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

 

[Paul Farquhar]

If the adventure doesn’t end with the pcs stopping Takhisis or at least making the attempt, I will be very disappointed. If this is just a prequel adventure where nothing you do has any impact on the setting, I’ll pass

If you want the PCs to defeat Takhisis at your table you could run the DL modules (or just the later ones) updated to high level 5e as sequels to this adventure.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

So everybody can play anything anywhere is your position. I dislike that, but that is your preference.
Also you're making that the claim that anyone who plays DL has to use/buy-into Spelljammer and Planescape settings for their cosmology. How not oppressive of you. You sure this isn't a form of control over other people's tables?

. . . . I'm saying that's how it is in 5e. The base cosmology of 5e (and it actually has been around since 2e) was that almost all of the D&D worlds are connected to the Multiverse. Krynn is explicitly connected to it. Plasmoids are from Krynn's Moons from 2e Spelljammer. The Dragonlance setting is connected to Spelljammer so it never would have made sense for a DM to say that there is 0% chance of Orcs ever existing on Krynn.

That is not what I said, this is how you interpret it.
The sidebar acknowledgement would reflect the historical limitations of the setting (hence it being a sidebar). It is not mandating it for your table. One would be free to ignore it.
The DMG keeps reflecting on the freedom of the DM to shape their world, their cosmos.

And my point is that the "historical limitations of the setting" are both outdated and completely unnecessary to include in a book. Mythic Odysseys of Theros never goes out of its way to say "Hey, Orcs, Kobolds, and Dwarves don't exist in this world so don't let your players play them", because it tells you which creatures are native to the world through the setting book's material and provides ways for strange/unique players of different races to exist in the world (Planeswalkers, Nyxborn created by the Gods, Anvilwrought created by Purphoros). The setting makes it clear that the theme is "Ancient Greece" so Orcs and Beholders probably won't fit in the world, but it also gives justifications of both the DM and Players to include them if they want to. Eberron does something similar where it has a list of major races, but also gives ways for other races and monsters to exist (Mordain the Fleshweaver, the Mournland, Xen'drik, etc). And this way is a superior type of worldbuilding to "these races are banned because we say so". It makes it clear that things are left up to the DM and helps them use their imagination to customize the world.

Again, it's the acknowledgement and to educate newer DMs about the quirks of the setting. Again, not about orcs alone, but all playable limitations (i.e. no halflings, no dragonborn, no tieflings etc). But hey, let me not control you, you do you doing me.

And sometimes the "quirks of the setting" are bad or outdated. Banning orcs is outdated because the reason they were banned in the first place no longer applies to the modern iterations of Orcs (because Draconians became the main always evil race that serves the villain). I have no opinion on Tieflings existing in the world, to me it makes sense if the Great Wheel is the world's cosmology, but 5e has said that Dragonborn can be used as Draconians.

The game has changed a lot in the past 38 years since Dragonlance first came out. So the setting should change to fit the modern game. Some things that used to work well (banning Orcs to make way for a new always evil mook race) don't work as well in 5e. The quirks of the setting that you're complaining about being changed (or theoretically being changed because we don't actually know that Orcs will be present in the world) are such minor parts of the world that it honestly baffles me that you care this much about it and leaving it up to the DM encourages player and DM creativity when making the setting/adventure their own.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

The Dragonlance setting is connected to Spelljammer so it never would have made sense for a DM to say that there is 0% chance of Orcs ever existing on Krynn.

That's an oversimplification. Krynn was created before Spelljammer, and it was incorporated into the Spelljammer setting by the Spelljammer creator against the wishes of the Dragonlance creators, who had always envisioned it as completely separate from the core D&D cosmology.

So, you could say that Krynn is part of the Spelljammer setting, but Spelljammer is not part of the Krynn setting.

Or, it's up to the DM.

