Dragonlance DRAGONLANCE LIVES! Unearthed Arcana Explores Heroes of Krynn!

The latest Unearthed Arcana has arrived and the 6-page document contains rules for kender, lunar magic, Knights of Solamnia, and Mages of High Sorcery.

In today’s Unearthed Arcana, we explore character options from the Dragonlance setting. This playtest document presents the kender race, the Lunar Magic sorcerer subclass, the Knight of Solamnia and Mage of High Sorcery backgrounds, and a collection of new feats, all for use in Dungeons & Dragons.

Kender have a (surprisingly magical) ability to pull things out of a bag, and a supernatural taunt feature. This magical ability appears to replace the older 'kleptomania' description -- "Unknown to most mortals, a magical phenomenon surrounds a kender. Spurred by their curiosity and love for trinkets, curios, and keepsakes, a kender’s pouches or pockets will be magically filled with these objects. No one knows where these objects come from, not even the kender. This has led many kender to be mislabeled as thieves when they fish these items out of their pockets."

Lunar Magic is a sorcerer subclass which draws power from the moon(s); there are notes for using it in Eberron.

Also included are feats such as Adepts of the Black, White, and Red Robes, and Knights of the Sword, Rose, and Crown.

News Archive | Dungeons and Dragons

Read the full archives of Dungeons & Dragons news, Sage Advice, Unearthed Arcana, and D&D Studio Blogs.

dnd.wizards.com

 

[darjr]

I’d still be trying to figure it out while I got my behind kicked.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

There was also a Free RPG mini-adventure/setting called Histaven for 4e, which was set in Ravenloft. It's actually a pretty cool little thing.

I don't believe Ravenloft was supported in 4e, aside from a single article in Dragon #416.

That is one of the issues here. It's one thing to say "oh, I miss the Spellplague and when Abeir was added to Toril in 4e" or "I prefer pre-Dragons of Summer Flame Krynn." It is another to say "I do not like these specific changes that have made in the name of inclusivity and prefer the setting when it had these things that are now recognized as being problematic." Even if it comes out of a sense of nostalgia, and not out of any true animus, it is still enabling the perpetuation of hurtful stereotypes.

Nah, the main people complaining about the change to Kender in this thread are the exact same people who have posted more toxic/extreme stuff about Wizards in other threads. I could get examples if asked, but I'm pretty sure it would be breaking site rules.

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

I absolutely agree. Enchanment isnt INHERENTLY evil, but its definitely abusable. On the other hand, blowing up someone with a fireball is the spell working exactly as intended and in a campaign with a foundation in war, I feel like we get to the weirdness of how is damaging with a spell considered having more potential for evil than swinging a sword.

yeah....to me Black Robes are Necromancy/Enchantment.

Transmutation and Conjuration for Reds and Abjuration/Divination for Whites. Illusions and Evocations are just ''general magic things'' every spellcasters know in a way or another.

 

[Scribe]

The main reason I dislike the switch from Enchantment to Evocation, "I can bend your mind to my will." is more transgressive than "Make fire! Go boom!".

Yeah for sure.

I think back to the first 2 trilogies, and when Dalamar is snitching on Raistlin about the experiments they get up to.

It makes perfect sense that there would be a 'non-good' qualifier on that, but well...

 

[BrokenTwin]

Yes.

It's not a 100% correlation, but yes. Kender are portrayed as wanderers and thieves who have no respect for the property of civilized folks. That's the Romani stereotype in a nutshell right there.

An entire race of thieving kleptos? Kender have long been problematic, this isn't some new revelation.



Kender are ALSO designed to embody child-like innocence. Which, IMO, is just adding more problem-sauce on top of the Romani stereotype.



Maybe you should . . . read the thread. Listen to other voices. Open your mind.

I mean... you CAN map them to the Romani, but it's a stretch in places, and the inspiration for the Kender is clearly children. Saying that they're ALSO based on children makes it sound like the Romani stereotypes came first, and not, you know, just that some stereotypical traits of children also map to Romani prejudices?

Like, my knowledge of the setting is VERY faded, but I don't recall ever seeing art of Kender in stereotypical Romani attire, they travel alone and not in groups, and of the negative stereotypes I've heard associated with Romani only theft fits. The Kender aren't known for drinking, or kidnapping, or pulling cons, just taking things that don't belong to them. Which is very clearly described in a way that references children.

But honestly, I have no skin in this game. I've got no vested interest in the setting, and don't honestly care how it's changed for 5E. I was just surprised that people were mapping Kender to Romani when the connection seems accidental at best. Unless there's a source somewhere where the authors state they were influenced by the latter in creating the Kender, in which case I'd clearly stand corrected.

 

[Umbran]

I didn't suggest that we should be the central focus for their plans.

I know. I'm simply restating my own position there, making no claims on yours.

In these threads, though, I get and see a lot of responses that are along the lines of, "WotC should be focusing on the newer, younger players and not the old guys." That's what I'm pushing back against

So, it seems to me that you are splitting a mighty fine hair there, and I don't understand where the line is.

