NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 8808433" data-attributes="member: 8461">Well, the original story behind Dragonlance is that Tracy and Laura Hickman came up with the idea while driving to TSR to start working for them. The basic premise was "for a game called 'Dungeons & Dragons,' it doesn't really seem to have many dragons in it." Which, if you look at the published adventures circa 1982, wasn't exactly wrong.The other major "core" of it was that the Hickmans had, prior to that, started their own RPG company (Daystar West Media) because they wanted stronger character development and narrative focus in adventures. They'd seen the vampire encounter in S2 White Plume Mountain and didn't like how it was just a random monster; to their thinking, vampires were all unique characters with notable backstories (my guess is that there was some Anne Rice influence, there) and they even wrote a module called Vampyr, which later became the original I6 Ravenloft. There's a reason why this shift, which caught on wildly, has <a href="https://grognardia.blogspot.com/2008/12/scrappy-doo-and-hickman-revolution.html" target="_blank">been called</a> the <a href="https://muleabides.wordpress.com/2012/03/23/manifesto-of-the-hickman-revolution/" target="_blank">"Hickman Revolution"</a> in <a href="https://www.thedmlair.com/2021/12/21/how-the-hickman-revolution-changed-dd-forever/" target="_blank">so many circles</a> (often by fans who don't care for the shift in focus).So in a real way, the "core" of Dragonlance can indeed be boiled down to "dragons" and "an epic character/story arc." The problem is that pretty much everything in D&D does that now, so it's no longer unique to that setting.</blockquote>

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