WotC Dragonlance: Everything You Need For Shadow of the Dragon Queen

WotC has shared a video explaining the Dragonlance setting, and what to expect when it is released in December.

World at War: Introduces war as a genre of play to fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons.

Dragonlance: Introduces the Dragonlance setting with a focus on the War of the Lance and an overview of what players and DMs need to run adventures during this world spanning conflict.

Heroes of War: Provides character creation rules highlighting core elements of the Dragonlance setting, including the kender race and new backgrounds for the Knight of Solamnia and Mage of High Sorcery magic-users. Also introduces the Lunar Sorcery sorcerer subclass with new spells that bind your character to Krynn's three mystical moons and imbues you with lunar magic.

Villains: Pits heroes against the infamous death knight Lord Soth and his army of draconians.

Notes --

• 224 page hardcover adventure
• D&D's setting for war
• Set in eastern Solamnia
• War is represented by context -- it's not goblins attacking the village, but evil forces; refugees, rumours
• You can play anything from D&D - clerics included, although many classic D&D elements have been forgotten
• Introductory scenarios bring you up to speed on the world so no prior research needed

 

[doctorbadwolf]

If I want it to it does.

No, it doesn't, because we are talking about officially published adventures, not your home game.

I don't need knights of Solomnia or Towers of High Sorcery to do War of the Lance in Faerun. Those are just names no different than Purple Dragon Knights and Red Wizards of Thay.

You can't seriously think that the Towers and their orders are equivalent to the Thayans.
And without those two factions, it isn't the War of The Lance.

The point is that there doesn't need to be another kitchen sink setting to do War of the Lance.

"Need" is irrelevant. Making room for groups to allow all options isn't contrary to doing War of The Lance. It takes nothing away from the story. It doesn't even have any reason to change any single event in the course of the original novels. It doesn't matter.

 

[Micah Sweet]

There is a HUGE market for homebrew in D&D. There is also a HUGE market of those who like the idea of campaign settings, but do NOT ENJOY the nitty gritty of everything being defined. They want something more akin to the original Grey Box of the Forgotten Realms or less, or like the original Greyhawk Gazetteer. They want the things vague and undefined.

They want a world setting, but one which they can craft to their OWN design, not someone else's. They don't want to play in someone else's sandbox, they want to play in THEIR sandbox. Sometimes they want some broad parameters such as it is a square 25x25 box with several plastic buckets and shovels...but they want to do the rest on their own.

THIS is what WotC excels at currently, and they are doing a very good job of it.

IMO.

As was said, WotC knows their audience, and they apparently don't care about real worldbuilding any more than WotC themselves do. More's the pity.

 

[Kai Lord]

Remember how in the latest Matrix movie Neo saw himself as cool Keanu Reeves when he looked in the mirror but everyone else saw him as a middle-aged bald man? Maybe that should be done in Dragonlance. So if you want to be a cool badass orc then fine go ahead and make that character but when everyone else looks at you they just see a pudgy Hobgoblin. Player gets what he or she wants and the setting's identity is preserved.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I think it has more to do with they are better at making what they know will sell. Part of the wonderful diversity of TSR settings was that they were awful with their finances and undisciplined in market research.

But the result...was glorious!

 

[Micah Sweet]

Yet when they DID do something new in the form of Radiant Citadel, people on this board bemoaned it was going to kill the chance of Planescape happening or how Netherdeep took a book slot away from something like Dark Sun or Greyhawk. Funny, it seems people are angry when WotC pulls out the greatest hits and calls it a nostalgic cash grab, but are equally angry when they make new stuff instead of supporting the classic settings...

I was hesitant about Radiant Citadel at first, mostly because I didn't care about it, but I've come around. It sounds like one the few decent pieces of design work put put under the WotC banner. I say it that way because was almost entirely written by freelancers. Not a ringing endorsement of WotC themselves beyond their freelance hiring practices.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Removing something (Orcs, for example) allows another participant in the setting to come to the forefront (say, Minotaurs or Hobgoblins).

Not really. You literally can just not focus on the same things every time. Orcs and Minotaurs can just occupy different narrative space than they do in FR. You can bring Minotaurs and Hobgoblins to the forefront. Full stop. You don't need to do anything to anything else, you can just put them centerstage. You could make Hobs one of the top half dozen or so races that has impacted history.

 

[Dire Bare]

As for orcs...

