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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aaron L" data-source="post: 3485393" data-attributes="member: 926">I am 31 years old.  I came to gaming in the early 90's through comic books, specifically Chris Claremonts X-Men (still the best things ! have ever read) and the Punisher.  It wasn't until just after I found a group of gamers and begged them to let me play that I finally read LotR.  I wasn't all that impressed, largely because the dense, arcane, and and Byzantine prose made it almost impossible or me to discern what the hell was going on in the story.  It wasn't until after I read supplementary material and bestiaries and the like that I really began too appreciate the world of Midde Earth and the story of LotR.  Reading the Silmarillion made me understand what was going on, and I got more out of the paragraph long summary of the whole of the series than I ever did out of reading the books themselves.  Then I went back and read LotR and was finally able to appreciate it, but I still can't take all the poerty and songs and still skip them whenever I read the books.  LotR made me fall in love with Elves, and I am sill in love with them to this day.        It wasn't for several years that I read the Dragonlance Chronicles, recommended to me by a friend who had come to gaming through them.  Since then I had been exposed to Frank Herbert's Dune, Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, David Eddings Belgariad and Mallorean, and Lovecraft and the general body of Cthulhu Mythos material.  so I was excited about reading the legendary Dragonlance Chronicles.  But when I finally read it I was left totally unimpressed.  It was simplistic, predictable, and juvenile.  The only character I found remotely interesting was Raistlin and his relationship with his brother Caramon.  ALL of the races I found repugnant.  The elves were xenophobic racists, the dwarves were stubborn racist fools causing their own extinction, and the humans were arrogant racists who deserved to be wiped off the planet.  Tinker gnomes, kender, and gully dwarves made me so sick to read about, so annoyed and disgusted that I wanted to rip out every page featuring one of them and burn it.  The fact that the the "absent minded tinker" replaced the 1st Edition gnomish culture and became a standard for gnomes in D&D and elsewhere since then (even frigging EverQuest and World of Warcraft!) still infuriates me to this day, and I strip it out of the race in every game I run.  The way the dwarves treated the gully dwarves reminded me of nothing but Nazis and the way they treated the mentally ill.  Every race but the dragons were vile and unsympathetic, and wanted them to unite and wipe the other races off the face of Krynn.       The whole story made me wish I had never read it.  The modules were even worse, the most horrific railroad of a series of adventures I ever had the misfortune of trying to play through.    The Legends series was much better; better written, better characters portrayals, better everything.  I actually still have a copy and read it every so often.  But you couldn't pay me to read the Chronicles again.    As for Dragonlance being the LotR of a generation of gamers?  I'm afraid I agree with that.  Very unfortunately.  Now everyone expects gnomes to be tinkers, kender to be allowed as a playable race, no matter what world the game is set on, and minotaurs to be a playable race.  I wish the books had never been written to taint fantasy with it's ideas.     Well, there's my take on it.  In my present state of mind it probably comes off a lot harsher than I'd normally put it, but it's still truly what I think.I'm sorry about that for all the people that love Dragonlance.And Cam Banks, I've always wanted to ask you: just where in central PA do you live, exactly?</blockquote>

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