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]

Saying one style of worldbuilding is superior to another sounds an awful lot like stating a subjective preference is actually objective fact. Is that what you intended?

Yes, I genuinely believe that it is a superior way of world building a D&D-like TTRPG setting. Because it is the sweet middle ground between "include every race and try to explain how they all fit in" and "only allow a small amount of race options and go in depth for how they fit in the setting". It allows you to choose as many races as you want to be important in the world, while also accommodating the players that might want to play a character race not explained in-depth in the world. It's the best of both worlds, and I see absolutely no downsides. It's just better.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

How does that square with the cosmology? It's pretty different as I recall.

According to 5e, Eberron is somewhere inside the Great Wheel, but the Ring of Siberys blocks travel to and from Eberron and it's own unique cosmology. So the DM can officially choose to include stuff from other settings if they want, but the baseline is that travelling to or from Eberron is basically impossible.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

Dragonlance was more influenced by Star Wars than LoTR.

Not for the races and fantasy tropes, which is what this tangent is discussing.

 

[mamba]

Dragonlance was more influenced by Star Wars than LoTR.

I’d like some examples for this, because it clearly has lots of similarities to LotR and I do not see many SW ones.

I grant you Lord Soth looks like Darth Vader if you squint enough. You will need a lot more to say it was more influenced by SW though.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

Again, not really an objective fact, and insulting to boot. People have different preferences, and "importance" is deeply subjective. I wouldn't want tieflings in a LOtR rpg, and I wouldn't want orcs in Dragonlance. If you do at your table, more power to you.

And I could always find a justification for including Tieflings in Middle Earth. Melkor/Morgoth corrupted a lot of creatures after all, the Tieflings could just be a unique corrupted-Maiar. And that Krynnian Orc could have come from space or some distant island that no one from Taladas has discovered yet.

Letting someone play an Orc/Half-Orc as a unique outsider is not going to ruin the game. Orcs are a generic fantasy race and Krynn is a fantasy world. It's really not an egregious thematic divergence, like playing a Time Lord in Dark Sun or Ultron in Theros. Dragonlance already has similar fantasy races and was obviously inspired by Lord of the Rings.

 

[bedir than]

How does that square with the cosmology? It's pretty different as I recall.

Every new race, class, etc he writes on his blog about how he feels it fits.

 

[Veltharis ap Rylix]

How does that square with the cosmology? It's pretty different as I recall.

On the topic of Eberron, my understanding is that, as of 5e, the "official" stance on integrating Eberron into the Great Wheel from both WotC and Baker himself is that the three Progenitor Dragons (Eberron's mythical primordial creator deities) essentially sealed off some hidden pocket of the Astral Plane and created Eberron and its unique cosmology within that pocket - basically, Eberron's entire cosmology exists within one giant demiplane, locked away in some hidden corner of the Astral.

While I personally like to keep them explicitly separate, despite loving both Eberron and Planescape a great deal, this setup seems perfectly functional for whatever playstyle your table wants to choose.

Want Eberron and the Great Wheel to interact to some degree? Congrats, travel between the two is possible, if not necessarily easy.

Want them to remain sealed off from one another? Congrats, even if planewalkers managed to find the Eberron "demiplane" somewhere in the infinite expanse of the Astral, the Progenitor Dragons closed and locked the way in/out behind them eons ago.

 

[Velderan]

Again, not really an objective fact, and insulting to boot. People have different preferences, and "importance" is deeply subjective. I wouldn't want tieflings in a LOtR rpg, and I wouldn't want orcs in Dragonlance. If you do at your table, more power to you.

And I could always find a justification for including Tieflings in Middle Earth. Melkor corrupted a lot of creatures after all, the Tieflings could just be a unique corrupted-Maiar. And that Krynnian Orc could have come from space or some distant island that no one from Taladas has discovered yet.

Letting someone play an Orc/Half-Orc as a unique outsider is not going to ruin the game. Orcs are a generic fantasy race and Krynn is a fantasy world. It's really not an egregious thematic divergence, like playing a Time Lord in Dark Sun or Ultron in Theros. Dragonlance already has similar fantasy races and was obviously inspired by Lord of the Rings.

I feel like the truth is somewhere in the middle of what the 2 of you are going back and forth about. Saying orcs are not known to exist and would be considered alien to Ansalon doesn't remove the ability of a DM to let a player create one and decide what exactly that means (e.g. people in every town panicking at the sight of this unknown creature walking into their town). A DM allowing that exception and fitting it into their world also doesn't break the setting.

 

[Remathilis]

How does that square with the cosmology? It's pretty different as I recall.

ERLW:

It is theoretically possible to travel between Eberron and other worlds in the multiverse by means of the Deep Ethereal or various spells designed for planar travel, but the cosmology of Eberron is specifically designed to prevent such travel, to keep the world hidden away from the meddling of gods, celestials, and fiends from beyond.

...

In your campaign, you might decide that the barrier formed by the Ring of Siberys is intact, and contact between Eberron and the worlds and planes beyond its cosmology is impossible. This is the default assumption of this book. On the other hand, you might want to incorporate elements from other realms. Perhaps you want to use a published adventure that involves Tiamat or the forces of the Abyss meddling in the affairs of the world. In such a case, it could be that the protection offered by the Ring of Siberys has begun to fail. You might link the weakening of Siberys to the Mourning—perhaps whatever magical catastrophe caused the Mourning also disrupted the Ring of Siberys, or perhaps a disruption of the Ring of Siberys actually caused the Mourning

 

[Ixal]

Settings are defined by limitations. Sure you can personally at your table decide to ignore them, but the default which is also how they should be published is that the limitations are honored.