Dragonlance Dragonlance "Reimagined".

[Neonchameleon]

This is a misreading of the setting. It's not "too much good". You will not find that anywhere in the actual text of the setting. At no point does anyone claim that the Kingpriest was "too good" and thus had to be put down. The Kingpriest was too LAWFUL.

As has been mentioned his time was explicitly called out as when good held sway.

The problem is, people are equating that with "good vs evil". The setting IS NOT ABOUT GOOD VERSUS EVIL. Again, Takhisis is the Queen of CHAOS. Not evil.

[Citation Needed]

There is a dispute by D&D's various creators whether Takhsis is actually Tiamat (who is Lawful Evil) but I can't track down any source material claiming that she's Chaotic. I don't have her statblock from Dragonlance - but if we look at the Dragonlance Wiki she's definitely Lawful Evil.

This "she's chaotic" fits precisely zero of the official source material I'm familiar with - and the 3.5 Dragonlance campaign book (by Weiss and Perrin with foreword by Hickman) explicitly talked in the opening section about how the setting was a "conflict of good and evil". Meanwhile the 2e Player's Guide to Dragonlance under The Gods of Evil on page 88 explicitly states that "Takhisis is the embodiment of Evil". Not chaos. Evil.

So I'm very curious to see if you can produce any information to back up your claims that Takhsis is the "Queen of CHAOS. Not evil." when the books themselves disagree with you. I agree that if you were to reorient Dragonlance as law vs chaos it might make a more cohesive setting - but that's not the setting we have.

And I forget who suggested that Dragonlance (DL1 Dragons of Despair came out in 1984) came out before the two-axis alignment chart in the 1979 AD&D DMG.

 

[Zardnaar]

Quote please.

And look. I understand that things will be changed in the new book. They SHOULD be changed. There’s tons of cringeworthy stuff there that really needs to be addressed.

I am the last person to stand on tradition. I have zero problems with fae based kender. Heck I think that particular change is an improvement. But if people are going to take big steaming dumps on the setting, at least have the common decency to actually READ the work first.

I'm not a fan of retcons and reimagining. Lack of originality and usually butchers the original work. Reboots as well.

If it's new I don't really care may not be for me and that's perfectly fine. I respect creative vision so altering some else's work is basically the opposite of that.

 

[Zardnaar]

Not taking a side in this one, but the particular Caramon quote is from Autumn Twilight, it doesn't specifically reference genocide though. The context is weird - an argument after Caramon tried to knock out a couple of goblins who spotted the blue crystal staff, and hit them too hard and killed them accidentally. The whole sequence is mostly designed to illustrate that Sturm is stiff-necked and lets his honour get in the way, and pump up Tanis's leadership abilities for smoothing over a potential row within the group.

The context is also war.

 

[Haplo781]

The context is also war.

Caramon doesn't say "doesn't count, we're at war."

He says "it's not murder, they're goblins."

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

And I forget who suggested that Dragonlance (DL1 Dragons of Despair came out in 1984) came out before the two-axis alignment chart in the 1979 AD&D DMG.

That was me. But the 2-axis alignment actually dates back to 1977, with the Dungeons and Dragons Basic Set. So there were 7 years between when the 9 alignments first came out and when the first dragonlance book was written.

 

[Zardnaar]

Caramon doesn't say "doesn't count, we're at war."

He says "it's not murder, they're goblins."

That whole war of the lance thing.

He's it commiting genocide and it doesn't need the the at war qualifier.

If XYZ invades your country and you kill a soldier it doesn't count as murder if you say "doesn't count they're XYZ".

Context, nuance. He's not butchering non combatants.

 

[Faolyn]

This is a misreading of the setting. It's not "too much good". You will not find that anywhere in the actual text of the setting. At no point does anyone claim that the Kingpriest was "too good" and thus had to be put down. The Kingpriest was too LAWFUL. He tried to upset the balance by making everything and everyone follow a single code of behavior. Thus the whole "secret police force" and stamping down hard on any sort of free thought.

The problem is, people are equating that with "good vs evil". The setting IS NOT ABOUT GOOD VERSUS EVIL. Again, Takhisis is the Queen of CHAOS. Not evil.

Almost source I've looked at says Takhisis is Lawful Evil.

Dragonlance Wiki: Lawful Evil.

Dragonlance Adventures--you know, the actual 1e rulebook for DR--says she's LE (Thank you, Internet Archive).

Planescape's On Hallowed Ground says she's LE. And lives in Baator, aka The Nine Hells.

Dragon Annual #4 does list Chaos in her portfolio, but doesn't actually give her an alignment.

Also, if the setting isn't about Good vs. Evil, why are the gods listed as "gods of good/neutrality/evil" and not "gods of law/neutrality/chaos"?

She is Queen of the Abyss remember. That's the whole chaotic place? Where all the demons hang out? She is not Queen of Hell. Hell didn't even EXIST in Krynn for the first quite a while. There were no devils. That got added in later when all the TSR settings had to fall in line with the Great Wheel. But originally, there literally was no Hell in Krynn. The whole Abishai thing came later as well. It wasn't part of the original setting either.

Dragonlance Wiki describes the Abyss as being another name for the Nine Hells, not as being synonymous with the Abyss of D&D.

To be fair, you rarely see demons either. That's kinda the point of the setting. But, this notion of "too much good" is just wrong. The Kingpriest was engaging in genocide. He was wholesale slaughtering all of the "evil" races. THAT'S why the Cataclysm happened.

So in response, the gods also committed genocide?

I'm actually rather curious now. Who is saying that the Kingpriest was good and/or right?

Did he use some golden circlets? Because the DL Wiki says that those circlets were only supposed to be able to used by good-aligned clerics.

 

[Hussar]

Did it? Because the 3x3 Alignment system was introduced before Dragonlance was made. The 9 alignments date back to 1977's Dungeons and Dragons Basic Set, while the Dragonlance setting was made 5 years later in 1982. I don't know when the stuff about the Kingpriests was added, but were good/law and evil/chaos really conflated then?

(I'm sincerely asking, because I'm not familiar with this part of D&D history. If it was, I'd still have problems with Dragonlance listing them as good and saying that too much "good" makes tyranny, but that does explain it a bit.)

Yes, it pretty much did. Lawful Good is continuously held up as the most good good which chaotic evil being the most bad bad.

Never minding OD&D, where there wasn't a 9 point Alignment system, just Lawful Neutral, and Chaotic, which is what the alignment system would have been during the playing of the original modules and also during most of the writing of the first trilogy.

 

[Hussar]

So in response, the gods also committed genocide?

Again, don't take this up with me - take this up with the various writers throughout history that have used this story starting with Plato a few thousand years ago.

 

[Zardnaar]

I think stories like that are the greaterbfoid and renewal via destruction.

On a cosmic scale the fate of individuals don't matter to much.