They reason they were excluded is because draconians replaced them as the archetype race for evil shock troops. That was fine for a while, but a lot has changed since then. Doom Brigade and Draconian Measures showed draconians with free will. And now with 5e, orcs are being seen as more than savage monsters.

There has been the occasional mention of orcs in Dragonlance anyway, but those are all considered to be kender tales.

As it stands now in 5th edition, there's no reason not to have them, but you might need to do some work to make them fit in. They can be reskinned as half-ogres easy enough. Or you might say they exist, but only on Taladas.

Hobgoblins have always been in Dragonlance.

Draconians take over the typical role of orcs as evil minions of the Dark Lord. So . . . why do we need goblins and hobgoblins?

Dragonlance doesn't need orcs, to be sure. But it doesn't NOT need them either.

And it's not just orcs being reconceptualized as not-always-evil, but almost every "evil" humanoid race, including draconians, goblins, hobgoblins, ogres, etc, etc.

There's no need to add orcs to a Dragonlance game. If I were WotC, I don't think I'd call it out in the adventure book, I just wouldn't feature any orcs. If a player just has to play an orc (and really, how often is that going to be an issue?), why not allow it? No reskinning needed, just find a place for orcs in Krynn. It's not a hard task, it doesn't break the setting in even a minor way.

 

[Dire Bare]

War has barely started and the Draconians are largely a secret. Having good ones running around ruining "the surprise"... well... I know WotC wont care. Doesnt matter in the long run. Gotta let someone play a Dragonborn!

WotC thinks the focus of DL is the War. And from other DL threads on this forum, a lot of the fans and newcomers to it think so to. I tried to bring up that the Focus of DL isn't just the War and is about "friendship and noble knights and hope" etc but would just got shot down with "But THE WAR!" And WotC agrees.

As someone mentioned earlier in this thread, if this is going to have Orcs and Drow and Dragonborn and The Towers etc watereddown to be fairly generic... could have just made a "Dragon War!" campaign set in Faerun and had the exact same thing.

At the beginning of the war, there are no divine spellcasters. Arcane spellcasters are rare and secretive. Dragons are myths, and no one's ever heard of "draconians" or dragon-men.

So?

In the original novels and modules, the Heroes of the Lance include both divine and arcane spellcasters from the get-go. One of their first encounters is with kapak draconians.

The setting isn't broken even slightly if your adventuring party includes any kind of spellcasting hero, and/or a draconian/dragonborn. The common folk are going to be fearful and distrustful of the scary dragonman AND the spellcaster from the Towers of High Sorcery AND the spellcaster claiming to channel the power of Paladine. Imagine a draconian wizard/cleric in the party!!! :O

 

[DarkCrisis]

You can't seriously think that the Towers and their orders are equivalent to the Thayans.
And without those two factions, it isn't the War of The Lance.

How? How is it REQUIRED that Solomnic Knights and Tower Wizards exist for the War of the Lance to happen and conclude?

The War is bare bones "Evil god uses dragons and dragonspawn (and other monsters etc) to try to take over the world. What makes the War of the Lance in anyway "special" is its a war with dragons and it has dragon riders who have magic lances. I could 100% do that in almost any D&D campaign world.

The good guys having a group of Knights and a cabal of Wizards is not unique to Krynn.

And heck even all the fighting and dragons and wizards and knights fighting and winning, they still almost lost because the evil god was about to fully manifest in the world and was stopped via betrayal.

 

[Maxperson]

No, it doesn't, because we are talking about officially published adventures, not your home game.

Every game is a home game. They could have just made War of the Lance and said, "Put it in any setting you feel like, because all settings a kitchen sink anyway."

You can't seriously think that the Towers and their orders are equivalent to the Thayans.
And without those two factions, it isn't the War of The Lance.

War of the Lance was only Krynn, because Krynn was a unique setting to put it in. Now that Krynn officially no longer has any significant difference from any other setting, there's no point for it to exist or for War of the Lance to be set there.

"Need" is irrelevant. Making room for groups to allow all options isn't contrary to doing War of The Lance.

No, because all options = any settings, so it isn't contrary to War of the Lance. It is however contrary to the Krynn setting which had limitations that made it unique.

It takes nothing away from the story. It doesn't even have any reason to change any single event in the course of the original novels. It doesn't matter.

Nor does Krynn now. There's literally no point in my buying it, because I already have a kitchen sink setting in the Forgotten Realms.