You didn't suggest that we (older gamers) should be the central focus on their plans. So, that would mean that their central focus could/should be... elsewhere, right?

But when folks say they should be focusing elsewhere, you push back.

So, which is it? Is it okay for them to focus elsewhere, or not?

 

[Weiley31]

Did you mean the sequels? Which ep 7 and 9 are super bastardizations of the ep 4 and 6

Episode 9 is pretty much "Greatest Star Wars Moments: Greatest Hits Edition."

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

I find fey stuff off-putting in general.

This is a tangent, I know, but I've seen you complaining a lot about it recently, so I guess I'll give my viewpoint on this whole "Fey-Craze" thing that you and others have been talking about for several months now.

IMO, the root behind the recent addition of multiple fey races and the retcons to certain races to make them fey/fey-adjacent is largely due to the fact that creatures and options of the Fey type that could be used at the table were very lacking towards the start of D&D 5e.

For example, in the Monster Manual, there were only 8 Fey creatures, with the one with the highest CR being the Coven-version of the Green Hag at CR 5. For comparison, Elementals (a pretty rare creature type) had 23 creatures, with the highest CR being the 4 Genies at CR 11. Roughly 3 times the amount of creatures in the Monster Manual, with over twice the CR range. Constructs (another rare creature type) had 16 creatures, with the highest CR being the Iron Golem at CR 16, which is twice the amount of creatures and triple the CR range that the Fey had in the core rules. That was it. For years, that was all of the fey that we had in D&D 5e, a paltry amount. If you wanted to do a Fey-centric campaign in D&D 5e using just the 3 Core Rulebooks . . . the tools were just not there. If you wanted to do a Dragon, Demon, Devil, Undead, Humanoid, or even Aberration-focused campaign, you could fairly easily do so. However, you absolutely could not for Fey. You were better off doing a campaign focused around Plants, of all things, than you were for Fey, which I honestly find baffling.

And Wizards of the Coast knew that certain creature types had far too few creatures to base a whole campaign around. That's probably a part of the reason why we pretty quickly got Princes of the Apocalypse (for elementals), Storm King's Thunder (for Giants), and recently got The Wild Beyond the Witchlight. While Wizards of the Coast also wanted to focus around adventures that included more popular creature types (Tyranny of Dragons for Dragons, Rage of Demons and Descent into Avernus for Fiends, Curse of Strahd and Tomb of Annihilation for Undead, etc), they also wanted to give tools to DMs that wanted to focus around other more rare creature types for their own campaigns. And through the various monster compendiums and adventure bestiaries that we have gotten throughout the years we have gotten more monsters for the rarer creature types, like the few fey in Volo's Guide to Monsters, constructs in Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes, and plants in Tomb of Annihilation.

And even after all of that . . . we still didn't have a lot of fey. After Volo's Guide to Monsters, we only got 10 more fey (more than the Monster Manual gave us, but still not a lot), with the highest CR one now being the Bheur Hag and Korred tied at CR 7. Then Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes gave us only 4 more fey, the different seasons of Eladrin, boosting the range of CR up to 10, still less than the upper ranges of Elementals, Constructs, and most other rare creature types (soon boosted up to the CR 18 Trostani by the release of Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica a few months later). And, again, that's still much less fey than there are, say, Undead, Fiends, or Dragons, with still a smaller range of CR.

That's about it. 5e started out lacking fey, and it only got worse as more and more books got released when compared to the other more popular creature types, so WotC has recently tried to remedy this by adding more fey creatures and player races to allow for whole campaigns themed around them/placed in the Feywild.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

I suppose I can say here today the sense of humor among the different generations have changed. For example in the past a professional comedian could tell jokes about stutterers, and now it is taboo, but in the cartoons for adults certains things wouldn't be allowed decades ago.

I don't imagine gullys as people with a mental handicap, but people with a very low culture whose ancestors were outcasts and low social caste, a mixture of hillybillies+treehugger hippies following a new-age guru. Maybe they suffered the secondary effects of charming magic by the capricious feys.

Kenders aren't cleptomanians, but compulsive gatherers. It is as if the spirits from the Feywild wanted kenders to do certain actions to fulfill the Fate. Kenders are more "Dennis the menace".

 

[Maxperson]

I know. I'm simply restating my own position there, making no claims on yours.

So, it seems to me that you are splitting a mighty fine hair there, and I don't understand where the line is.

You didn't suggest that we (older gamers) should be the central focus on their plans. So, that would mean that their central focus could/should be... elsewhere, right?

But when folks say they should be focusing elsewhere, you push back.

So, which is it? Is it okay for them to focus elsewhere, or not?

I don't think a central focus is the way to go. The percentages are spread pretty evenly. 35+ is 27%. 25-34 is 36%. 15-24 is 36%. Those are all very sizable numbers. Rather than a central focus, taking all three major age ranges into account in roughly equal margins seems to be a good strategy.

And I'm not pushing back at the idea that other categories should be taken into consideration. I'm pushing back at the idea that the old timers shouldn't be taken into consideration or very minimally considered. 35+ with the buying power it has is still more than a quarter of the players. It deserves significant consideration, but should not be the center of it all.