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.

​

 

[Burnside]

It's very much an adventure, not a setting sourcebook. It does an excellent job of zeroing in on the setting info that you NEED to have to run the adventure without attempting to give you the whole world of Krynn or continent of Ansalon. The setting and backstory info it does provide is succinct, readable, and interesting.

We don't NEED a sourcebook, btw. Players and DMs who ran the original DL1: Dragons of Despair module when it first came out in the 80s did so with only a 30 page book to work from. There was no setting sourcebook until much later.

I think an adventure is a great way to introduce a setting. WotC in 5E has done this very effectively with Curse of Strahd, Tomb of Annihilation, and Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden, and less effectively with other adventures including Waterdeep: Dragon Heist

In keeping with the setting, it's implied that in terms of races, players should pretty much be running humans, elves, dwarves, gnomes, or kender. If players want to run other races (such as tieflings or dragonborn), they can, but some rationale will be needed (like they came through a portal from another world). Dwarves are hill or mountain; gnomes are forest or rock; elves are high, wood, or the sea elf from Mordenkainen's Monsters of the Multiverse. Kender have no sub-races; their mechanics are fine but I don't think anyone is going to be dying to play them for the mechanics alone.

Some other races that have traditionally been playable in Krynn in earlier editions, such as minotaurs, are not mentioned.

I have not encountered any refences so far to gully dwarves, so they may have been wisely omitted.

There are two new backgrounds, Knight of Solamnia and Mage of High Sorcery. Both are well done and it would definitely add to the campaign to have at least one player using each. Both of these backgrounds include a feat.

ALL characters start with a feat at level 1. If you don't have one of the backgrounds with a feat, you get to choose either Skilled or Tough.

Everyone also gets a free feat at level four - there are 4th level feats for the Knight and Mage that have pre-requisites. Barring that, you get to choose from Skilled, Tough, Alert, Mobile, Sentinel, War Caster, or a new feat, Divinely Favored.

In terms of balancing characters vs encounters, theoretically the free feats should lead to an arms race where the adventure has to ramp up all the encounters in order to challenge tougher adventurers.

In practice, however, like most official WotC books, the designers here treat encounter balance as more art than science and largely ignore their own CR system. The result, as usual, is that on the whole the encounters as written are mostly too deadly at levels 1-2, about right at levels 3-4, and mostly too easy thereafter. DM is left to fix it but if you’ve run a few WotC hardcovers you’re used to that by now

The Knight and Mage also get unique Trinket tables to roll on.

The Knight and Mage backgrounds are not really class-gated. It says that most Knights are fighters or paladins, but there are also War Domain clerics and some Valor bards and Zealot barbarians among their ranks. Most Mages of High Sorcery are Wizards, Sorcerers, are Warlocks, but it's implied that there are some Eldritch Knight fighters and Arcane trickster rogues among them.

I haven't compared it with a fine tooth comb, but the new Lunar Sorcerer subclass seems quite similar to the UA version.

Chapter 2 provides a broad overview of the adventure which seems in general to be rather linear except for a sandbox section in chapter 5. It covers levels 1-10, but advancement through levels 1-3 seems VERY rapid. It would actually make more sense to just start everybody at level 2 rather than advancing them after the prologues in which they have to do VERY little.

Chapter 2 also provides a story hook to unite the characters physically in the small town of Vogler in Solamnia. It's the funeral of a mutual friend. I've seen this trope used before to start campaigns, but I'm a big fan of re-using good ideas and it's done well here, with the DM and players collaborating on developing the details of their relationship with the NPC.

They integrated the board game FAR more than I expected they would. There are multiple points throughout the adventure where call-out boxes tell you when you could use it to resolve a battle.

 

[DarkCrisis]

real world religion is against the rules of this website please do not bring it up especially over and over again.

Which is why discussing DL gets one sided because one side is handicapped as a large part of what happens in the lore is based on a real world religions happenings.

 

[Demetrios1453]

Can we talk about the preludes?

Chapter 2 contains three short prelude I-won't-call-them-adventures. These are meant to be played either one-on-one or with only part of the party in each prelude. There are three preludes: one for cleric characters or others who will be drawing their power from Krynn's newly re-emergent old gods; one for aspirant Mages of High Sorcery; and one for Everybody Else.

I LOVE this prelude idea on paper and love the idea of running short one-on-one or small group sessions with each player before bringing the party together.

Unfortunately - and here is where I start to worry about the quality of this adventure - the first two preludes are very lame and uninspired, and the third is just okay. With such high-stakes to work with: the arrival of divine magic, an elite order of mages testing a possible new member, and the appearance of new unknown monsters, the writers here deliver some really banal and uninteresting stuff, which also offers very little for character to actually DO. Each of these is less than an hour long and worth advancing from level 1 to 2 (in the case of the cleric character, you're basically going to level up after watching a 20 minute cut-scene). If I was the editor, I would have sent at least two of these preludes back to the writers with the note "Not cool enough."

Hopefully, the adventure proper starts off strong in Chapter 3. As a DM, I can already say I would keep the IDEA of doing these three preludes, but would heavily re-work at least 2 of them.

Odd, I found them very flavorful and interesting. They very much set up the world, especially for those who know little about it.

 

[Demetrios1453]

I'd prolly spoiler tag both paragraphs in case someone reading this thread may be playing it as a player. I'm considering whether I want to run SotDQ or just pillage the parts I like for a DL1-14 campaign I'm planning with my table.

