Paul Farquhar
Legend
The tower in the background is out of focus, as you would see in a photograph or digitally created 3D image (I'm pretty sure it's the latter). An actual painting would use aerial perspective, as in this image:
Dragonlance [Let's Read] Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen
pukunui
Legend
It’s not just the focus for me. The water also has that 3D video game texture about it.
Libertad
Hero
Chapter 7: Siege of Kalaman
The final chapter of the book has a climactic showdown with the Dragon Army’s flying citadel as it moves across the horizon to besiege the city of Kalaman! Unlike prior chapters this one has a time limit when they enter the final dungeon. Once that happens. in three hours the citadel will reach Kalaman at which point it cannot be sabotaged lest it fall into and destroy the city.
*At which point they’ll reach level 11.
But first, once the party reunites with Darrett he will tell them to report to Marshal Vendri, and PCs who try to fly up to the citadel early on will be repelled by lesser death dragons. Once the PCs return and report, they will be grilled on the citadel’s nature and defenses, and once it becomes clear that they don’t have a surefire solution this will make her anxious. It won’t be long before word about the citadel spreads to Kalaman’s general population, and combined with the Red Dragon Army taking more and more territory this will cause panic to spread throughout the city. To set the scene there are various events the DM can use as set dressing, such as blacksmith shops running out of weapons and small crowds of refugees pleading to gate guards to be let through.
But Darrett has a plan! Clystran from Heart’s Hollow has arrived with a wasteland dragonnel, and based on his aerial scouting he spotted a series of tunnels lining the flying citadel’s underside which the PCs can use to infiltrate the fortress and find a way to destroy it. And since we have to raise the stakes, this plan of entry will be best done when it attacks Kalaman, for the Dragon Army will have the bulk of its attention directed towards the city’s defenses.
But before that happens, the PCs will take part in several encounters defending Kalaman’s walls from enemy scouts: they include any number of random encounters on a table involving draconians testing the defenses, such as shapeshifted sivak or dragonnel-riding bozaks. One involves a death dragon with a message hand-delivered to the PCs by Kansaldi Fire-Eyes talking about how she will bring about their end. The only mandatory encounter involves Lord Bakaris getting a letter from his son who defected to the Dragon Army, and decides to join him by raising one of the city gates with some fellow traitors to let several Dragon Army officers through.
After all of this, the PCs get one last long rest for the rest of the campaign, for the Battle of Kalaman will begin in earnest!
We get some more encounters as the Red Dragon Army’s ground forces attack attack the walls, with more random encounters with higher stakes: sivak draconians attacking ballistae the PCs need to defend/repair, dragonnel-riding officers throwing alchemist’s fire into the city, and auraks using dimension door to teleport next to and attack one of Kalaman’s officers. We have one more Warriors of Krynn scenario to play (Victory grants each dragonnel a PC is riding in the next encounter has advantage on the first attack or ability check). Once these are done, the PCs need to rendezvous with Clyrstran and the allied dragonnels via a gnomeflinger catapult, where they must fight alongside them against four red dragon wyrmlings in another Battlefield Encounter. The lair actions for this are pretty cool, including stray ballista shots, a blitzkrieg run of enemy dragonnels lighting fires on the ground, and the red dragons all recharging their breath weapons with a prayer to the Dragon Queen.
PCs flying up to the Citadel will be let through if they’re disguised as Dragon Army soldiers or have some other means of avoiding attention, but otherwise they will be intercepted by a pair of dragonnel riders: Bakaris the Younger who uses typical Dragon Army Officer stats and Red Ruin, the commander of the aerial forces who has her own unique stat block. She is a lance-wielding heavy armor + shield fighter who has 2 out of 3 benefits of the Mounted Combatant feat (no advantage on melee vs unmounted). Her unique Ember Lance can deal 2d6 bonus fire damage and force prone a creature that fails a Strength saving throw, and also has a rechargeable Explosive Hand Crossbow which is basically a Fireball spell with lower range but increased damage. All in all a pretty cool battle with some nice weapons as loot, but can be easily bypassed by canny PCs.
