Anyone ever play 1E Dragonlance?

[Steel_Wind]

I am running a classic DragonLance camapign now (though heavily modified to remove DL1 and DL2 from the campaign - for the most part).

I use 3.5 rules and use the DLCS and all of the books put out by Sovereieng PRess (for that matter - e-tools data-sets are now available for all of the DL hardcovers as well).

While I did play and run DL under 1st edition - 3.5 is much, much better.

War of the Lance is an amazing book and I highly recommend it.

 

[Ogrork the Mighty]

It does require a lot of work OR a DM who is really good at winging a lot of stuff. But sometimes either of those things can be a good thing.

 

[toberane]

The biggest problem with the Dragonlance modules from a players point of view was also their biggest strength from a "fun to read" point of view. The pregenerated characters were great and well suited for the adventures, but when you hand out characters to the players at the beginning of the modules, the players have always seemed to have less fun. I have attempted to DM these modules countless times in the last 20 years, and the only time it worked was when I ditched the pregenerated characters and let the players roll up their own.

I have actually been working on a version of the campaign where the pregenerated characters are there, but they are in an alternate timeline. Caramon is married to Tika, henpecked and a drunk. Sturm never came back from his trip north. Raistlin mysteriously disappeared during the tests at the Tower of High Sorcery. And so on.

In other words, the original characters are there, and available for use as NPCs, but they have gone a different route in their lives, allowing the new PCs the chance to be the true Heroes of the Lance. This allows the players to feel ownership of their characters and to play them better than anyone ever did when I tried to make them play Tanis, Caramon, Sturm, and Raistlin.

 

[Turanil]

I did play in the first trilogy (1e), but we used our own PCs, not the pregenerated ones. The story looked good to me at that time, although we did play it like just another D&D module.

Later I bought some 2e Dragonlance modules to run them, but overall I didn't like them. It wasn't my kind of adventure, really.

 

[wedgeski]

I've run Dragonlance in all three editions of the game and the portion of the War of the Lance campaign that we ran using Dragonlance Adventures remains to this day my players' favourite D&D 'epoch' - at least with me as a DM.

It was probably due to the fact that it fell in the sweet spot when we were just realising how good roleplaying could actually get and still had tons of time to play it all hours of the day, but I do think that the quality of that original hardback had a lot to do with how much we all enjoyed those adventures. Rules-wise it's a bit of a mixed bag but every page screams Dragonlance in a way that no product since has really succeeded in doing.

It remains my favourite D&D sourcebook to this day.

 

[Whisper72]

Well... I did play (and DM) 1st edition DL, but we ran 'homebrew' adventures off of the DLA book. We never ran the modules. The world itself is a lot of fun, and especially at the time was decidedly 'different'. We had all read the novels (the first three), and usually set our game somewhere in the world away from the main action as fully detailed in the books themselves. The actions described in the novels would basically form the world around us moving along, and as such formed a nice backdrop.

 

[Kylearan]

Played the series and then DM'd them for another bunch of friends. I loved most of the adventures and didn't mind the strict plotline. The campaign has its very own flair (which I liked very much), and DL1 still is my favorite startup adventure for players and DMs alike.

As is already written, the tinker gnome class came later on, and I don't like the Dragonlance Setting made after the original series. It is too ... railroading/strict/cast in stone for my likings. (Well, the people I played with came up with a certain, weird looking grey box and wanted to play in that setting. So we did.)

Kylearan

 

[Eternalknight]

I have DMed campaigns using the original 1st edition modules as well as the 15th anniversarry book, which in my opinion was superior.

 

[Steel_Wind]

Well... I did play (and DM) 1st edition DL, but we ran 'homebrew' adventures off of the DLA book. We never ran the modules. The world itself is a lot of fun, and especially at the time was decidedly 'different'.

In my current campaign - there are no Heroes of the Lance/Legend, as it were. Tanis, Raistlin et al never existed. They aren't PCs and they aren't NPCs either. The world is tabula rasa.

That story is for the PCs to tell in their own way. That frees players from a feeling of predestiny that can otherwise pervade.

I think this is the best way to do DragonLance. For me, DL was a series of modules befroe it was a series of novels.

But for a lot of DragonLance fans, they can't imagine doing that and the novels and the events and characters described in them are too important and too much a part of the setting.

Different strokes, etc..

 

[Cam Banks]

An idea I have wanted to run with for many years is to have the player characters be the also-rans or secondary characters from the modules and novels, the unexpected ones you'd really not imagine going through from the start and defeating Takhisis at the end. The cast of characters would include Hederick, Otik Sandath, Theros Ironfeld, Eben Shatterstone, and even Toede. I'd have the heroes never come back from their five years apart, and the "new" Innfellows would be thrust into the situation instead. Much would, of course, rely on the players feeling confident enough to take some unsavory or even downright villainous or selfish characters and make them heroes. It wouldn't work for everybody, but I would have a blast doing it.

Cheers,
Cam