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

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

2. Of course the Gods are real. They don't directly send avatars to wander around, but anyone who goes to the heart of Thrane and sees the giant pillar of Silver Flame and says "nah, that ain't real" is a fool.

The Silver Flame isn't a god. It's the amalgamation of thousands of dead coautls that protects the world from being destroyed by the Demon Overlords and there's a religion founded around it, but it isn't a god. Eberron does have pantheons of "gods" (the Soveriegn Host and Dark Six, the Progenitor Dragons might count too), but their existence is up for debate in and out of the setting. Boldrei, The Mockery, Dol Arrah, and the other gods may or may not exist, it's up to the DM.

 

[AnotherGuy]

There were drow in some of the later adventures, and I guess if we accept the idea that devils and demons exist in DL, then it’s not so far fetched to admit the existence of tiefling.

Not really what is being discussed. You can do whatever you want at your table just like you can insert any adventure or module in any setting pretty easily. Some posters, I feel, are advocating that some reference be made in the setting book of what DL historically/usually includes in terms of playable options, some posters are against it.
It isn't about how limited people's imaginations are.

I feel this thread is more about how some posters want WotC to consider a particular segment of the DL fandom.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

No. Each player's wants in a game are equally valid. There should be a compromise. And "anime magic girls" or similar characters can exist in Ravenloft. They just have to be changed slightly to fit the setting (maybe the "magical transformation" is a Dark Gift more akin to a superpowered evil side, or it's actually an Undead Warlock's Form of Dread or Barbarian's Rage).

The table should bend to the will of all players equally.

at our table we have 2 levels of this.
the big gun... everyone of us has full veto power. we can just as player or dm say "No, I don't want that" and it more or less just comes off the table (sometimes with no futher explanation, sometimes with a quick 5 min to half hour discussion as to details of what and why).
on a lower level if one of us (player or dm) objects we can call for a group vote and that is majority takes it... but groups that have even numbers current DM wins ties.

to give an example, a few years ago when we were trying to decide on a new campaign for when mine ended (it was wrapping up in the teens for level already) and 3 of the 5 of us had pitches (I actually had two so it was 4 pitches total) for what to play and 2 of them got vetoed out the gate...
1st veto- darksun, one player just said "I have no interest in playing darksun"
2nd veto- my 'in the army now' campaign idea... 2 different players of the 5 had reservations, but 1 wasn't going to veto but the other did...

of the two that we then had left we ended up with me running my hunter of monsters game

but in the above example

Trying to play say Gothic Horror and one player wants to make an anime magic girl…

any of us CAN veto the character or ask for a vote, but the most likely thing would be find away and group biarn storm a dark gothic anime magic girl

 

[Remathilis]

The Silver Flame isn't a god. It's the amalgamation of thousands of dead coautls that protects the world from being destroyed by the Demon Overlords and there's a religion founded around it, but it isn't a god. Eberron does have pantheons of "gods" (the Soveriegn Host and Dark Six, the Progenitor Dragons might count too), but their existence is up for debate in and out of the setting. Boldrei, The Mockery, Dol Arrah, and the other gods may or may not exist, it's up to the DM.

Poe-TAY-toe, poe-TAH-toe. The Silver Flame is a literal manifesting of divine power. It has a champion that it "speaks" with and faith in it fuels clerical energy. It's not a God like Zeus, but if you want proof of the divine, Eberron is full of it.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

If ever there was a setting where Warforged and Autognomes made sense outside of their respective original settings, it's Dragonlance.

I doubt that would necessarily be the case for, say, a tiefling. Though I suppose a warforged would be thought of as some runaway gnome experiment.

And it's not even confirmed that they're adding orcs. Right now it's all just speculation and pre-judging.

You make a point that when Dragonlance came out, there was much less concern over canon. One gaming group might have a completely different take from another based on whether they had a certain product or issue of Dragon magazine.

I absolutely love watching people rail against WotC resetting the setting back to the original setting is somehow "watering down" the setting.

Hey folks, guess what? This is what Dragonlance was when it first came out. It wasn't "there are no orcs". That was never established. It was, "there don't happen to be any orcs in these adventures." There were no limitations on what classes you could play. It was just, "These are the classes of NPC's in these adventures".

Hell, you didn't even have a map of Ansalon until a third of the way through the series. You didn't KNOW the setting history until then. Heck, you wouldn't know the names of half of the gods until DL 5.

