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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[pemerton]

genocide is evil not good. there ARE objective goods and evils... yes you can find shades of grey and corner cases... but like They no D&D good/evil is not by region

You assert that DL is genocide without argument. Clearly in the fiction it's collective punishment. The notion of divine collective punishment as a righteous things is something that many of your real world fellow citizens strongly believe in. Gygax, who authored the original D&D alignment descriptions, was one of those people. To the best of my knowledge, so is Tracy Hickman.

You're obviously welcome to hold a different belief - your 1st Amendment even confers on you a constitutional right to do so - but continually asserting what you believe isn't going to make everyone agree with you. Adding the descriptor objective won't do that either. The D&D rules nowhere state that you are right and those others, including some of the original authors of the D&D rules and of DL, are wrong.

So I don't know why you keep beating this drum.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

You assert that DL is genocide without argument. Clearly in the fiction it's collective punishment. The notion of divine collective punishment as a righteous things is something that many of your real world fellow citizens strongly believe in. Gygax, who authored the original D&D alignment descriptions, was one of those people. To the best of my knowledge, so is Tracy Hickman.

You're obviously welcome to hold a different belief - your 1st Amendment even confers on you a constitutional right to do so - but continually asserting what you believe isn't going to make everyone agree with you. Adding the descriptor objective won't do that either. The D&D rules nowhere state that you are right and those others, including some of the original authors of the D&D rules and of DL, are wrong.

So I don't know why you keep beating this drum.

if you can't see why I (and others) keep saying this then why are you here to argue with us?
the only answers I can see are you either want to argue and don't care about what, OR you know that there is a tipping point right now and that is why we are arguing and you are trying to counterpoint it.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

Yeah, at this point the DL bashing seems a bit hurtful. Just don't use the setting if these issues bother you that much.

If saying "Hey, I think this part of the story is poorly thought out and doesn't make sense, and that it could be changed to be better and enhance the story in a way that I would enjoy it more" sounds like "Dragonlance is stupid and terrible and you should feel bad for liking it" . . . that says more about you than it does me.

 

[overgeeked]

One day I want to answer that question by writing up an alternate LotR timeline where he tried it, and Gwaihir dumped Gandalf off his back from 6000 feet and took the One Ring for his own, and now all the peoples of Middle Earth hide from the sky as the shadow of black wings spreads across the land.

Mordor meets The Birds.

According to Tolkien, the answer to that question is, "Shut up."

 

[Faolyn]

You assert that DL is genocide without argument. Clearly in the fiction it's collective punishment. The notion of divine collective punishment as a righteous things is something that many of your real world fellow citizens strongly believe in. Gygax, who authored the original D&D alignment descriptions, was one of those people. To the best of my knowledge, so is Tracy Hickman.

You're obviously welcome to hold a different belief - your 1st Amendment even confers on you a constitutional right to do so - but continually asserting what you believe isn't going to make everyone agree with you. Adding the descriptor objective won't do that either. The D&D rules nowhere state that you are right and those others, including some of the original authors of the D&D rules and of DL, are wrong.

So I don't know why you keep beating this drum.

Pretend, for a moment, that it was a mortal wizard spamming meteor spawns because they were offended by the kingpriest demanding that they give him wizard powers.

What would you call willfully killing an entire population?

 

[pemerton]

if you can't see why I (and others) keep saying this then why are you here to argue with us?
the only answers I can see are you either want to argue and don't care about what, OR you know that there is a tipping point right now and that is why we are arguing and you are trying to counterpoint it.

My main interest is that I'm an academic political philosopher and, as far as I know, the only participant in this thread who has actual published scholarly work on the morality of violence.

My second interest is that I think RPGing benefits from good literary criticism, and the criticism you level at DL is shallow. Good criticism might ask about the merits or demerits of a work that embraces the notion of collective divine punishment. But criticism that disregards the actual content and framing of the work and simply asserts that the work endorses genocide is shallow. No one in this thread endorses genocide. Tracy Hickman does not endorse genocide. Nor does he lack the ability to use "good" and "evil" as adjectives of English.

 

[Scribe]

Pretend, for a moment, that it was a mortal wizard spamming meteor spawns because they were offended by the kingpriest demanding that they give him wizard powers.

What would you call willfully killing an entire population?

In the world view of older religion, no mortal, is on par with a God, it's an invalid comparison within the context.

 

[pemerton]

Pretend, for a moment, that it was a mortal wizard spamming meteor spawns because they were offended by the kingpriest demanding that they give him wizard powers.

What would you call willfully killing an entire population?

I don't know how well read you are in political theory. But you might know that in your country there are millions of people locked up by the state. The state asserts, and most of your fellow citizens appear to accept, that this is not kidnapping or torture but justified punishment.