Once they’re inside, the PCs need to find a way to destroy the flying citadel. It’s by far the longest dungeon crawl in the campaign, with 25 rooms split between the sublevels and the Bastion of Takhisis. The enemies here are light on draconians and heavy on undead, not all of which are hostile.
One “friendly” undead includes Lorry Wanwillow, a kender vampire who finds the idea of trespassers to be a fun change of pace from her boring unlife (she was sealed away in the City of Lost Names for 50 years by her former vampire master who couldn’t stand her nonstop talking), and can tell the PCs about the other creatures in the dungeon. PCs can also meet Leedara again at the entrance, where she warns them about Lord Soth who is in the Bastion above and is powerful to the point that they won’t be able to match him in typical combat. Soth is guarding the Cataclysmic fire from Kalaman’s catacombs, which is being used as fuel for the flying citadel, and if the PCs can find the Mirror of Reflected Pasts somewhere in the sub-levels they can use it to distract Soth and find a way to quench the flames. The mirror in question is inside a treasure vault behind a secret door which can open if the PCs figure out a rotating statue puzzle that opens doorways which it is facing. A Silvanesti spirit known as Cithcillion can reveal more about the mirror and how it works if they find the bones of his friends elsewhere in the dungeon and bring them back to him.
So what does the Mirror of Reflected Pasts do? Well when it’s activated it floats in the air and cannot be moved from that position, and those within 30 feet who look into it must make a Wisdom save or become paralyzed until the mirror is deactivated or they can no longer see their reflection.
The Bastion of Takhisis is comparatively short, making up 5 out of the 25 rooms, although it is home to Lord Soth and two of his more powerful minions who (thankfully) are initially fought separately. Caradoc makes a return in the possessed body of a Kalaman soldier, and over time has come to believe that Soth’s alliance with the Dragon Army is a bad idea and offers to ally with the PCs if they can grant him control of the flying citadel. Such a plan is doomed to failure (the helm required to control has to be attuned by a spellcaster), but he doesn’t know that.
The other minion is Wersten Kern, an undead former Knight who is Lord Soth’s most trusted champion. She has her own unique stat block where she attacks with a Banner Pike weapon that can impose a curse halving a target’s speed and imposing disadvantage on attack rolls and saving throws. She also has a rechargeable attack where she recites the names of everyone slain by Lord Soth, imposing psychic damage and the frightened condition. If Lord Soth is still around he will join the battle after 3 rounds have passed.
Much ado has been made about Lord Soth’s stats, as it was one of the first things revealed by those who got this book early, and specifically whether he was weak or a fair match for a CR 19 monster or even just for a level 11 party. Several have claimed that he’d be a cakewalk at this point in the campaign, which may be true if all the players are into CharOps and Soth was being fought in a white room scenario where the PCs have all of their spells, limited-use class features, and hit points at 100%. Between the many combat encounters between this and the siege of Kalaman, the possible aid of Wersten Kern, and him popping off a deadly ability such as banishment or Word of Death, most gaming groups are going to see at least one PC die or be taken out of commission when fighting him.
However, the PCs have an ace in the hole for this: if the Mirror of Reflected Pasts is deployed, Lord Soth will autofail the save, whispering the name “Isolde” as he stares into it. Furthermore, the PCs don’t have to kill Lord Soth in order to get him off their back. If the big brazier holding the Cataclysmic fire is extinguished, then he will vanish into a pit of darkness and never show up for the rest of the adventure. The fire can be destroyed via a multitude of ways: throwing a relic of a good-aligned deity into the flames such as a dragonlance (this can be figured out via an Insight or Religion check) or if the four scaffolding supports reinforcing the brazier are smashed apart.
