Libertad
Hero
Before I continue, my last post received some good-faith criticism from dave2008, a poster on one of the forums I placed this review. They’re definitely worth covering so I’m including the quote as well as my own explanation and likely errors on my end:
It’s true that Shadow of the Dragon Queen doesn’t explicitly call out Goldmoon by name or mention who was the “first cleric.” In War Cromes to Krynn, the section on Religion and the Gods can be plausibly read a certain way to imply that divine casting isn’t “just returning” but has been around in bits and pieces:
Additionally as I will cover in the adventure itself, divine magic PCs don’t begin play with their spells but “awaken” to them in a religious epiphany. But as Shadow of the Dragon Queen takes place in the vague time of 351 AC where Verminaard is down in Abanasinia, the mention of druids and hidden communities implies a longer-lasting presence than the literal days after Goldmoon’s epiphany where more people become divine spellcasters after hearing about her example.
The book is more vague than explicit on this count like other things, so that’s why my initial reading was that divine magic preceded Goldmoon in the 5e version.
The Tiamat/Takhisis link was something that Margaret Weis didn’t care for, and several sourcebooks often maintained a separation of Dragonlance’s cosmology from D&D. This was particularly so during the 3rd Edition line, where Cam Banks said in a forum post that the Abyss of Krynn wasn’t the Abyss of the Great Wheel. As the end of the War of Souls novels had Takhisis die, which were published during the 3.5 era and Krynn’s Age of Mortals made this canon in their own products, having Tiamat still be alive in other settings was used as a rationale for the separation.
Naturally, the explicit references to five-headed dragons and Paladine’s association with platinum are a clear call to Bahamut and Tiamat of typical D&D cosmology. So TSR, WotC, and Jeff Grubb making the link explicit is an understandable one. I went with the Dragonlance conception by Weis and Hickman in being the foremost authorities on the setting, and as Weis was the publisher for the 3e line of products and had a hand in writing a few of them I went with that designation. Even so, Jeff Grubb also contributed greatly to the evolution of Dragonlance, so I was wrong on this account being a new thing.
Now on with the review!
Chapter 2: Prelude to War
The original Dragons of Despair module began with a party split, where PCs ventured to the village of Solace in smaller individual bands. During that time they’d encounter strange occurrences and people forewarning that all is not well, and Prelude to War follows in Despair’s footsteps.
But before that, the book gives a rundown of what the various chapters cover along with the major villains of the adventure: Kansaldi Fire-Eyes is the Red Dragon Highmaster overseeing the Solamnic invasion. She is on orders from Verminaard to find a hidden weapon under the City of Lost Names. Lord Soth has been tasked with the Dragon Queen herself to help out Kansaldi, but isn’t a member of the Dragon Armies and is more or less allowed to do his own thing. Finally there are the draconians, who have a write-up that I’m not fond of:
With all the talk of revamping the always evil humanoid races such as orcs, this honestly comes off as hypocritical on Wizards of the Coast’s part. Even the Dragonlance sourcebooks and novels subverted the draconians in making them more three-dimensional over time, with a few breaking away from Takhisis and the Dragon Armies due to their poor treatment. This was also “G-level canon” to use Star Wars terminology, as Margaret Weis herself helped write the Doom Brigade which covered one such group of non-evil draconians who decided to build a nation of their own.
I get that an adventure like Shadow of the Dragon Queen wants a straightforward “here are color-coded bad guys to fight without remorse,” but like I said before it speaks to the lack of a consistent vision on the writers’ part.
As for the Preludes, the PCs begin at 1st level, and there are 3 sample ones suited to different character types. What unites the PCs is that they’re all good friends of the now-departed adventurer Ispin Greenshield, and are on the way to his funeral in the Solamnic village of Vogler.
Broken Silence is a Prelude suitable for divine magic-using PCs. They won’t have access to such holy magic and class features until the end of this encounter, which involves detailing the first vision of their deity-to-be. The PC(s) have a bad dream of being the survivor of a massacre in a forest clearing, spotting a glowing amulet held by one of the corpses. While traveling to Vogler their camp is ransacked during the night and tracking down their stolen supplies they find a strange amulet among their belongings that matches the holy symbol of their chosen deity. The surrounding plant life parts in order to lead them to some ruins which hold broken statues of Krynn’s deities. The statue of their patron deity glows as they establish mental communication with them, and how this scene plays out is up to DM Fiat. But in short the deity wants the PC(s) to become their herald in the world.
This Prelude is written as though there’s only one divine spellcaster in the party. I suppose that multiple PCs can participate and get their own medallions of faith and statue-prophecies, but I feel that this would narratively cheapen what should be a unique once-in-a-lifetime encounter.