Like I said earlier, this new module is as close to being an authentic Dragonlance experience as you could possible get. All you folks kvetching about orcs or tiefling characters? You're the ones who are changing the setting and trying to change the experience, not WotC.

No one seems to be complaining that there hasn't been any mention of Irda yet, I might point out. I certainly don't mind if they get dropped - they always fell flat for me when they came up in the stories.

Now, if you insist on later (and not much later mind you) canon, then my group consisting of a minotaur, thanoi walrus man, kyrie bird man and irda ogre walk into the Inn of the Last Home and you should be absolutely groovy with it. After all, this is 100% canon for the setting. Has ties right back to the original modules (if you include DL 16) and predate virtually everything else in the setting.

No problems right?

Seems to me that someone wanting to play a half-orc (maybe skinned as a really big goblin or a really small ogre - either way an unbelievably easy thing to include) would be a lot less of an issue than the things that already exist in the setting.

That's the truth. That sort of thing used to drive me up a wall as a DM, but these days I just roll with it.

Some players are either so enraptured by their own idea or seek to be the intentional Proud Nail. If you forced them to play a human fighter, they'd still find a way to make them not fit the prescribed campaign theme.

 

[Velderan]

And, again, let's not forget, that the only reason that, say, Tieflings don't exist in Dragonlance is because DL was written first. If Tieflings had been part of D&D in 1982, then DL would have had Tieflings. It's not like Dragonlance banned any PHB races. And, before anyone starts up about half-orcs, I'd point out that the official removal of orcs from Dragonlance came much, much later. As in several years after the release of the setting.

You didn't have half-orcs in DL simply because no one played one. Drow weren't banned from the setting. They just didn't appear.

It was much later, after the fact, that people started justifying why this or that race didn't appear in Dragonlance by changing things to exclude those races.

I really wonder why people are so set on making sure that Dragonlance stays "true" to canon but insist that it must be canon that came much later and wasn't actually canon at the outset. I thought keeping settings true to their origins was the goal here. I thought that changing canon was a bad thing. Apparently not though. It's apparently only a bad thing to change canon when people don't like the changes.

I don't think any changes to canon are quite as simple as you make it out to be for some people. Orc and drow simply weren't defined in DL1 because they didn't need to be; at least for orc it wasn't until 3 years later when DL Adventures written by Hickman and Weis was published that they finally defined half-orcs as not existing. The fact the original creators finally got around to defining it is what probably carries so much weight and makes people resistant to a published change, just look at the other Dragonlance thread about the Cataclysm and the questions on who wrote the 2E material I was citing. I'm actually not immediately sure where the no drow thing comes from, maybe the 2E stuff where I'm pretty sure they also said no lycanthropes? DL Adventures doesn't seem to mention drow in the elf section one way or the other at least.

You are right though that the irony is I'd bet WotC does follow more of the DL1 model of just not defining it and not featuring any orcs so people can do whatever they want. The art so far hasn't shown anything that wouldn't be considered traditional DL imo so I don't quite get the problem people have in this thread. If you really need WotC to spell everything out clearly, perhaps a game centered around playing make-believe isn't a game I'd want to do at your table. (Not you personally, but in a general sense.)

Personally I'm far more interested in if and how they explain clerics pre-Disks of Mishakal but we don't have the book yet and the info released so far hasn't touched on it so I guess I'll save the speculation for the day the book goes live on D&D Beyond and I can skim through it to decide if it looks interesting enough to buy the physical book in December.

 

[Kai Lord]

DL16 "World of Krynn" that came out just one year after Dragonlance Adventures revealed that Lord Soth kept a Tarrasque in his basement so him riding a Death Dragon in the new material isn't too much to get fussed about.

 

[DragonBelow]

DL16 "World of Krynn" that came out just one year after Dragonlance Adventures revealed that Lord Soth kept a Tarrasque in his basement so him riding a Death Dragon in the new material isn't too much to get fussed about.

DLA (1987) came out before DL16 (1988), but whatever

 

[Kai Lord]

Yes I literally said that DL16 came out one year after DLA.

 

[Maxperson]

Poe-TAY-toe, poe-TAH-toe. The Silver Flame is a literal manifesting of divine power. It has a champion that it "speaks" with and faith in it fuels clerical energy. It's not a God like Zeus, but if you want proof of the divine, Eberron is full of it.

I see nothing in the 5e books to indicate that the Silver Flame itself talks to anyone. It's just a power source no different than if I created a Dark Rock and those that drew upon it got psionic power. "Divine" means godly in other settings, but it does not mean that in Eberron.