A lot of ink has been spilled in arguments about if, and under what circumstances, an institution like the state gains the authority to punish, and thus becomes different from a private person engaging in kidnap or torture. Similar discussions address things like the difference between police and vigilantes, or soldiers and terrorist militias.

Opinions in these arguments vary widely. But no one who contributes to them seriously thinks that you can just ignore the notion that the state enjoys authority that ordinary citizens do not.

There are also parallel, and sometimes even overlapping, arguments about the nature of divine authority.

As I posted just upthread, I have published work that contributes to some of these arguments. While I'm proud of much of it, I don't feel any great need to point you to it: a good first year textbook, or the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, will introduce you to the basics if you're interested but unfamiliar.

Nor, in an anonymous internet post, do I intend to tell you whether or not I agree with the moral, political and theological framework within which DL is framed. (My state -Victoria - has an election on today, and I'm not going to tell you how I voted, either.) My point is that the moral, political and theological framework of DL is absolutely transparent and utterly commonplace - especially in your country. And it obviously is one that rests on a theory of punishment that does not equate collective divine punishment to genocide. And it puzzles me that you, @GMforPowergamers and @Levistus's_Leviathan, seem incapable of even recognising that.

 

[Faolyn]

I don't know how well read you are in political theory. But you might know that in your country there are millions of people locked up by the state. The state asserts, and most of your fellow citizens appear to accept, that this is not kidnapping or torture but justified punishment.

A lot of ink has been spilled in arguments about if, and under what circumstances, an institution like the state gains the authority to punish, and thus becomes different from a private person engaging in kidnap or torture. Similar discussions address things like the difference between police and vigilantes, or soldiers and terrorist militias.

Opinions in these arguments vary widely. But no one who contributes to them seriously thinks that you can just ignore the notion that the state enjoys authority that ordinary citizens do not.

There are also parallel, and sometimes even overlapping, arguments about the nature of divine authority.

As I posted just upthread, I have published work that contributes to some of these arguments. While I'm proud of much of it, I don't feel any great need to point you to it: a good first year textbook, or the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, will introduce you to the basics if you're interested but unfamiliar.

Nor, in an anonymous internet post, do I intend to tell you whether or not I agree with the moral, political and theological framework within which DL is framed. (My state -Victoria - has an election on today, and I'm not going to tell you how I voted, either.) My point is that the moral, political and theological framework of DL is absolutely transparent and utterly commonplace - especially in your country. And it obviously is one that rests on a theory of punishment that does not equate collective divine punishment to genocide. And it puzzles me that you, @GMforPowergamers and @Levistus's_Leviathan, seem incapable of even recognising that.

The American judicial system is (a) really crappy, and nearly every American knows and understands that (the most recent polls I've seen show that over 90% of Americans believe there should be prison reform), (b) has nothing to do with the argument at hand, and (c) is not controlled by a greater god with the power of a 40th-level cleric/40th-level magic-user who rules over Goodness. So I fail to see what your point is, other than to perhaps say "Americans suck, so it's OK that this fantasy religion also sucks." Which is the definition of whataboutism and is a really bad argument.

Now, would you care to answer my question? The one about what it would be called if a mortal wizard spammed meteor strike and killed off everyone in a country and also irreparably damaged the rest of the world in the process.

Anyway, can it be considered just (divine or not) to commit genocide over a thought crime? Because the gods didn't do anything to stop the kingpriest during those many decades he spent gathering his power and killing people in their name, one god made an incredibly half-tuchised attempt to stop him at the very end by sending one emotionally unstable familicide who barely even got halfway there before he turned back, and then the gods only smote the kingpriest after he demanded power--power which, AFAICT, he had no actual way to get. It's not like he was about to complete the last step of the ritual that would grant him ultimate powah!!! and needed to be stopped before the timer hit 0:00. He just said "hey, make me a god so I can do your jobs for you and get rid of evil, 'k?" and they dropped a mountain on him because he was too prideful. Which, as I mentioned, not only killed everyone in the country but also killed tons of people outside the country (were they guilty of something?) and literally broke the map. Then they left the world and took their divine magic, even from people (elves, dwarfs, humans who were still faithful) who hadn't been involved in any of the kingpriest's shenanigans.

Also? I am talking about fantasy religions here. I am not talking about how they compare to real-world religions.

 

[Faolyn]

In the world view of older religion, no mortal, is on par with a God, it's an invalid comparison within the context.

Way to evade the question.

Also, the Dragonlance religion dates from the early 80s. It is not an "older religion." Inspired by one, sure. Actually one, no.