And being a Load Bearing MacGuffin, the entire citadel will begin to slowly fall, forcing the PCs to escape. The DM can deploy one or more Scenes of Destruction to emphasize the race against time, from your standard falling rocks to fleeing baaz draconians falling into suddenly-appearing pits. The PCs will have to fight Karavarix, a greater death dragon and the dragon Sarlamir slain with the dragonlance. He believes one of the PCs to be Sarlamir and will fight to the death.
The PCs may have won the war, but what about the battle? Well after they land safe and sound, there is one more problem they must take care of: Kansaldi Fire-Eyes has vengeance in her heart, flying on the red dragon Ignia to kill the PCs.
Kansaldi is a heavy armor-wearing cleric with a variety of offensive spells, and can multiattack with her pike and thrown balls of flame. She has a glowing ruby in an eye socket that grants her truesight out to 120 feet, and can heal herself or an allied creature 17 hit points as a bonus action. As for Ignia, she has young red dragon stats but is Huge-sized. This is also a Battlefield Encounter, meaning we have cool features such as debris from the falling citadel as multitarget hazards, bozak reinforcements, exploding siege engines, a stampede of panicked dragonnels, and a one-time vision of Takhisis watching down from the clouds that can impose disadvantage on attacks and ability checks. But anyone wearing a good-aligned deity’s holy symbol gains inspiration instead as they’re protected from the Dragon Queen’s gaze.
We then get one last Warriors of Krynn scenario with some very nice rewards for a victory: a +3 shield or a Talisman of Pure Good if a good-aligned divine caster is within the party. Sadly, as this is the end of the campaign the PCs won’t get to use it unless the DM runs their own adventures afterwards. Celebrations are held, the dead are honored, and we get an epilogue for various surviving NPCs and what they are up to. For example, Darrett travels to the city of Malegoth in hopes of becoming a true Knight of Solamnia and Mayor Raven and the survivors of Vogler return to their hometown and start to rebuild.
But sometime later, the PCs are given a message from a mysterious figure, the letter sealed in blue wax bearing the Dragon Queen’s symbol:
The adventure doesn’t spell it out, but it’s Kitiara.
Thoughts So Far: I really like this chapter. The stakes are high, there’s quite a few challenges, the final battle is suitably climactic, the PCs can take some long-awaited satisfying revenge against at least one Bakaris, and having the PCs level up before entering the final dungeon rather than at the end of the campaign like some adventures do is a great idea. As 11th level brings a variety of cool features such as 6th level spells for primary casters and 3-6 attacks per round as a fighter, this is a better “end level” for a campaign than 10th.
My main criticism would be that Lord Soth takes up too much spotlight in comparison to the real leader of the Dragon Army forces. I get that Soth is fanservice for Dragonlance veterans, but I understand how Weis and Hickman felt when they were vehemently against WotC transporting him into Ravenloft. I feel that the true final battle should’ve been against Kansaldi Fire-Eyes in the room with the brazier, as a loss for the PCs then would spell out the doom of Kalaman. If the PCs lose against her in the typical adventure…well it’s sad that they died, but the flying citadel is irreversibly destroyed and Lord Soth has cut off ties with the Dragon Armies.
Appendices
The 5 appendices cover new material introduced in Shadow of the Dragon Queen. As I covered quite a few of these as they showed up during the adventure, this section is going to be rather brief.
Gear and Magic Items has a bit of gnome favoritism, as quite a few of the mundane items are the new gnomish devices and siege weapons. For the kender we get stats for the hoopak, which is basically a finesseable two-handed spear that can also be used as a sling with a longer range. The narycrash are gnomish parachutes which can be given to the PCs who express worries about the dangers of using a gnomeflinger at several points during the campaign. In true gnomish fashion Than and Rookledust genuinely won’t consider the danger in being flung unless the PCs bring it up. The only magic item we didn’t previously cover is the Flying Citadel Helm, which is an attunement-required wondrous item that grants control of a flying citadel. Basically you can move the citadel up to 80 feet per round and the wearer can see from the highest point outside the citadel at any time. Characters who are on the citadel or within 120 feet of its crash point take 39 bludgeoning damage, which at 11th level is pretty survivable.