 

[fba827]

So….. dragonlance, I’ve never played in it beyond the name dragonlance was on some modules but it was played in such a way that it could have been any generic fantasy setting when you filed off the names. I’ve been playing d&d for many many many decades but mostly been home brew ( some mystara etc mixed in there though as the hollow world stuff let me dip in to real world ancient culture themes without centering a whole campaign on it)

I would otherwise not be interested only because setting-deep books do not really interest me personally, though I have been wanting good ideas for a war backdrop so I may glance at previews and see if it includes more concepts than I am already doing. The idea that they are at least thinking about players without dragonlance encyclopedic knowledge is a nice idea, execution will matter a lot to push me over that edge.

 

[Stormonu]

Huh?

Isn't that pretty much exactly what they have done for like the past five years or so?

In the past 5 years, we've gotten the following adventures/books: Ravnica, Theros, Wildemount, Strixhaven, Radiant Citadel, Eberron, Saltmarsh.

Looks like they've hit seven non-FR worlds in the last five years.

To me, this looks a lot like the perennial complaint that WotC isn't publishing fast enough. Before it was "There aren't enough 5e adventures", ignoring the couple of thousand adventures on DM's Guild, now it's "WotC isn't doing enough setting material" again, ignoring the couple of thousand setting supplements and/or original settings on DM's Guild.

How much material do people actually want?

Um, no, that is not my point.

Rime of the Frostmaiden, Tomb of Annilihilation, Dungeon of the Mad Mage, Dragon Heist, Storm King's Thunder, Hoard of the Dragon Queen, et. al, are all set in FR.

Ravenloft is the only realm they've come back to (Curse of Strahd, Van Richten's).

I'd like to see them come back for an adventure or supplement for other worlds they've already released in 5E, besides FR. Give me another Eberron adventure or redo City of Sharn. Give me a campaign set in Theros. That sort of thing. I could care less what's coming out of DM Guild. I want the WotC team to put this out - for me, the content difference is like that of a college football team vs. the NFL, and have access to it in print in stores instead of just as a PDF I might not hear about because I don't comb through the myriad titles and sift out the cruft in the DM's Guild.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Banning orcs is outdated because the reason they were banned in the first place no longer applies to the modern iterations of Orcs

I would suggest the reason they were written out was to try and make the world feel more grounded by making most of the population human, rather than have every other person you meet some kind of weird alien.

Something that still holds up in 2022.

 

[Remathilis]

Um, no, that is not my point.

Rime of the Frostmaiden, Tomb of Annilihilation, Dungeon of the Mad Mage, Dragon Heist, Storm King's Thunder, Hoard of the Dragon Queen, et. al, are all set in FR.

Ravenloft is the only realm they've come back to (Curse of Strahd, Van Richten's).

I'd like to see them come back for an adventure or supplement for other worlds they've already released in 5E, besides FR. Give me another Eberron adventure or redo City of Sharn. Give me a campaign set in Theros. That sort of thing. I could care less what's coming out of DM Guild. I want the WotC team to put this out - for me, the content difference is like that of a college football team vs. the NFL, and have access to it in print in stores instead of just as a PDF I might not hear about because I don't comb through the myriad titles and sift out the cruft in the DM's Guild.

WotC is releasing five new books next year. Which one would you want to be replaced by a Sharn Book? By a Theros adventure path? A Spelljammer vessel supplement?

 

[Velderan]

Ahh, that makes more sense.

But, that's also exactly what you get from DM's Guild.

Look, a sub to Dungeon and Dragon back in the day would have been twenty bucks (give or take) a month. If you spent twenty bucks a month on DM's Guild material, you'd have far, far more material than you could ever use, and a lot of it at very high production values. I mean, good grief, the Elminster's Candlekeep Companion was in part written by Ed Greenwood. Co-written by @M.T. Black. That's some pretty serious writing chops right there.

It's not like DM's Guild stuff is just some guy poking away by himself on a laptop.

