The campaign frames do have alterations on certain ancestries. Age of Umbra Ribbets (the frog people) are much larger and more bestial looking for example.
I would note they did say they had other announcements in the tank, they just were put on the back burner as a result of the fires in LA affecting crew and production.
Unfortunately Sam Riegel is not one who would deign to have enjoyed fantasy in his youth. To my recollection it was mostly Liam O'Brien, Laura Bailey, and Matt Mercer who explicitly mentioned picking up Dragonlance book.
The Vox Machina campaign started as a home game and the first two episodes are loosely based off of events that happened late in those games. Based on the fact that the stream started at level 9 I would guess they were level 7 for that dragon.
“Meleys was as swift a dragon as Westeros had ever seen, easily outpacing Caraxes and Vhagar”
from Fire & Blood and dated around 54 years before this battle
Really I think the main difference between C3 and C1 (C2 was much more sandboxy and wandering) is that there was a connection between all the little "save the town" early quests and the big main issue. Those little quests still happened