Friends & Foes doesn’t include any creatures or NPCs we haven’t covered. It does have a 1d100 table of Dragon Army encounters the DM can use for times when PCs may run into a place under Dragon Army control. It’s your typical selection of evil human soldiers, draconians and monstrous humanoids, and some more unique encounters such as Caradoc and some skeletal knights on a mission to kidnap a noble Caradoc’s possessing or soldiers hunting for escaped prisoners with mastiffs.
Sidekicks gives us 6 DMPCs using the sidekick rules who can accompany the party on the adventure. Unlike Darrett or the death slaad none of them appear in the adventure by default, and it’s left to the DM’s discretion when and how they appear in the campaign. About half of them are spellcasters, including a human White Robe mage, a kender druid, and a dwarf war-priest of Kiri-Jolith. The other 3 DMPCs are more warrior-oriented, including a Khurish human archer…who doesn’t speak Khur, a human Solamnic knight who fights with a big sword and big armor and has Pack Tactics which makes her great to use alongside another melee-focused character, and a Kagonesti roguish type who fights with a poisoned dagger and is proficient in a wide variety of skills.
All of these characters have progression for their abilities beyond 2nd level, allowing for a painless process in leveling them up.
Story Concept Art & Maps are our final appendices, the former being a collection of rough sketches and notes. My favorite one is the draft of Kansaldi Fire-Eyes:
We only have 2 maps, 1 being the hexcrawl map of Kalaman and the Northern Wastes we saw earlier, and the other a map of Ansalon:
Beautiful, just beautiful.
Final Thoughts: Shadow of the Dragon Queen has all the workings of an epic fantasy adventure. You have a clear overwhelming villain, you have artifacts of legend that can decide the fate of the free peoples of Ansalon, and the emphasis on the backdrop of a larger war is mechanically reinforced via Battlefield Encounters and integration with the Warriors of Krynn board game. The initial setting overview is rather bare, but WotC did a good job preserving much of what we recognize about Dragonlance while making some necessary changes in places. I did notice a pretty high number of female Knights of Solamnia (and former Knight in Wersten Kern’s case) as well as women warriors in general. In the original setting that organization was pretty patriarchal, and while in-universe the knighthood is acknowledged as clinging too much to outdated mores to its detriment I can understand this change. One because knights are a cool and attractive option for players, and two to avoid the inevitable arguments about “Female Space Marines.”
But with that being said, the adventure inherits the time-tested Dragonlance problem of narrow-minded adventures that don’t take into account the various twists and turns from likely methods of action by the PCs. There are also too many options that give the illusion of choice and consequences but don’t make a difference in the long run, which only adds to the problem. Additionally this is a bit of a personal taste, but the adventure accelerates at a rapid pace without much downtime. I can understand the rushed nature given the backdrop of an invasion, but it’s a recurring thing I see in quite a few WotC campaigns.
In spite of being set in Solamnia we hardly get any screen time for Solamnic Knights, and while the PCs do get a dragonlance they don’t get to wield it while riding an actual metallic dragon which was one of the highlights of the War of the Lance. The dragonnels feel like a compromise option, as canonically in this part of the story the metallics are in hiding and don’t want to tip their hand, but even in the original adventures the PCs can gain the aid of Silvara and get to do this when rescuing the good dragon eggs. We even have a bronze dragon in this adventure that can be used for such a purpose, maybe even tipping the scales (pun intended) against that black dragon in Camp Carrionclay.
But overall, these above problems don’t take away to the point that the bulk of the adventure is unusable. And I’m happy to see a Dragonlance product released, for this also means that the setting is opened up to the Dungeon Master’s Guild and already there’s some promising content in the works for it. I don’t know when or if I’ll review such products; I may veer over to Let’s Reading an entirely different line.
Even after its birth nearly 40 years ago, Dragonlance still stands the test of time. Here’s to 40 more!
