WotC Dragonlance: Everything You Need For Shadow of the Dragon Queen

WotC has shared a video explaining the Dragonlance setting, and what to expect when it is released in December.

World at War: Introduces war as a genre of play to fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons.

Dragonlance: Introduces the Dragonlance setting with a focus on the War of the Lance and an overview of what players and DMs need to run adventures during this world spanning conflict.

Heroes of War: Provides character creation rules highlighting core elements of the Dragonlance setting, including the kender race and new backgrounds for the Knight of Solamnia and Mage of High Sorcery magic-users. Also introduces the Lunar Sorcery sorcerer subclass with new spells that bind your character to Krynn's three mystical moons and imbues you with lunar magic.

Villains: Pits heroes against the infamous death knight Lord Soth and his army of draconians.

Notes --

• 224 page hardcover adventure
• D&D's setting for war
• Set in eastern Solamnia
• War is represented by context -- it's not goblins attacking the village, but evil forces; refugees, rumours
• You can play anything from D&D - clerics included, although many classic D&D elements have been forgotten
• Introductory scenarios bring you up to speed on the world so no prior research needed

 

[Maxperson]

except do we have any example of action that you would let a 1e or 2e Good aligned character get away with?

Weeeeelll, Krynn happened during 1e and Gygax had some odd notions of what LG allowed.

 

[Veltharis ap Rylix]

My original post merely reflected what I would do at my table if I were running that period piece of DL. And yes, I would do that whether or not WotC includes that sidebar. The only issue is, my reason to purchase the book will depend on
(a) The reviews; and
(b) How much WotC decides to deviate from canon. The abovementioned sidebar would help limit such concern.

For what little my two copper pieces are worth to this discussion, I would actually prefer WotC to be willing to deviate from canon significantly more than they seem to be, based on what previews are available at present.

The more I hear about traditional Dragonlance, the less I want to play in it. While there are certainly things about the settings that look like they could be interesting to me, they are smothered by the themes and assumptions and restrictions that Dragonlance is apparently defined by.

This isn't about orcs specifically for me, but rather a setting that has seemingly been structured in such a way that the effort necessary to make it into a world I would find compelling increasing seems tantamount to building a setting from scratch, if not more, and making the interesting nuggets of material I do find within it functionally useless to me for anything except spare parts to pry out and port elsewhere.

And I find that more than a little disappointing. I get that not every setting has to be for me, but I want WotC to make a version of the setting that works for everyone, or at least as many as possible. As is, it doesn't seem to be doing much on that front, and every sign that they might change something (Kender origins, loosening High Sorcery Alignment requirements) seems to get shouted down until they revert it back to the setting default.

As to the inevitable "just change it for your home game" and/or "just make your own homebrew setting", that fundamentally misses the point. I doubt I would ever use Dragonlance as a primary setting, even if it were tailored more to my liking - I'm pretty happy with Eberron, when it comes to non-planar-focused games. But I also like Planescape, and a big factor in why I like having a wide variety of prebuilt campaign settings on hand is so that I have a wide variety of locales, peoples, ideologies, and plot points to draw upon when putting a plane-hopping storyline together. And yet Krynn seems so inherently "locked down" that anything I might want to do that isn't built into its set of default assumptions (or even some of the things I'd want to do examining those default assumptions) risks causing the setting to fall apart at the seams.

Also, I find it weird to see a take on Alignment that even I, someone who swears by the Great Wheel, find too inflexible... I revel in ambiguity and nuance, and Dragonlance just doesn't seem to allow for that, at least in the aspects of the setting I've been exposed to...

 

[mamba]

the god of krynn is a character you can interact with in a game that has set uses of the words good and evil and the game setting is supposed to be MORE good vs evil so yeah I expect us to understand what the concept of good IS

if you understood that, you would not consider the Kingpriest to be good (we can also reverse that, you know what good is, you know little about the Kingpriest)

 

[RuinousPowers]

imagine being the DM in a 1e game where a LG paladin said "We have to destroy the whole city to be sure we get the bad guys, because the good guy burgomaster is doing too much good."
all the stories of DMs taking away powers and changing alignments ever start with WAY less then that.

Dragonlance is unique in that apparently too much Good or Evil will destroy the world, so the real heroes are the True Neutrals.

 

[mamba]

The more I hear about traditional Dragonlance, the less I want to play in it.

If by this you mean 'the more I read these threads', then I understand Look for information elsewhere, you find none here

 

[RuinousPowers]

if you understood that, you would not consider the Kingpriest to be good (we can also reverse that, you know what good is, you know little about the Kingpriest)

The head god of good called the kingpriest good, so we have to accept that he was good, right?

 

[mamba]

Dragonlance is unique in that apparently too much Good or Evil will destroy the world, so the real heroes are the True Neutrals.

We don't know that, true good has never attempted to conquer the world

 

[mamba]

The head god of good called the kingpriest good, so we have to accept that he was good, right?

The head god of good wiped the Kingpriest off the map, you sure he called him good ?

 

[Vaalingrade]

The head god of good wiped the Kingpriest off the map, you sure he called him good ?

1) Yes. Something to the effect of 'Would you believe the kingpriest as a good man?', which I'm pretty sure was heavily inspired by Gandalf's speech about Gollum, only Gollum is a zealot dictator.

2) Assuming we're finally getting someone to cop to the good gods mercing the Kingpriest, I'm sure we can also cop to the fact that they merced thousands if not millions of innocent people and caused the suffering of countless more up to and including that part where their goth little sis used the aftermath as a means of building up a massive army of heavy metal album covers to try and rule the world.

 

[RuinousPowers]

The head god of good wiped the Kingpriest off the map, you sure he called him good ?

Yes he did, in the original series.

"Fizban scolded, shaking a bony finger at her. "There was a time when good held sway. Do you know when that was? Right before the cataclysm!" "Yes" he continued seeing their astonishment " the king priest of Istar was a good man. Does that surprise you?"