No, the Dragonlance iteration came first, and the Marvel version second, being published two years after Dragonlance: Fifth Age. The SAGA iteration of Marvel should not be confused with the earlier FASERIP version.
I love it and ran several games of it ... but never in Dragonlance. I ran some playtest sessions for the Ravenloft variant that I wrote for DRAGON Magazine, as well as short-lived campaigns based off the Dragon Quest (fka Dragon Warrior) and Final Fantasy 1 video game settings.
Making that promise explicit was half the mistake--the other half was making the changes too obvious. 3E and 5E kept or brought back enough chrome and surface features to disguise the underlying differences until people were already invested in the game. :)
But I think there was a...
Given that this book had a cultural consultant, does it include any notes about the fact that Asmodeus is a demon in a book (Tobit) held as Sacred Scripture by a majority of the world's Christians, and his use and portrayal in D&D may seem inaccurate or misguided to some?
And immediately follows it with "His exact appearance in each race and gender is always the same, however, and is determined by greater powers." RA1 Feast of Goblyns confirms that "Unlike most wolfweres, Harkon Lukas is cursed by the Dark Powers of Ravenloft. Because of this curse, he always...
Ah, but ever since the original setting, it's been stated that while Harkon can choose race (presumably in D&D sense) and gender, his exact appearance in each form is fixed. RA1 Feast of Goblyns even has him resorting to a magical item to get around this.
Well, there is this illustration:
Everything I'm seeing suggests that they're taking out a lot of the elements I liked (classic monster archetypes, the Gothic atmosphere, the moral underpinnings of the setting, the product aesthetics), doubling-down on elements I didn't like (the real-world fortunetelling elements, the...
This arguably reflects the broader change in D&D's philosophy from TSR--"D&D as a way to do all sorts of fantasy adventure stories"--to WotC--"D&D as its own unique genre and multiverse."
I think Hazlik’s sexuality was first floated on the Ravenloft mailing list in the mid-90s by one of the designers, and fans sort of picked it up and ran with it. Sadly, my archives of the list are in a format I can't unpack right now.
I expect this is because it's the traditional date of the Crucifixion, and the Comedy definitely takes place over the Easter Triduum (although Good Friday in 1300 fell on April 8th; Dante wasn't a stickler for details like that, it seems). It's also the date of the Annunciation, since Christ is...
It's entirely possible I was wrong; it was just the impression I got from a brief flip-through. But WotC hasn't produced anything I've really enjoyed for nearly a decade, and everyone in the D&D space seems united in telling me that whatever makes 'real' or 'good' D&D, it's not for me, so I...