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Davies
Legend
Thanks for helping me end my vacillation on whether to get this one. I think I'll wait a while longer ... and yeah, Kansaldi seems like she'd be a better final boss. They went to all this trouble to create a cool looking villain, and she gets upstaged by Darth Vader's non-union equivalent? No thanks.
Steel_Wind
Legend
Thanks for all of this (and to @darjr , too!).
I have my Session 0 for SotDQ for this coming Saturday and will commence the campaign on January 7. I am looking forward to it.
I also have asked for the Warriors of Krynn boardgame from my wife for Xmas (I will buy it myself otherwise) but am alarmed at the report that it may not be ready for distribution as a stand alone boxed game until March of 2023. I hope this is not the case, as I would like the opportinity to try it out and integrate it into my campaigns. Time will tell if it appears at retail .
The interesting thing about all of this is that I have been a huge fan of DragonLance over the years -- and a frustrated wannabe DL DM. I have stripped various parts of the modules from time to time for use in other campaigns over the years, but I have never actually run the DL Classic campaign. The novels ruined the potential at the time, detailing too much from DL1 and DL2 for most players to be able to get by -- so all of my players over the many intervening years have always expressed a strong disinterest in playing it. A few continue to express hostility - but I do think I have a group of 5 or 6 which are prepared to take the plunge into the classic DL campaign in the spring of 2023. So I may get the chance to run the first true Adv Path for AD&D (no, A1-4 and GDQ1-7 do not count) only 39 years after the fact, more or less!
I have my Session 0 for SotDQ for this coming Saturday and will commence the campaign on January 7. I am looking forward to it.
I also have asked for the Warriors of Krynn boardgame from my wife for Xmas (I will buy it myself otherwise) but am alarmed at the report that it may not be ready for distribution as a stand alone boxed game until March of 2023. I hope this is not the case, as I would like the opportinity to try it out and integrate it into my campaigns. Time will tell if it appears at retail .
The interesting thing about all of this is that I have been a huge fan of DragonLance over the years -- and a frustrated wannabe DL DM. I have stripped various parts of the modules from time to time for use in other campaigns over the years, but I have never actually run the DL Classic campaign. The novels ruined the potential at the time, detailing too much from DL1 and DL2 for most players to be able to get by -- so all of my players over the many intervening years have always expressed a strong disinterest in playing it. A few continue to express hostility - but I do think I have a group of 5 or 6 which are prepared to take the plunge into the classic DL campaign in the spring of 2023. So I may get the chance to run the first true Adv Path for AD&D (no, A1-4 and GDQ1-7 do not count) only 39 years after the fact, more or less!
pukunui
Legend
Yeah, there does seem to be a bit of a bait-and-switch going on here, with Lord Soth being built up as the ultimate BBEG only for the adventure to go "No, sorry, he's too powerful for your PCs and he needs to survive to do stuff later so here's the actual BBEG right at the end."
I note that Bakaris the Younger's fate is ambiguous, such that if the PCs succeed in defeating him, he can still conveniently survive to become Kitiara's 2ic later on.
Incidentally, these sidekicks are the characters from the board game.
Are they worth running? I've only ever heard that they're horribly railroady but I have a sudden hankering to give them a try oddly enough.
MonsterEnvy
Legend
Kansaldi not actually new, though I don’t think she ever got art.
Steel_Wind
Legend
Some are worse than others. DL1 is the one that is the worst for this, and it continues in DL2. It gets much better after that.
It's not perfect by any means. I think it is possible to add to DL1 (a lot, actually) to make the whole thing flow very differently -- and reasonably, too. The stuff where NPCs march the characters to the Forest Master at arrow point is just heavy-handed nonsense. You can get around that easily. The most important thing is to put two concepts together:
1 - Add stuff: Add a LOT of stuff and leave it up to your players which way they go: You can add an entire lengthy chapter to Haven, in particular, that makes everything seem utterly and totally different (for the good reason that it will be) and have the PCs escape the Lord City by riverboat -- which leads them pretty much where you want them. You can also add elements to the Que-Teh, Que-Shu and Que-Kiri -principally as prisoners to be rescued from a camp (think something like the Raider's Camp in HotDQ) and change the feel of DL1 completely.
