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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[Levistus's_Leviathan]

Self defense assumes a certain level of avoidance or attempts to avoid confrontation (ianal). Marching into a cultists hideout to slaughter demon-worshippers before they kill a virgin to summon a vrock might be justified, but it's still murder and still evil, by that definition. Fighting fire with fire, or evil with evil.

Truth. Folks really push their modern morals on D&D for worldbuilding, but rarely exercise the same beliefs in play with their PCs.

It's very strange that you would say this. What do you know about the playstyles of the people asking for books to be held to modern morality? I'm in favor of making books not be filled with terrible, outdated morality, and I certainly label PCs at my table evil if they do evil things (murder, commit genocide, etc). When my PCs kill people and wish to stay "good people" (I don't use alignment, but we still judge if the PCs are good people or not), it's basically always in self defense or in the protection of others. If they kill people outside of these constraints, I make it clear that they just did an evil act and aren't good people.

The Dragonlance Campaign Setting may not be for you then. As I said, the new book pretty much holds with the old ways, including the teams for the gods and the Good gods being part of the Cataclysm. Player stuff is open to accommodate all of WotC's new player base, but lore is mostly what it was.

And this is part of the reason why I have such mixed feelings about the Dragonlance setting. I like quite a bit of it and recognize how influential it was to early D&D, but whenever I ask for it to change to be better for a modern audience, people that don't want anything to be changed in the setting come and tell me that I'm bad for the setting and ruining it for them.

I honestly feel bad for WotC. It's hard to appease the modern community when the fans from previous editions keep getting of the way of any kind of progress because they don't want anything, even if it might make the setting better for a modern audience and wouldn't affect how they play the setting.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

Jeeze just making conversation. Excuse me all to heck and back.

I just thought you had a point and were keeping things on topic to this tangent. Not just griping about how so many older settings will never get updated.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

As noted elsewhere, there are many hill's I have died upon.

I prefer not to die on hills. Especially not on small, unimportant ones. Not that I'm perfect at it.

 

[Scribe]

I prefer not to die on hills. Especially not on small, unimportant ones. Not that I'm perfect at it.

We all have our lines in the sand. I find the idea of a Black Robe being 'good' as stupid as anything Wizards has printed, worse than Tasha's changes actually, for the whole edition.

EDIT: Oh, and its even worse because they know its stupid. They included a restriction in the first UA for a reason, because it makes sense.

 

[overgeeked]

keeping things on topic to this tangent...

So...maybe...let the tangent die? And get back to the actual topic?

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

We all have our lines in the sand. I find the idea of a Black Robe being 'good' as stupid as anything Wizards has printed, worse than Tasha's changes actually, for the whole edition.

EDIT: Oh, and its even worse because they know its stupid. They included a restriction in the first UA for a reason, because it makes sense.

Alignment doesn't have mechanics in most of 5e. There's just a handful of magic items and minor things like that. They're just following the 5e "tradition" of not restricting mechanical features behind an optional rule that not all people use.

And because you can't imagine a very rare, unique Black Robe mage that isn't evil doesn't mean that no one else can. They're providing support in the book for those people that do want to have outliers.

 

[Scribe]

Alignment doesn't have mechanics in most of 5e. There's just a handful of magic items and minor things like that. They're just following the 5e "tradition" of not restricting mechanical features behind an optional rule that not all people use.

And because you can't imagine a very rare, unique Black Robe mage that isn't evil doesn't mean that no one else can. They're providing support in the book for those people that do want to have outliers.

Its not a complicated thing. I cannot use language on this respectable site, that can express the degree of stupidity I feel a 'Good' Black Robe, would represent.

I can imagine it. I simply find it completely asinine, and doubly so because they had made the correct choice, and then backed out, because the 'MM Clause' is just too hard I guess.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

Its not a complicated thing. I cannot use language on this respectable site, that can express the degree of stupidity I feel a 'Good' Black Robe, would represent.

Then I doubt you actually understand why someone would want to play with the rare non-Evil black mage robe. Or the extent that people dislike the concept of being restricted to an evil alignment for an option that's supposed to be playable in a world where you're supposed to be fighting for Good. Not everyone wants to play Raistlin.

I can imagine it. I simply find it completely asinine, and doubly so because they had made the correct choice, and then backed out, because the 'MM Clause' is just too hard I guess.

The "Monster Manual Clause" as you call it, assumes that the table is playing with alignment. And playing without alignment is pretty common, especially among newer players, IME.

 

[Scribe]

The "Monster Manual Clause" as you call it, assumes that the table is playing with alignment. And playing without alignment is pretty common, especially among newer players, IME.

Then having a 'restriction' would be even easier for most tables to ignore yes?

 

[Micah Sweet]

It's very strange that you would say this. What do you know about the playstyles of the people asking for books to be held to modern morality? I'm in favor of making books not be filled with terrible, outdated morality, and I certainly label PCs at my table evil if they do evil things (murder, commit genocide, etc). When my PCs kill people and wish to stay "good people" (I don't use alignment, but we still judge if the PCs are good people or not), it's basically always in self defense or in the protection of others. If they kill people outside of these constraints, I make it clear that they just did an evil act and aren't good people.

And this is part of the reason why I have such mixed feelings about the Dragonlance setting. I like quite a bit of it and recognize how influential it was to early D&D, but whenever I ask for it to change to be better for a modern audience, people that don't want anything to be changed in the setting come and tell me that I'm bad for the setting and ruining it for them.

I honestly feel bad for WotC. It's hard to appease the modern community when the fans from previous editions keep getting of the way of any kind of progress because they don't want anything, even if it might make the setting better for a modern audience and wouldn't affect how they play the setting.

Its actually quite easy to appease the modern community. Make a  new campaign setting that appeals to them. Stop doing retreads. Like Nentir Vale. Great setting. Would have liked it even more if it wasn't expressed through 4th ed only.