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

 

[MonsterEnvy]

It should be noted that the Neutral and Evil Gods had just as much of a hand in the Cataclysm and would outvote the good gods.
The good gods also did attempt an alternative path by enlisting Lord Soth to take out the Kingpriest before the Cataclysm started.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

It is a historical perspective, one that was held by a lot of people in the past, and still believed by some today. You don't have to agree with it personally to engage with it and analyze it on it's own terms.

And they're wrong. If a god has a hand in a genocidal act happening, they are bad. They cannot be objectively labeled within the setting any of the good alignments. The "Good" gods cannot commit evil acts without being evil. If a god kills thousands of babies, they cannot be good.

If someone believes that a god can kill (or have a hand in killing) thousands of innocents, including children and infants and still be objectively listed as "Good", then they're wrong. They're wrong and their morals are bad.

These works are all fictions, not truths.

You can appreciate/enjoy the fiction without subscribing to the ideas that it promotes. If someone thinks that the "good" gods of Dragonlance are good in spite of their hand in genocide, then they are wrong. A circumstance being fictional doesn't mean that you can't judge it or the people that agree with the morals it promotes.

But D&D is a TTRPG. Dragonlance is supposed to be a war between Good and Evil. But you can't have that sort of conflict if "good" is actually bad. Then it just becomes a reskinned version of the Blood War (evil versus evil).

 

[pemerton]

You can appreciate/enjoy the fiction without subscribing to the ideas that it promotes. If someone thinks that the "good" gods of Dragonlance are good in spite of their hand in genocide, then they are wrong. A circumstance being fictional doesn't mean that you can't judge it or the people that agree with the morals it promotes.

But D&D is a TTRPG. Dragonlance is supposed to be a war between Good and Evil. But you can't have that sort of conflict if "good" is actually bad. Then it just becomes a reskinned version of the Blood War (evil versus evil).

Here's why I think you're wrong: many people enjoyed Black Panther as a good vs evil tale, although it is in fact a tale about an apparently absolute monarch maintaining his throne and killing someone who wants to use the power of the land to engage in revolutionary social transformation.

Many people enjoyed the LotR films, although they are about establishing a "true king" as ruler, and only make the remotest moral sense if one accepts the premise that "the King and the land are one". They don't seem to have been troubled by the objectional social hierarchy that operates between Frodo and Sam, and which is left completely undisturbed - indeed, reinforced - by the events of the story.

Many people enjoy the Star Wars films, and celebrate the destruction of the Death Star, even though the death toll must be in the many, many thousands, and many of those killed are effectively functionaries and perhaps conscripts.

I recently saw a bit of the Wonder Woman film on TV, where she leads an attack on German trenches and many German soldiers are killed and the audience is clearly intended to be uplifted by this as a heroic victory.

All the time, in romantic adventure fiction particularly, moral framings are simplified, even in some cases distorted. It's interesting to note; it can even be interesting to criticise the Melbourne intellectual Robert Manne wrote a scathing critique of Schindler's List along these lines). But it's silly to say that people who enjoyed Wonder Woman are immoral because they don't care for the lives of German conscripts; or that people who enjoyed LotR are immoral because they are celebrating radically unjust forms of political and social organisation.

When I play my heroic paladin in a FRPG, I don't play him as conforming to the actual political and moral demands that I'm personally committed to. He eats meat, he kills liberally, he does not seek to overthrow the feudal social order, etc. And the game doesn't normally focus on the toil of the peasants and the injustice of mediaeval taxation. If that were to become the focus, then the whole framing of play would have to change, and heroic paladins wouldn't even make sense any more as an archetype.

 

[Velderan]

That is not buying into the philosophy. When a society functions the way @pemerton suggests, someone with a more individualist view point is really going to stand out, especially as they have to make a point of dissenting or you wouldn't know. Assuming you're not going for comedy (a la Monte Python), the person with the modern views is going to severely confuse the issue and compromise buy-in of the pre-modern premise, which in turn throws the whole story out of whack.

TL;DR: if you don't like stories/settings/worlds with a premodern point of view, don't engage with them. Trying to tear them down by forcing an adherence to a modern standard they have no desire to use to me feels more like giving fans grief about something they enjoy rather than honest discussion.

I really liked what Snarf posted in the locked thread. I really don't understand the mentality of continuously going into threads related to a topic that clearly people don't like to remind everyone how much they don't like it. But hey, some people just like their morality to be in their games I guess. lol

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

Here's why I think you're wrong: many people enjoyed Black Panther as a good vs evil tale,

. . . Killmonger is widely regarded as one of the best villains in the MCU because his motive makes sense and the issue isn't "good versus evil". T'challa even says in the movie multiple times that Killmonger is right and that Wakanda should share its prosperity with the rest of the world.