2 - Free Your Mind: This is the hardest part, to be honest. The impetus for both the DM and the players to remake scenes from the novel is what needs to change. These are not design elements of the module as much as they are mental chains that all people involved need to shed. It can be hard. But when combined with adding new elements to the module, it works the best I think (I did run a re-worked version of DL1 summer before last for my family during Covid). That certainly seems to be the after campaign reports from those who have done it successfully.
The biggest issue with the perceived railroady nature of things is that for both DMs and players, the existing module elements that are railroady (and there are some elements, especially in DL1 that no modern designer would ever write now) can largely be addressed with modest consistent changes. It's just a matter of making some design choices to remove those more offensive elements. Not a big deal, really. Traditional XP points would turn this approach into an arithmetical impossibility - but milestone levelling fixes all of that with a wave of your hand and a POOF of magic dust. Long rest - and even short rest - healing rules for 5e, when combined with the powers of the Staff of Mishakal allow a reasonable party of 4-6 PCs in 5e to have the resources to survive all of this in a way that a party pf PCs could not easily do under 3.x or PF1.
The later elements of the campaign are really cool modules though -- and they have for the most part, never been spoiled in novel form. They can benefit from some design changes and updating the maps (for VTT play) and encounters - but they are very worthwhile playing. There were some really great authors and designers in TSR in the mid-80s. The largest amount of time and money that TSR devoted in its heyday in the 80s was to DragonLance -- and it still shows. The artwork was outstanding and the maps remain phenomenal. The premise is still cool AF. But in order to get there, you have to pass through the initial gauntlet of DL1 and DL2 - and that's hard for many to do.
The biggest challenge is getting through DL1 and DL2 with a group of players who are engaged and want to play. After that? It's easy peasy. And totally worthwhile.
By way of my own assessment after reading SotDQ - does it look like it will be fun? Sure. I look forward to running it, admittedly after several changes of my own that I will make to it.
Does SotDQ look like it will be as great and sweeping as the original classic modules? No, Hell No, even. The DL Classic campaign is still the best form to consume the War of the Lance - you just need to approach it (re)visiting that with great care.
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Libertad
Hero
Shadow of the Dragon Queen is more tightly-focused in that the PCs are fighting primarily for one region and community. The original Chronicles were showing off a whole new world, so the PCs would go traveling all over Ansalon to see the War of the Lance from different angles.
It's still rather amusing in juxtaposing the power creep. In SotDQ the PCs went from 1st to 11th level pretty quickly, whereas in the Chronicles they went from 5th to 14th level (give or take a few depending on Edition) in a little under the year.
Steel_Wind
Legend
Quite true. That's a function of age-groups of target markets as much as anything though - and we have seen that change from 2E through 3.x, PF1/2, 4e, and 5e. The rules reflect the changes -- and ages -- in the player base.
I started playing in 1979-80 and through the early 80s, we played several times a week. I remember in high school we often had 24 hour game sessions where we stayed up for that long just playing 1st ed. No responsibilities? No problem!
40+ years later, I run 2 campaigns, each every other week. Even when running PF Adv Paths, most of those campaigns took about 2 years to finish; from 1st to ~14th+ level. Some took more, much more. As a player, I played every other Friday night for ~3 hour sessions. It took 6 years in RL for us to finish Iron Gods, from 1st to 18th level. (For the record - that was WAY to effin long! Most of us couldn't wait for that damn campaign to finish!)
Modern play requires faster levelling to suit the tastes of most players. We are simply older and we have less time to play. The nice thing is, milestone levelling also means we can stop and smell the roses for as long as is required without the power balance getting out of whack. Go as fast - or as slow - as you reasonably need to go.
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