Yeah, there's some legit good stuff there. The Border Kingdoms for example is another Ed Greenwood book available there that's pretty good.

If the adventure doesn’t end with the pcs stopping Takhisis or at least making the attempt, I will be very disappointed. If this is just a prequel adventure where nothing you do has any impact on the setting, I’ll pass

From the most recent interview F. Wesley Schneider has spoken about it in (around the 1:10 mark), I'm 99% sure it's going to keep the focus in Eastern Solamnia and they're specifically trying to explore an area that previously wasn't talked about. Why would you do that? Simple, so you can leave existing lore largely intact and still tell a new story. You're not requiring people to know more than what's needed for that region, so you avoid what they're suggesting is the problem of needing to read tons of additional material to get up to speed and allow them to keep the book to 224 pages. That's basically what I did during my own home game years ago that you made it a point of saying wasn't Dragonlance because it wasn't epic enough for the record (you edited your post to remove what you said, but I quoted it in my response here).

The more I hear Schneider talk about the setting and adventure, the less concerned I am that they're going to take a hatchet to the setting. There will certainly be changes, for instance Soth was pretty much only loyal to Kitiara and not the Dragonarmies or Takhisis so involving him in a way that makes sense for the adventure they're describing to me implies they'll need to retcon his character a bit. Overall I'm not as concerned as I was when they first announced this during their announcement stream in August. Want something where you get to take on the role of the Companions? As you've said a few times now, DM's Guild exists. Why would WotC remake that product when it's been done several times before here, here, and here?

Edit: Forgot to mention Schneider also does a great job of just completely glossing over the whole orc/drow/tieling topic by saying you can play everything you'd expect to play in a D&D setting before focusing on topics like clerics and wizards instead of digging into the race topic. People that want orcs and drow can run what they want, people who want a more traditional DL experience can exclude those races. They're not going to say anything more specific in the 224 page book, why would they?

 

[Micah Sweet]

You were invoking political inclusivity in a way that seemed like you were comparing "I want Orcs banned from Dragonlance" to actual marginalized minorities. It's not "censorship" to call out ridiculous language that tries to make you look like you're being discriminated against for wanting to ban a race from a setting.

Waste of space. The book is about 220 pages. And the adventure can tell you what creatures and races exist in the world by having them included in the adventure, like Theros and Ravnica do. They don't have to say "no Orcs". Because that would be wasting words on an issue that only pleases the grognards that want to control other people's tables for some reason.

Its not about controlling other people's tables. Its about having a standard, and preserving a setting's identity, which means what it doesn't have just as much as what it does have. Theros and Ravnica, which keep getting brought up, are pretty clear about what the setting includes. If someone wants to play a tiefling in either, and the table is fine with it, there's no problem. But those settings don't include them by default, and neither does DL.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

I would suggest the reason they were written out was to try and make the world feel more grounded by making most of the population human, rather than have every other person you meet some kind of weird alien.

Something that still holds up in 2022.

I don't buy for a moment that the reason they removed orcs is because of that. They still have a bunch of different fantasy races in Dragonlance and even added new ones (Draconians, those weird Ogres, Gully Dwarves, etc). To me, what makes more sense for why they originally removed/didn't include Orcs is because they wanted to distance the story from the Lord of the Rings (Hobbits became Kender, Orcs became Draconians, Sauron became Takhisis, Gandalf became Fizban, Gimli became Flint, etc) and thought that including Orcs would make the already clear inspirations from Lord of the Rings would make it seem like they were ripping it off. So, instead of having an evil army of Orcs (corrupted elves/humans) that serves the Dark Lord Sauron in the setting's main conflict, which is a war between evil and good, Dragonlance has an evil army of humanoid corrupted dragons that serve the Dark Lady Takhisis in the setting's main conflict, which is a war between evil and good.

Dragonlance already took heavy "inspiration" from Lord of the Rings. Including Orcs (which were always evil monsters at the time) would have made the similarities even more clear than they already are.