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Message: <blockquote data-quote="teitan" data-source="post: 2011228" data-attributes="member: 3457">I must first establish that I have been a big fan of Dragonlance dating back 15+ years having discovered the world of Krynn through the first novel in the Chronicles in my 7th grade year. I was one of the few apparently that was enamoured of Tasslehoff Burrfoot. My discovery of Dragonlance led to my eventual discovery of Dungeons & Dragons and the rest is geek history.It was with great anticipation that I awaited the arrival of the 3E version od Dragonlance, mixed anticipation I should say, because Dragonlance GAMING products have a history of being very hit or miss and never fall in the mediocre range, with most scaling towards the lower end of the dung heap. As a comparison Dragonlance Adventures was an excellent product with high quality artwork and very flavourful text that captured the epic proportions of the novels, whereas the Tales of the Lance boxed set was a bitter pill riddled with errors (Great Wall of CHina anybody?) and recycled artwork, this during a time when Dark Sun, Ravenloft and the Forgotten Realms were featuring artwork by Brom, Easley, Baxa, Parkinson and company. Dragonlance officially became the red headed step child of TSR's fantasy world with Greyhawk being the monster in the basement ala Sloth in The Goonies.Dragonlance was tossed around, blown up, revived as a different gaming system and then reduced to novels, where the property has been most successful overall.Then the Powers That Be announced they were going to release a 3.5 edition of this most beloved setting of so many fanboys and I was one of the first in line until I saw a copy. I know all the arguements for the increasing prices in gaming products, I have seen them in various forums etc but this was a travesty. A full fourth of the page is taken up by a rather distracting brown coloured border and the font size is twice that of the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting, another 40 dollar book. To top it off the page count was around 40 pages less than the FRCS and with the bigger font gives the impression the font was expanded in order to increase the page count on the product to better justify the higher price. DOn't get me wrong, I still wanted the book but it remained just out of my reach, like Rebecca Romijn or Eliza Dushku. And the price is why I thank god everyday for Ebay.Recently I was able to purchase the Dragonlance Campaign Setting and read it voraciously. The book is a nice hardbound book of 288 pages but unfortunatly didn't include a bound in map let alone a map of the whole continent. There are regional maps but it is hard to place them within context of one another unless you have a working knowledge of the continent of Ansalon and how the pieces fit together. To make matters worse the maps are not even in the same scale. Overall though, the smaller maps are of the same quality as the map bound into the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting and provides enough information that you can work off of until a better map (WOTC provides oneas a Web Enhancement on their website) comes along. The material is written in a nice, easy to read style and the the bigger font is much easier on my eyes than the FRCS or Mutants & Masterminds fonts. The text style is very conversational, something most gaming products fail to accomplish except for the high end products like those released by WOTC, Green Ronin and a few others. There are weak spots though. SOme sections could have been a bit beefier, especially the geography section, which almost falls shorrt of providing enough detail to give aspiring DM's an idea of what the region is all about. This is a very skimpy section when compared to other books of this type, ridiculously so. The book fails to provide enough detail for a setting which relies so heavily on canon provided by novels and by using a smaller font they could have provided much more detail, at least enough for a serious campaign that doesn't start in Solace. What we get is similar in presentation to the method used in the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer but with far less detail, especially considering the amount of detail that Dragonlance has received through various novels and a plethora of gaming materials when compared to Greyhawk, which has had sparse data shared on its world by design. There is just enough material for a DM to develop a campaign, but the little bit of data provided is a real shame. I don't want you to think I am getting down on the setting though, this is some valid and worthy gaming material and were this an initial game setting release instead of a revision it would rate much higher on my charts, as is I give it 3.5 out of 5 stars in the Geography department.Gaming material wise, this is a very nice sourcebook. Each major race of the Dragonlance campaign is presented in a playable manner while maintaining the important flavour of Dragonlance. All the races are given suitable space, comparable to the Player's Handbook for the new ones and enough flavour data for the PHB races. I am not a big fan of playable centaurs or the Irda as a PC race, but applaud the design sense provided by the design team and the sense of balance they provide for the races of various power levels. I especially liked the Draconian races and how they were made playable and the feats created for them to make them more unique and interesting to PCs.Classes is also a very well done section, but has its problems. First off, the Wizards of High Sorcery are required to specialize according to this book, imply that is you want to be a general wizard you have to play a renegade... who are hunted and either converted to the order or destroyed, which doesn't provide a lot of options to the players interested in playing a Wizard in the Dragonlance setting. I understand there is a sidebar in Age of Mortals that allows for players to play generalist wizards, but for a group just playing using the DLCS, this really restricts the players in their design choices. A major faux pas. The Noble class is almost straight out of the excellent Star Wars Roleplaying game and features little modification to its core abilities. The Knights of Solamnia are an icon of the setting as much as the Wizards of High Sorcery but thankfully the same types of criticisms can be placed on the design of the fabled Knights. One aspect that generally upsets