Eye in the Sky is a Prelude geared for PCs who wish to join the Orders of High Sorcery. It takes place on the Night of the Eye, when all three moons of magic are full and lined in front of each other to look like a giant floating eye. The PC(s) is summoned to an old spire full of extradimensional rooms known as the Barb, where a red-robed mage by the name of Rovina presides over it. After engaging in some small chat, she reveals a test for the would-be mage(s) and leads them to the Hall of Sight. The Hall has a pedestal in the center holding a key and is surrounded by a maze of invisible walls. The key opens up a door on the other end of the room which the PC(s) must open in order to leave and pass the test. Spells such as Detect Magic and Faerie Fire can reveal the magical outlines of the walls, the former spell by their auras. Otherwise an Investigation check is necessary to “feel” one’s way through the maze, and an Arcana check on the wall around the rotunda can reveal a cipher for a one-time casting of the Knock spell as an alternative solution.
The Prelude presumes that the trial is completed and doesn’t detail what happens for characters that end up hopelessly stumped. The adventure does mention that an NPC apprentice can accompany a PC if the DM deems that they need assistance. They use the Acolyte stat block, which is amusing as that NPC casts divine magic and at this point in the story such magic is a unique miraculous event.
Upon completion Rovina will give each PC a scroll with instructions to take it to the wizard Wyhan in the city of Kalaman which is conveniently near Vogler. They’re also instructed to not open the scroll under any circumstances. This last part is a secret test of character which along with the mages’ alignment can eventually determine what Order of High Sorcery they’re inducted into. The contents of the scrolls aren’t detailed if the PC decides to open them up, so I presume that they’re blank; they certainly aren’t Explosive Runes, that’s for sure!
Scales of War is our final Prelude and is suitable for PCs who don’t fit into either of the above Preludes. It’s also the only Prelude which sees actual combat and involves the party coming upon a terrified fleeing commoner whose traveling companions were ambushed by strange cloaked figures. These figures are draconian scouts, one kapak and four baaz to be specific, looking through the dead bodies of the traveling companions who are actually uniformed Solamnic Knights.* The kapak and two of the baaz will attempt to flee so that they can report to their superiors, and all of them are wounded from their fight with half normal hit points. There’s no mention of possible developments for PCs who manage to take a draconian prisoner alive or decide to track down the fleeing ones, which is odd as many future encounters outline what soldiers know and can tell PCs if they’re taken alive (or cast Speak With Dead) to be interrogated.
*Their armor has been rendered useless from the fight so PCs can’t loot them for good armor.
I suppose that now’s a good time to talk about draconians. At this point in the story there are only five varieties of draconians in order of strength: baaz, kapak, bozak, sivak, and aurak. Unlike prior Editions their type is Monstrosity, not Dragon, although thematically they’re pretty much the same. All but the aurak have wings which they can use to avoid a certain amount of fall damage as well as unique death throes.
Baaz are straightforward melee brutes who can multiattack with short swords and have advantage on attack rolls when they can see an allied dragon. Their death throes are different than in previous Editions: while originally they turned to stone and could forcefully embed sharp weapons in their petrified forms, in 5e they impose the restrained condition on adjacent targets and who then can turn to stone for 1 minute if they fail a second Constitution save. I can see this change being made to still be debilitating yet not frustrating in forcing PCs to lose their weapons when fighting hordes of baaz. In prior DL games it was common for characters to have bludgeoning weapons as backup (at least with the groups I gamed with) to get around these death throes. On the other hand, petrification for 1 minute is pretty much a Save or Lose effect, so this still hinders melee characters particularly those without reach weapons.
As for the kapak, they are your sneaky assassin types who fight with daggers coated in their poisonous saliva. They get a bit of buff in 5e, being outright immune to the poisoned condition and poison damage, and their dagger attacks can poison and paralyze a target at the same time for 1 round if they fail a Constitution save. Their death throes remain the same in exploding into a cloud of acid.
There is no real mention on draconian gender in this book; the Dragon Armies could identify the physical sex of dragons before they hatched, so in their rituals in creating draconians they only used the male dragon eggs in order to control their numbers. They hid this from draconians and kept them in the dark, which resulted in a number of them rebelling and taking the rest of the dragon eggs to have greater reproductive freedom once the ruse was discovered. I bring this up as kapak draconians could have healing saliva if they were women, and the book doesn’t mention this at all.
Thoughts So Far: The Preludes are serviceable, although my critical eye can still spot some flaws in their make-up. They aren’t the kind of things that make encounters unbalanced or the adventure unplayable, but it is a throwback to the railroady nature of Dragonlance modules which presume a predetermined course of action without thought as to other likely PC actions.