Agree completely that the character could face a challenge themed around their deity's domain. They don't really need to put much in the book, just reference the section on gods and let DMs figure out the rest. Same with the mage Test really, give 3 challenges with 3 general expected outcomes and build a quick formula to determine which robe you get based on how you handle each challenge. That's how I used to handle it in 2e. I wish I had my old hand-written notes on that stuff.

That's basically done when it come to the actual real test. This is just a pre-test to see if the character has the ability to be considered for that real test down the line.

 

[Burnside]

That's basically done when it come to the actual real test. This is just a pre-test to see if the character has the ability to be considered for that real test down the line.

Don't you think think though that the pre-test, the first scene of the adventure for this player, should be evocative of...something?

Solve the invisible maze thing. There's just no sense of atmosphere, or danger, or something to give a flavor of what this campaign or world is like and why it's different.

I feel like the Mages of High Sorcery, their tests, and the towers should carry an aura of mystery and awe and danger. A lot of players will come out of this like "Mages of High Sorcery? Oh yeah, those people that made me do that annoying maze."

 

[Velderan]

Don't you think think though that the pre-test, the first scene of the adventure for this player, should be evocative of...something?

Solve the invisible maze thing. There's just no sense of atmosphere, or danger, or something to give a flavor of what this campaign or world is like and why it's different.

I feel like the Mages of High Sorcery, their tests, and the towers should carry an aura of mystery and awe and danger. A lot of players will come out of this like "Mages of High Sorcery? Oh yeah, those people that made me do that annoying maze."

Isn't the concept basically?

Spoiler: Minor spoiler

important events are about to go down, there's no time to actually Test

That seems pretty.. lazy? I'd probably rework that and actually just run the Test either as a side session for that player or work it into a group session where the players use of magic is tested as part of a larger event.

 

[ersatzphil]

and in a real world philosophy class or political history class or even in a fun debate about these things that is great... D&D is none of these things. D&D has 9 little boxes and 3 of them are good. they are defined and no organization NEEDs one, but if they are listed to have one they are expected to fit the box. If you can find me a carve out for this in any 5e book let me know.
BECUSE THAT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE GAME I AM BUYING!!! game. game. game.

it also (and this just occured to me) is a breach of the website rules... we don't talk politics or religon and the only reason for @pemerton to bring it up is to break the rules and maybe get the thread locked.
he seems to have a problem seperating real world from the frame work of a game for a fantasy one

Speaking personally as someone who can trace a pretty straight line from "being really into D&D in Highschool in the 90s" to "spending six years in philosophy school in the '00s": D&D raises genuinely interesting philosophical questions.
Is there such a thing as capital G Good?
If there is, does that imply capital E Evil?
If there is, is it Right to fight Evil?
Is there such a thing as a Just War?
These are extremely real questions that philosophers have been talking about for an awfully long time, and the conclusions that they have come to over the years have real relevance and usefulness in playing the game, at least in my mind. Certainly campaign settings take real positions on these questions, and their answers vary from campaign to campaign.

edit: We're all clear that we're not allowed to talk about real-world politics and religion on these boards, but so far as I'm aware, there's no ban on talking about philosophy. Those waters obviously have some pretty muddy edge cases, of course - I legitimately don't know if it's within the rules to talk about the Kingpriest through the lens of Aristotle's models of governance in Politics - but I hope this post is well within the rules.

 

[Burnside]

Isn't the concept basically?

Spoiler: Minor spoiler

important events are about to go down, there's no time to actually Test

That seems pretty.. lazy? I'd probably rework that and actually just run the Test either as a side session for that player or work it into a group session where the players use of magic is tested as part of a larger event.

Nah, the premise is not that there's no time to do the real one. This isn't the real one. It's like if the real Test is the SATs, this one is a PSAT for characters who are getting ready to take the real one down the road a bit.

 

[overgeeked]

Which is why discussing DL gets one sided because one side is handicapped as a large part of what happens in the lore is based on a real world religions happenings.

Exactly. The setting is clearly and obviously based on real world religion with only the thinnest veneer of fantasy D&D religion and alignment thrown over the top.

Speaking personally as someone who can trace a pretty straight line from "being really into D&D in Highschool in the 90s" to "spending six years in philosophy school in the '00s": D&D raises genuinely interesting philosophical questions.

Is there such a thing as capital G Good?
If there is, does that imply capital E Evil?
If there is, is it Right to fight Evil?
Is there such a thing as a Just War?
These are extremely real questions that philosophers have been talking about for an awfully long time, and the conclusions that they have come to over the years have real relevance and usefulness in playing the game, at least in my mind. Certainly campaign settings take real positions on these questions, and their answers vary from campaign to campaign.

Maybe a separate philosophy thread would be in order?

 

[Faolyn]

Speaking personally as someone who can trace a pretty straight line from "being really into D&D in Highschool in the 90s" to "spending six years in philosophy school in the '00s": D&D raises genuinely interesting philosophical questions.
Is there such a thing as capital G Good?
If there is, does that imply capital E Evil?
If there is, is it Right to fight Evil?
Is there such a thing as a Just War?
These are extremely real questions that philosophers have been talking about for an awfully long time, and the conclusions that they have come to over the years have real relevance and usefulness in playing the game, at least in my mind. Certainly campaign settings take real positions on these questions, and their answers vary from campaign to campaign.

In D&D, the answer to all of those things is "yes," because D&D has absolute, objective morality in the form of alignments and the Outer Planes, which are literal exemplars of the alignments. Which means there can in fact be Just Wars in D&D, if the actions of one side are Evil. You can have truly Good and truly Evil people and creatures.

If you actually want to have any sort of realism in the game, though, you can't use alignment, because it leads to people arguing that a creature that is listed as Lawful Good can commit Good genocide.