me is the lack of the historical flavour text describing the founding of the Knighthood and the journey of Vinas Solamnus, their founder, that was available in the Dragonlance Adventures hardcover of the 80s. This piece was a moving and inspiring piece of prose that really helped me to envision the knighthood and its principles and considering the low page count in comparison to the FRCS and the large typeface is inexcusable.Dragonriders is an intriguing prestige class that some people have called into question as being balanced but are such an integral part of the Dragonlance world that to not include them would be a crime, kind of like not including Elminster in the core Forgotten Realms sourcebook or mentioning Vecna at least once in the LGG. On the opposite side of the Knightly coin we are presented with the Knights of Neraka. The KN are probably some of the coolest anti-heroes ever produced for a novel or campaign setting, yes they wholly evil, yes they want to dominate the world, but the honour of their Order and the desire to keep the world to themselves makes them like unto Dr. Doom, occasionally powerful allies to the forces of good, no matter how selfish their goals. The prestige classes provided for the KN are pretty standard but maintain the necessary flavour of "honorable evil" that such a class would need in order to work in the setting.The chapter on magic is excellently done, explaining the influence of the three moons on High Sorcery and contrasting it with primal sorcery of the Sorceror class. A similar comparison is made with the divine casters like Clerics and the new Mystic class, a sort of divine sorceror type, similarly nerfed like the Sorceror is nerfed to hades and back when compared to a Wizard. The dissertation on the effects of the moon on the three orders is clearer than previous versions and the mechanics of determining the position of the moons are two: You can either determine it at the beginning of the campaign and keep strict track of time by moving the counter on the provided chart one space or you can do it randomly when a PC asks for the precise alignment of these heavenly bodies. The effects provide a nice bonus to arcane spell casters especially specialist wizards and the penalties which were once harsh are softened by the specialist requirements of the core Dragonlance book.Deities are given proper development, providing enough information on the deity and their teaching that a beginning Dragonlance DM can work them into their campaign with little effort in believable manners. The space given is comparable to the Forgotten Realms deities, though the world of Krynn possesses fewer deities. Each deity's persona shines through in the writing and their symbols are clear and easy to determine who they belong to even without the captions provided.Some other highlights include: an XP system that emphasizes roleplaying over hack and slash, some interesting adventures and some great monsters like the Krynnish Death Knight. Now... I think something does need to be addressed regarding the artwork that WOTC provided for the book. It is very inconsistent quality wise with only a few standout pieces. The majority of the illustrations are borderline adequate and a few standout as horrid, like the illustration of Skullcap, which is anything but creepy and more murky and hard to read. The artwork is handled very poorly. The section on dragons is the most inconsistent as it will feature some really excellent pieces, the Red, Black and White dragon while others look like they were drawn by talented children. The image of Dalamar looks like it came straight out of Flash Gordon as opposed to Dragonlance and the image of Huma looks very elementary in execution. The styles vary heavily as well, from classical fantasy illustration to Warhammer like illustrations for the two orders of Knights, and even then they seem a little choppy.I do want to address some other issues of the Dragonlance Campaign Setting as a whole as opposed to just this product. Dragonlance is a rich and vibrant world that lends itself to the operatic works of Wagner, very Germanic in its feel and approach and this is a good thing. It is a world well developed by various authors for WOTC and TSR and that as well is a good thing. The thing is that Dragonlance, unlike the Forgotten Realms, lends itself to a more restrictive gamestyle in order to maintain its flavour. Dragonlance is just as much known for what it excludes as opposed to what it includes. I am not knocking the legend here, that would be like knocking Ric Flair for being an old school wrestler in an age of high flying luchadores, just shouldn't be done because they are two different classes. Dragonlance is open to myriad adventures and ideas, but the restrictions limit you in how you can execute them in order to maintain the precious and essential flavour of a Dragonlance campaign. Dragonlance has similar pitfalls to Second Edition Realms products and the world of J.R.R. Tolkien in that the biggest stories are told elsewhere while your PCs are doing the grunt work on the side. The world is also prone to dramatic upheavels and the stories are more often told in novels as opposed to home campaigns, unless you use THEIR NPCs. This is a big drawback to the setting, sadly as it is the flavour that makes Dragonlance what it is, it is what they exclude that makes Dragonlance unique and special, in the same way that what the Realms include is what makes the Realms special.I have compared this book to the Forgotten Realms quite a bit and with reason. The FRCS is probably the highwater mark of campaign setting design and presentation and this book strive for a similar quality, in placed achieving it and in other places failing to achieve that excellence of execution. I am not touting the Realms as a superior setting, but a superior presentation of product identity. The DLCS succeeds overall and is a great gaming product, but fails to seperate itself from the rest of the pack in the same way. In some ways, I think that maybe Dragonlance has lost some of its sheen and this book helped to bring a lot of that gloss back in spite of its drawbacks.If you like to run high adventure and epic (not epic level) adventures, if you love Dragonlance like I did when I was a kid, then this book is for you. If you think Dragonlance if ok or like a more open ended campaign that you have more control over, this book probably isn't for you.</blockquote>

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