I had plans to review Chapter 3 tonight as well, although as I don’t know how long that could take I wanted to get out what I could for Chapter 2 tonight.
It’s true that Shadow of the Dragon Queen doesn’t explicitly call out Goldmoon by name or mention who was the “first cleric.” In War Cromes to Krynn, the section on Religion and the Gods can be plausibly read a certain way to imply that divine casting isn’t “just returning” but has been around in bits and pieces:
Additionally as I will cover in the adventure itself, divine magic PCs don’t begin play with their spells but “awaken” to them in a religious epiphany. But as Shadow of the Dragon Queen takes place in the vague time of 351 AC where Verminaard is down in Abanasinia, the mention of druids and hidden communities implies a longer-lasting presence than the literal days after Goldmoon’s epiphany where more people become divine spellcasters after hearing about her example.
The book is more vague than explicit on this count like other things, so that’s why my initial reading was that divine magic preceded Goldmoon in the 5e version.
The Tiamat/Takhisis link was something that Margaret Weis didn’t care for, and several sourcebooks often maintained a separation of Dragonlance’s cosmology from D&D. This was particularly so during the 3rd Edition line, where Cam Banks said in a forum post that the Abyss of Krynn wasn’t the Abyss of the Great Wheel. As the end of the War of Souls novels had Takhisis die, which were published during the 3.5 era and Krynn’s Age of Mortals made this canon in their own products, having Tiamat still be alive in other settings was used as a rationale for the separation.
Naturally, the explicit references to five-headed dragons and Paladine’s association with platinum are a clear call to Bahamut and Tiamat of typical D&D cosmology. So TSR, WotC, and Jeff Grubb making the link explicit is an understandable one. I went with the Dragonlance conception by Weis and Hickman in being the foremost authorities on the setting, and as Weis was the publisher for the 3e line of products and had a hand in writing a few of them I went with that designation. Even so, Jeff Grubb also contributed greatly to the evolution of Dragonlance, so I was wrong on this account being a new thing.
Now on with the review!
Chapter 2: Prelude to War
The original Dragons of Despair module began with a party split, where PCs ventured to the village of Solace in smaller individual bands. During that time they’d encounter strange occurrences and people forewarning that all is not well, and Prelude to War follows in Despair’s footsteps.
But before that, the book gives a rundown of what the various chapters cover along with the major villains of the adventure: Kansaldi Fire-Eyes is the Red Dragon Highmaster overseeing the Solamnic invasion. She is on orders from Verminaard to find a hidden weapon under the City of Lost Names. Lord Soth has been tasked with the Dragon Queen herself to help out Kansaldi, but isn’t a member of the Dragon Armies and is more or less allowed to do his own thing. Finally there are the draconians, who have a write-up that I’m not fond of:
With all the talk of revamping the always evil humanoid races such as orcs, this honestly comes off as hypocritical on Wizards of the Coast’s part. Even the Dragonlance sourcebooks and novels subverted the draconians in making them more three-dimensional over time, with a few breaking away from Takhisis and the Dragon Armies due to their poor treatment. This was also “G-level canon” to use Star Wars terminology, as Margaret Weis herself helped write the Doom Brigade which covered one such group of non-evil draconians who decided to build a nation of their own.
I get that an adventure like Shadow of the Dragon Queen wants a straightforward “here are color-coded bad guys to fight without remorse,” but like I said before it speaks to the lack of a consistent vision on the writers’ part.
As for the Preludes, the PCs begin at 1st level, and there are 3 sample ones suited to different character types. What unites the PCs is that they’re all good friends of the now-departed adventurer Ispin Greenshield, and are on the way to his funeral in the Solamnic village of Vogler.
Broken Silence is a Prelude suitable for divine magic-using PCs. They won’t have access to such holy magic and class features until the end of this encounter, which involves detailing the first vision of their deity-to-be. The PC(s) have a bad dream of being the survivor of a massacre in a forest clearing, spotting a glowing amulet held by one of the corpses. While traveling to Vogler their camp is ransacked during the night and tracking down their stolen supplies they find a strange amulet among their belongings that matches the holy symbol of their chosen deity. The surrounding plant life parts in order to lead them to some ruins which hold broken statues of Krynn’s deities. The statue of their patron deity glows as they establish mental communication with them, and how this scene plays out is up to DM Fiat. But in short the deity wants the PC(s) to become their herald in the world.
This Prelude is written as though there’s only one divine spellcaster in the party. I suppose that multiple PCs can participate and get their own medallions of faith and statue-prophecies, but I feel that this would narratively cheapen what should be a unique once-in-a-lifetime encounter.
