Dragonlance Dragonlance Adventure & Prelude Details Revealed

Over on DND Beyond Amy Dallen and Eugenio Vargas discuss the beginning of Shadow of ther Dragon Queen and provide some advice on running it.

Running a Session Zero for Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen

When starting a new adventure, it's a good idea to get on the same page as your party. Here's how to run a session zero for the upcoming Dragonlance adv...

www.dndbeyond.com

This epic war story begins with an invitation to a friend's funeral and three optional prelude encounters that guide you into the world of Krynn. Amy Dallen is joined by Eugenio Vargas to share some details about how these opening preludes work and some advice on using them in your own D&D games.

There is also information on the three short 'prelude' adventures which introduce players to the world of Krynn:

• Eye in the Sky -- ideal for sorcerers, warlocks, wizards, or others seeking to become members of the Mages of High Sorcery.
• Broken Silence -- ideal for clerics, druids, paladins, and other characters with god-given powers.
• Scales of War -- ideal for any character and reveals the mysterious draconians.

The article discusses Session Zero for the campaign and outlines what to expect in a Dragonlance game -- war, death, refugees, and so on.

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[darjr]

 

[humble minion]

One small thing I really liked about Spelljammer was that there was three illustrations for every new race (let's not talk about the hadozee for now...) so you got to see a bit of a spectrum of possibilities, rather than just This Is The Dwarf. Looks from the above kender image like this convention will continue. Good move, in my opinion.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

If "things I am not a fan of" is used to define evil, then you are going to get an awful lot of very different, and very long, lists.

Manchester United and Bussel Sprouts were evil all along!

I mean both the top and bottom statements can be true...

 

[Faolyn]

Kender to me are like Chaotic Neutral characters: it's possible to play them and not be a disruptive jerk, I've just not yet seen it myself.

I'm playing a Chaotic Neutral character and haven't been disruptive at all. And I've even asked the DM to let me know if I am, so I can stop.

I just do dumb things, like cannonball into the Death Pool because there's a shiny thing at the bottom of it and it seemed like the right thing to do at the time.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

My biggest gripe with DL has always been its ridiculous interpretation of alignment. It's basically trying to shoehorn Moorcock's Law and Chaos into D&D's Good and Evil. Hearing Paladine, the chief God of Good, who lives on a cosmic plane of Goodness, inhabited by good celestials, escorted by good dragons, and surrounded by the souls of his good followers, say that having too much good around is really bad, is seriously dumb stuff.

this is one of the points I have been tryign to make

 

[Faolyn]

Clearly it needs to be in bigger letters.

It needs being actually shown.

If a monster is given an evil alignment, and every time that monster is used in an official product, it's doing evil things, then it doesn't matter if you can make them any alignment you want them. They game itself is failing to support them as being anything other than evil.

Compare to the Level Up intro adventure, Memories of Holdenshire, where there's a friendly and helpful hag who can and will do nice things for players who solve her riddles. LU doesn't use alignments most of the time, but hags are traditionally evil--and Level Up made an effort to show one who isn't.

 

[Micah Sweet]

It needs being actually shown.

If a monster is given an evil alignment, and every time that monster is used in an official product, it's doing evil things, then it doesn't matter if you can make them any alignment you want them. They game itself is failing to support them as being anything other than evil.

Compare to the Level Up intro adventure, Memories of Holdenshire, where there's a friendly and helpful hag who can and will do nice things for players who solve her riddles. LU doesn't use alignments most of the time, but hags are traditionally evil--and Level Up made an effort to show one who isn't.

That sounds good, but there are a multitude of creatures who could be any alignment but are traditionally depicted as evil, and only a very few official WotC releases in which such a creature can be reasonably included. It is going to be a long, long time before all of them get a turn, and every time you do, you have to make a point of it. It's a nice goal, but not practical in any reasonable amount of time.

 

[Arnie_Wan_Kenobi]

as these threads have gone on about not changing or changing the canon I wonder how people would react to "I want to be the cleric of a CG god that has been sneaky and granting power to a secret cult breaking the rules all along, and can't use that knowledge to call Big lady T on it cause he only knows she is breaking the rules cause he is... and I am a member of this cult (1st level cleric) that has been sent to find away to expose her"

There is no way the CG god(s) at least weren't throwing miracles against the wall to see what stuck.

My memory's a little rusty, but isn't Branchala the only CG god on Krynn? And Sirrion the only CN? DragonLance never was very fond of the "Chaos" axis. But seeing as B. is the god of bards and kender...yeah, this exactly tracks.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

That sounds good, but there are a multitude of creatures who could be any alignment but are traditionally depicted as evil, and only a very few official WotC releases in which such a creature can be reasonably included. It is going to be a long, long time before all of them get a turn, and every time you do, you have to make a point of it. It's a nice goal, but not practical in any reasonable amount of time.

just some flavor text change to show there are GOOD or at least neutral groups of them in default MM would help

 

[Arnie_Wan_Kenobi]

My thoughts on the running commentary on this thread...

The more threads that get made on Dragonlance, the more the comments seem to stay the same...



I could swear we've had this exact same conversation three times in the past week in every thread on Dragonlance...Deja Vu...is this a glitch in the Matrix...

Someone must have let Tasslehoff get a hold of the Device of Time Journeying again...