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

 

[Micah Sweet]

The arguing over hypotheticals and minutiae, and the leaping to conclusions with extremely minimal (or even no) evidence, is just ridiculous. This thread alone is over 1500 posts long, and most of it is arguing over something that in the book will almost inevitably be "Here are the options if you want to play a traditional DL campaign - but if you don't, feel free to ignore them", rendering all that discussion null and void.

I would love it if it did that; seriously there would be no problem at all. But there are some posters who seem to feel just as vehemently that no consideration on what options are part of a traditional perspective should be there at all. There's a mission statement to that effect a few posts above this one.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

It's not just a matter of tradition though. It a matter of trying to make the various settings distinctive and interesting, rather than like homogenised baby food.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

It's not just a matter of tradition though. It a matter of trying to make the various settings distinctive and interesting, rather than like homogenised baby food.

The setting can be distinctive without removing/banning Orcs and other base D&D races. Eberron is distinctive from the core of D&D without banning any of the PHB races.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

The setting can be distinctive without removing/banning Orcs and other base D&D races.

Sure, there are other ways to make a setting distinctive. But since Dragonlance doesn't have those, removing orcs is a good way to go. It's not like orcs add anything, it's simple, and it works the same in 5e as it did in 1st.

Eberron is distinctive from the core of D&D without banning any of the PHB races.

Whilst it doesn't actually ban any races, it does reskin them to suit the setting. You could argue that Dragonlance doesn't ban orcs, it reskins them as draconians.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

Sure, there are other ways to make a setting distinctive. But since Dragonlance doesn't have those, removing orcs is a good way to go. It's not like orcs add anything, it's simple, and it works the same in 5e as it did in 1st.

Arbitrarily restricting core races and monsters in the game is a bad way to make the setting distinctive.

Whilst it doesn't actually ban any races, it does reskin them to suit the setting. You could argue that Dragonlance doesn't ban orcs, it reskins them as draconians.

Except Orcs aren't always evil monsters in the core of D&D anymore, so that justification doesn't work in 5e.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Arbitrarily restricting core races and monsters in the game is a bad way to make the setting distinctive.

Why? Orcs are useless holdovers from Tolkien anyway. The game doesn't need them. Some settings have them because TRADITION.

Trying to fit all the D&D monsters into some sort of world ecology makes any sort of world building a nonsensical proposition. Much better to prune as many as possible, then add them in with plot justification (e.g. BBEG made them) only as needed.

Except Orcs aren't always evil monsters in the core of D&D anymore, so that justification doesn't work in 5e.

Which makes them even less relevant. Always evil orcs = draconians, not always evil orcs = humans.

 

[mamba]

If you know nothing about the subject, you probably shouldn't be debating it. At least not without doing the work to learn about it.

The subject is worldbuilding, not Theros or MtG. I grant you that MtG worlds have a reason to do things in multiples of 5 (15 gods, 10 factions for each combination of two colors), I just do not see this as fundamentally different from building worlds for D&D, it’s more a detail to consider than a fundamental difference.

The fact that you can use a MtG world in D&D and create a deck based on a D&D world that was clearly not designed with these concepts in mind to me shows that at the level of worldbuilding these are not fundamental differences.

Now if you told me that designing a deck of cards for MtG is fundamentally different from designing (sub)classes or adventures for D&D, I’d agree.

 

[mamba]

Nope. But greek mythology was made before D&D, so that wouldn't be a setting designed for D&D. That would be a Greek Mythology setting converted to the D&D ruleset.

Dragonlance is a D&D setting made with D&D in mind. The distinction is important.

Ah, so the distinction is that one is ‘just using the 5e ruleset’ and the other is ‘designed for D&D’. With the deciding factor being how closely they follow the three core books.

Not sure I entirely agree that designing for the D&D ruleset only is not also designing for D&D, the latter seems more a shorthand to me, but I understand that distinction and why you make it.

 

[mamba]

Why must D&D settings arbitrarily ban options that could be fun?

there is no ‘must’, but I would expect there to be a ‘can’.

I also don’t see what fun is being taken away by not allowing half-orc players.

Removing options is fine if there's a good reason for it.

how good a reason is will forever be in the eye of the beholder

For you ‘because they never existed in the world’ / ‘tradition, we did it like this in the setting for the past 35 years’ apparently are not good reasons, for (some / many) others they are.

I am not sure ‘because we killed them all off in the prologue’ is so much better, yet you seem to be fine with that

 

[Velderan]

I would love it if it did that; seriously there would be no problem at all. But there are some posters who seem to feel just as vehemently that no consideration on what options are part of a traditional perspective should be there at all. There's a mission statement to that effect a few posts above this one.

The problem with the whole argument against having some language saying "this is the standard races you might find on Krynn" is that argument basically comes down to WotC isn't going to restrict player choice because D&D while conveniently ignoring WotC chose to by default suggest restrictions to player choice in a product they released just 2 years ago (Theros), which clearly describes that product as checks notes "a new setting for your Dungeons & Dragons campaign to explore". Now we can go on for another 81 pages about whether that's good or bad design philosophy, but the fact is they've done it recently and the product line didn't implode so them doing it again isn't going to hurt anything. They could even use something similar to the wording to leave it open to each table to figure out for themselves, "the races in the Player's Handbook are unknown on Theros, unless they’re visiting from other worlds." could easily be "the Half-orc, Halfling, and Tiefling races in the Player's Handbook are unknown on Krynn, unless they’re visiting from other worlds" without any issue. The language is incredibly flexible in steering towards the creator's intent without flat out saying no since that seems to be a problem here. The next paragraph says "the following common playable races of Theros", nowhere does it say banned. Your DM can allow a tiefling in Theros and it's just fine. This isn't exactly a difficult concept.