Dragonlance Dragonlance "Reimagined".

[Mort]

In my opinion, if the history of the world says that the good gods commit acts of genocide and get to still be labeled as "good", then the history deserves to be upended.

From a worldbuilding perspective, Of course the gods that committed the cataclysm would want to be labeled as good. You're always the hero in your own story.

Plus being labeled the "good" gods is much better from a branding PR/recruitment angle. So yeah, those are the "good" gods, after having won the big conflict in the past. So since they won, they're definition sticks.

Now, if you're doing a world hopping campaign with some kind of truly "universal" war between good and evil - things get interesting.

 

[DarkCrisis]

That's not what's happening.

What's happening is that you keep insisting that people are only disagreeing with you because they haven't read the books.

Then when they (like I) say they have read the books, you then insist they haven't read the correct books. And you never tell anyone what these right books are that will magically allow us to have the correct opinion.

What I said was “if you think DL is only about The War then you probably only read the first trilogy.”

If that’s what you think DL is all about, more power to you. WotC agrees.

There are almost 200 DL novels. There is more to it then one war.

That’s all I’m saying.

You can have whatever opinion you want, just as I can. Hurray for differences of opinion. No one’s opinion holds sway over another’s and doesn’t effect our tables at all.

 

[Micah Sweet]

If it were up to me, I'd either get rid of it or heavily retcon it to be out of the hands of the gods. Maybe they could tie it into the Dawn War, and have the Cataclysm be the result of the Primordials/Titans coming back and the cosmic war destroying much of the planet and setting back the magic and technology levels of the world for hundreds of years. Or maybe the Kingpriest caused it directly, through a failed apotheosis ritual or by summoning the evil gods or something like that. Similar to how the Calamity happened in Exandria.

In my opinion, if the history of the world says that the good gods commit acts of genocide and get to still be labeled as "good", then the history deserves to be upended.

WotC can do what they want, but I can't imagine them releasing a version of Dragonlance without the Cataclysm. Seems a bridge too far if you're capitalizing on nostalgia dollars just to gain the dubious benefit of getting rid of the good-evil dynamic a few people on a forum object to.

 

[Faolyn]

People have told me upthread, more than once, that no book not featuring contemporary values can be published today, at least by WotC (who are also the only people who can publish Dragonlance).

No. You have seriously misunderstood what people have said.

But you didn't answer the question: why would you want to publish a book that contains all of the unpleasantness of a book from the early 80s?

 

[DarkCrisis]

WotC can do what they want, but I can't imagine them releasing a version of Dragonlance without the Cataclysm. Seems a bridge too far if you're capitalizing on nostalgia dollars just to gain the dubious benefit of getting rid of the good-evil dynamic a few people on a forum object to.

I think I read it’s being fine tuned to the whole nation the KP (one in a line of KPs) ran was long evil and thus smote.

 

[Mecheon]

WotC can do what they want, but I can't imagine them releasing a version of Dragonlance without the Cataclysm. Seems a bridge too far if you're capitalizing on nostalgia dollars just to gain the dubious benefit of getting rid of the good-evil dynamic a few people on a forum object to.

You can have the Cataclysm you just don't.... Write it as "Person was doing Too Much Good so he got a rock thrown at him"

The fix is easy, simple and enough folks have said it: King Priest cast a spell he thought was gonna make him a god in his goodliness, it instead caused a KT-level extinction event to smack into his city. Gods warned him off the path to not do this, but instead in his hubris he was consumed and caused the disaster

Heck, doing it that way, the whole "People abandoning the gods" part of Dragonlance makes more sense becaues the gods weren't involved in the big rock and its actual "People actually abandoned the gods over something they had nothing to do with" and not "Gods did not explain themselves after making a home-made Chicxulub crater and people wisely decided to not worship the irresponsible things"

 

[Faolyn]

Disagreeing that The War is the thematic core of the setting is gatekeeping? I think you've lost sight of that phrases intended use. Not everyone who disagrees is gatekeeping.

In this case, it really is. You're clearly saying that my opinion doesn't count because I must have only read the first trilogy.

 

[Faolyn]

So how did the Cataclysm happen? Or are you just unending the history of the world entirely?

Possibilities:

1: Make it so that the good gods are not actually Good; they just claim to be, and it's all actually PR.

2: The cause of the Cataclysm was something else entirely, such as an act by evil gods pretending to be the good ones, a side effect of the battles between gods, or the kingpriest the called upon the mountain himself to wipe out his enemies but missed the target (or the mountain was redirected).

3: Because of the Cataclysm, the gods were cut off from Krynn; they didn't just abandon it because on guy and his minions were jerks.

None of these things would "destroy" Dragonlance as a setting, they would all keep the Cataclysm, and they would go a long way to removing some of the negative aspects of the setting.

To go back to the Star Trek examples people were using, in the final episode of TOS, it was stated that women couldn't be captains. They have obviously ignored that horribly sexist take since then, to the point of having a woman (Phillipa Georgiou) be a captain 10 years before TOS took place, but have never given an official explanation for the retcon. And Star Trek is better for having retconned

If the Cataclysm is kept as is, if gully dwarfs and kender and tinker gnomes are kept as is, if the Plainsmen are kept as-is, it would be as if Star Trek continued to not allow women to be captains.

 

[Haplo781]

Possibilities:

1: Make it so that the good gods are not actually Good; they just claim to be, and it's all actually PR.

2: The cause of the Cataclysm was something else entirely, such as an act by evil gods pretending to be the good ones, a side effect of the battles between gods, or the kingpriest the called upon the mountain himself to wipe out his enemies but missed the target (or the mountain was redirected).

3: Because of the Cataclysm, the gods were cut off from Krynn; they didn't just abandon it because on guy and his minions were jerks.

None of these things would "destroy" Dragonlance as a setting, they would all keep the Cataclysm, and they would go a long way to removing some of the negative aspects of the setting.

To go back to the Star Trek examples people were using, in the final episode of TOS, it was stated that women couldn't be captains. They have obviously ignored that horribly sexist take since then, to the point of having a woman (Phillipa Georgiou) be a captain 10 years before TOS took place, but have never given an official explanation for the retcon. And Star Trek is better for having retconned

If the Cataclysm is kept as is, if gully dwarfs and kender and tinker gnomes are kept as is, if the Plainsmen are kept as-is, it would be as if Star Trek continued to not allow women to be captains.

Star Trek is a fantastic example of real life tech overtaking sci-fi BTW. Those knobs and buttons in TOS look positively antique more than 200 years before it's supposed to take place. And let's not even get into the ship's computer using tapes...

 

[Vaalingrade]

Or jut black box it.

No one knows what caused the Cataclysm. Maybe we know the gods feel real bad, maybe that's something the PCs learn on an adventure.

We don't have to talk about the Kingpriest being a jackhole, or the gods going for maximum collateral damage, it's just the apocalypse that we're post and we don't have to talk about it.