Dragonlance: Our LotR?

[Xyanthon]

I read Dragon Lance for the first time when I was around 14 or so in 1986. I was pretty much hooked. I hadn't read Tolkien at the time but had seen the Hobbit cartoon and the Lord of the Rings Cartoon. I had an abiding love of all things fantasy and didn't really ditinguish too much at the time. I read Moorcock and the Elric series before I ever read Dragon Lance and my earliest exposure to any sort of fantasy topics were works of Greek and Norse mythology and the stories of King Arthur and the like. I guess my fantasy leanings are still a mixed bag as far as literary worth goes. Frankly, I don't put much stock in what accademics and critics say has more merit. I enjoy what I enjoy and that is enough for me. DL or LotR, Dante, Petrarch, Sir Thomas Malory, Machiavelli, Cervantes, Moorcock, and many more have brough a lot to my gaming table not to mention feeding my imagination.

 

[mhacdebhandia]

Bashing Tolkien is apparently the New Black(TM).

I was bashing Tolkien before it was cool!

Seriously, though: why shouldn't people who dislike The Lord of the Rings feel comfortable in expressing that opinion?

I don't consider Tolkien's work to be important to what I value in fantasy fiction, except inasmuch as some of the writers I do admire were reacting against his influence in the genre. Why should I not make my opinion known?

 

[Aaron L]

But, worst modules ever? No, that's not fair. There were much worse modules out there.

Oh, I have no doubt their were worse modules out there, but since I despise modules, and the only two I have ever actually tried to play through, without any success with either, were the Dragonlance series (where we got to about the caves underneath Xak Tsaroth or something) and the Temple of Elemental Evil (which is great fun to read, but a horrible nightmare to try to play. The videogame was great, though.)

But as for railroading? I can't imagine any modules being much worse than the DL series. All the others I've ever seen were just dungeons to crawl through.

 

[Ravellion]

All the others I've ever seen were just dungeons to crawl through.

Which is exaclty what made the DL modules so novel. Perfect execution? No. Good idea? Hell yes.

 

[Reynard]

Which is exaclty what made the DL modules so novel. Perfect execution? No. Good idea? Hell yes.

I never actually got to play through the original DL modules. When I rand my first DL game, it was my essentially my first run at fan fiction -- telling a story about after-Legends with my poor players getting dragged through my heckneyed 14 year old plot.

I just pulled my 1E DL hardcover out of the basement and purchased the first collected edition of the original modules from rpgnow. I am curious to see how they read, and even if they are possible to run as a PbP.

Ultimately, though, I want to see if the updated, 3rd edition Chronicles modules, plus the War of the Lance book, make it possible to run a DL campaign where the characters created by the players replace the Companions. Sort of follow the timeline of the war, and visit the places where the important people and things are, but create a unique story and see whether heroes rise or the world ends.

I did find that I have since lost my copies of Chronicles and Legends. Oh, well. I have been looking for an excuse to pick up the "annotated" versions anyway.

 

[Cam Banks]

After that rant? (J/K)

Yeah, I was going to say...

I live in State College, but I'm packing my family up and moving to Wisconsin in a month or two, since Margaret offered me a full-time job with MWP.

I don't believe the original DL modules are any more railroading than some of the newer adventures WotC have released, such as the Eberron adventures. Indeed, the DL modules are known for having multiple options just because the designers didn't want the players to know how the story would turn out having read the novels.

The revised Classic adventures we're producing now (Dragons of Autumn was the first, and I'm working on Dragons of Winter at the moment) use the concept of character archetypes to frame the narrative. The original pregens are included (Tanis, Caramon, etc) and assigned an archetype, but we expect people to create their own characters to fill those archetypes if they don't want to walk in the footsteps of the novel characters.

Cheers,
Cam

 

[DragonLancer]

I don't believe the original DL modules are any more railroading than some of the newer adventures WotC have released, such as the Eberron adventures. Indeed, the DL modules are known for having multiple options just because the designers didn't want the players to know how the story would turn out having read the novels.

IMO it's not the module that is railroading, its the DM who makes his game a railroading exercise.

 

[Hussar]

While this may be me misremembering Cam, but I believe that the original modules more or less assumed that you were going to play the Heroes. I think that, more than anything else, colored people's perceptions. It certainly did mine.

I think you make a pretty decent point though, the modules were very difficult to run. They were a large departure from what had come before for the most part. And, I think that many groups had a bad time simply because DM's (like myself) were not adaptable enough at the time to handle the material.

Although, OTOH, plot protection for characters was a bit much.

 

[Krolik]

Dragonlance taught me about role-playing rather then the roll-playing I had been doing for years. Until Dragonlance I never really saw how stats could influence how you played the character. If you had a low CON then you just didn't get Hit Point bonuses. If you had a high INT you got more spells. If you had a high STR you hit harder. I never thought about a low CON being sickly or a high INT making you frustrated by those around you with lower INT, etc. Dragonlance took me from playing a miniature battle and occasionally speaking in character to looking at the character and write-up as a whole and developing them in a way that was more then just me playing myself.

 

[Mark Hope]

I don't believe the original DL modules are any more railroading than some of the newer adventures WotC have released, such as the Eberron adventures.

QFT. Ghastly railroad, the Eberron adventures. Really awful. The DL adventures are paragons of versatility by comparison.

The new 3.5 versions (judging by Dragons of Autumn) are a real treat - plenty of cool options and lots of extra goodies .