Eye in the Sky is a Prelude geared for PCs who wish to join the Orders of High Sorcery. It takes place on the Night of the Eye, when all three moons of magic are full and lined in front of each other to look like a giant floating eye. The PC(s) is summoned to an old spire full of extradimensional rooms known as the Barb, where a red-robed mage by the name of Rovina presides over it. After engaging in some small chat, she reveals a test for the would-be mage(s) and leads them to the Hall of Sight. The Hall has a pedestal in the center holding a key and is surrounded by a maze of invisible walls. The key opens up a door on the other end of the room which the PC(s) must open in order to leave and pass the test. Spells such as Detect Magic and Faerie Fire can reveal the magical outlines of the walls, the former spell by their auras. Otherwise an Investigation check is necessary to “feel” one’s way through the maze, and an Arcana check on the wall around the rotunda can reveal a cipher for a one-time casting of the Knock spell as an alternative solution.
The Prelude presumes that the trial is completed and doesn’t detail what happens for characters that end up hopelessly stumped. The adventure does mention that an NPC apprentice can accompany a PC if the DM deems that they need assistance. They use the Acolyte stat block, which is amusing as that NPC casts divine magic and at this point in the story such magic is a unique miraculous event.
Upon completion Rovina will give each PC a scroll with instructions to take it to the wizard Wyhan in the city of Kalaman which is conveniently near Vogler. They’re also instructed to not open the scroll under any circumstances. This last part is a secret test of character which along with the mages’ alignment can eventually determine what Order of High Sorcery they’re inducted into. The contents of the scrolls aren’t detailed if the PC decides to open them up, so I presume that they’re blank; they certainly aren’t Explosive Runes, that’s for sure!
Scales of War is our final Prelude and is suitable for PCs who don’t fit into either of the above Preludes. It’s also the only Prelude which sees actual combat and involves the party coming upon a terrified fleeing commoner whose traveling companions were ambushed by strange cloaked figures. These figures are draconian scouts, one kapak and four baaz to be specific, looking through the dead bodies of the traveling companions who are actually uniformed Solamnic Knights.* The kapak and two of the baaz will attempt to flee so that they can report to their superiors, and all of them are wounded from their fight with half normal hit points. There’s no mention of possible developments for PCs who manage to take a draconian prisoner alive or decide to track down the fleeing ones, which is odd as many future encounters outline what soldiers know and can tell PCs if they’re taken alive (or cast Speak With Dead) to be interrogated.
*Their armor has been rendered useless from the fight so PCs can’t loot them for good armor.
I suppose that now’s a good time to talk about draconians. At this point in the story there are only five varieties of draconians in order of strength: baaz, kapak, bozak, sivak, and aurak. Unlike prior Editions their type is Monstrosity, not Dragon, although thematically they’re pretty much the same. All but the aurak have wings which they can use to avoid a certain amount of fall damage as well as unique death throes.
Baaz are straightforward melee brutes who can multiattack with short swords and have advantage on attack rolls when they can see an allied dragon. Their death throes are different than in previous Editions: while originally they turned to stone and could forcefully embed sharp weapons in their petrified forms, in 5e they impose the restrained condition on adjacent targets and who then can turn to stone for 1 minute if they fail a second Constitution save. I can see this change being made to still be debilitating yet not frustrating in forcing PCs to lose their weapons when fighting hordes of baaz. In prior DL games it was common for characters to have bludgeoning weapons as backup (at least with the groups I gamed with) to get around these death throes. On the other hand, petrification for 1 minute is pretty much a Save or Lose effect, so this still hinders melee characters particularly those without reach weapons.
As for the kapak, they are your sneaky assassin types who fight with daggers coated in their poisonous saliva. They get a bit of buff in 5e, being outright immune to the poisoned condition and poison damage, and their dagger attacks can poison and paralyze a target at the same time for 1 round if they fail a Constitution save. Their death throes remain the same in exploding into a cloud of acid.
There is no real mention on draconian gender in this book; the Dragon Armies could identify the physical sex of dragons before they hatched, so in their rituals in creating draconians they only used the male dragon eggs in order to control their numbers. They hid this from draconians and kept them in the dark, which resulted in a number of them rebelling and taking the rest of the dragon eggs to have greater reproductive freedom once the ruse was discovered. I bring this up as kapak draconians could have healing saliva if they were women, and the book doesn’t mention this at all.
Thoughts So Far: The Preludes are serviceable, although my critical eye can still spot some flaws in their make-up. They aren’t the kind of things that make encounters unbalanced or the adventure unplayable, but it is a throwback to the railroady nature of Dragonlance modules which presume a predetermined course of action without thought as to other likely PC actions.
I had plans to review Chapter 3 tonight as well, although as I don’t know how long that could take I wanted to get out what I could for Chapter 2 tonight.