If someone thinks Black Panther is a simple story of "Good versus Evil", they didn't understand the movie.

Many people enjoyed the LotR films, although they are about establishing a "true king" as ruler, and only make the remotest moral sense if one accepts the premise that "the King and the land are one". They don't seem to have been troubled by the objectional social hierarchy that operates between Frodo and Sam, and which is left completely undisturbed - indeed, reinforced - by the events of the story.

Many people enjoy the Star Wars films, and celebrate the destruction of the Death Star, even though the death toll must be in the many, many thousands, and many of those killed are effectively functionaries and perhaps conscripts.

Again, you can enjoy a story without agreeing with the morality of the actions taken/written in the book.

I recently saw a bit of the Wonder Woman film on TV, where she leads an attack on German trenches and many German soldiers are killed and the audience is clearly intended to be uplifted by this as a heroic victory.

And I've seen a ton of people criticize the ending because of how it simplifies the "humans are the real evil" message that the movie had been setting up until it's revealed that Ares is actually behind it all.

If you think that the Good gods of Dragonlance are actually good even though they played a part in genocide, then you have bad morals. I never said that people that enjoy Dragonlance have bad morals. Just the people that think genocide is excusable.

 

[Hussar]

And what about the children? They couldn't oppose the Kingpriest, they were too young and thus are innocent. Or the few people in Istar that didn't believe in him? I highly doubt that 100% of the adult population was backing him. Even Nazi Germany had people inside working against Hitler.

If my players kill innocents or their actions have collateral, I make it clear that what they did was not a good thing. I don't use alignment, but if I did and they killed hundreds of innocent people in order to overthrow a cult, their alignments would very quickly shift towards evil.

Again, you're basing this on a morality that isn't part of the setting. Look, I 100% agree with you that if this happened in our world, this would be horrific.

But, we're basing this on a fantasy world which has its own morality. Again, people in Nazi Germany were hardly elevating Hitler to godhood. There's a slight difference here. The people so believed in this person that their belief was actually changing reality. That's a bit more extreme.

Now, since we've circled back into this yet again, can anyone show me a SINGLE example where the Cataclysm is claimed as a GOOD thing? Necessary is the only thing they mention. At no point, in any of the reading or quotes that I've seen has ANYONE made even the slightest claim that the Cataclysm is a good thing. So, can we please give the whole "justification for genocide" thing a rest? It's not supported by any reading of the text whatsoever. It's entirely fabricated by those who insist on reinterpreting the setting through the lens of their own personal morality.

No one is claiming that genocide is justified. That's a ridiculous claim without any textual support.

 

[pemerton]

If you think that the Good gods of Dragonlance are actually good even though they played a part in genocide, then you have bad morals. I never said that people that enjoy Dragonlance have bad morals. Just the people that think genocide is excusable.

I don't have a view about the actual moral standing of the Good gods of DL, any more than I have a view about the actual moral standing of Aragorn, or of Superman. These are all romantic fictions, and don't require me to evaluate them in those terms.

 

[Faolyn]

This is silly.

The relationship between aesthetic value and moral value is extremely complicated. But many people take aesthetic pleasure in stories that do not conform to their own political and moral commitments.

I love Excalibur. The central motif of Excalibur is "The King and the land are one." But in real life, although I live in a monarchy, I am not a royalist and certainly don't hold to the sort of view that is central to Excalibur. Similar reactionary political ideas predominate in JRRT's work, which I also love. But I don't build my own political commitments around it. The idea of the "true king" is a fantasy, not a principle that I actually adhere to.

I also love the bit in the Kick Ass film in which the jet pack rider comes up the side of the building and starts shooting all the bad guys, even though that is almost impossible to square with any tenable account of the permissible use of lethal violence.

These works are all fictions, not truths.

Does Kick Ass have an alignment system? Is the jet pack rider supposed to be a being of true goodness? Does the jet pack rider have magical powers that would allow them to solve their problems without violence, or only target those people who are actively bad guys? Can the jet pack rider cast wish multiple times a day?

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

I don't have a view about the actual moral standing of the Good gods of DL, any more than I have a view about the actual moral standing of Aragorn, or of Superman. These are all romantic fictions, and don't require me to evaluate them in those terms.

D&D historically has tried to label gods with objective moralities. That's a major aspect of Dragonlance. If a game gives supposedly objective labels of gods and NPCs, then their actions better adhere to the real world meanings of those words or they were built wrong.

 

[mamba]

Or perhaps the fact that the idea of collective punishment cannot be squared with modern ideals of personal responsibility could be an in-universe story element that the setting explores, with different characters having different viewpoints on the matter, rather than something you just have to accept as true as part of the baseline price of entry.

Quite frankly it doesn't matter at all. 350 years ago there was a large catastrophe, the world is slowly recovering, the end. The rest does not matter.