Dragonlance Dragonlance "Reimagined".

[pemerton]

Looking at my copy of Dragonlance Adventures (December, 1987):

p 9 sets out "The Law of Consequence: This final law was given by the High God himself to rule over all other laws. For every law and rule that is obeyed there is a reward and blessing; for every law transgressed there is a punishment. Blessings and punishments may not come about immediately, but they occur eventually."

p 14 tells us that "The Kingpriest of Istar brought down the wrath of the gods upon Krynn, and the gods punished the people for their pride by casting a fiery mountain down on the land. The destruction and desolation caused by the disaster disrupted the world for months."

p 15 describes the role played by Lord Soth, who "had, in fact, been warned by his elven wife of the calamity that was coming. . . . When warned of the impending doom of the world, Lord Soth rode forth with his loyal Knights behind him. Yet waiting for him along the way was a troop of elven clerical women who stopped him. They knew of is dark deeds and persuaded Soth to turn back in exchange for their silence. Soth turned back and the Cataclysm took place."

p 39 explains that "the gods take an active and impassioned interest in Krynn" but "mainly allow the course of man's destiny to be shaped by the free will of mankind. The gods prefer to let their will and strength be felt through their agents rather than through direct intervention. There are, however, several notable occasions in which the gods took a direct hand in the course of the world of Krynn."

One of these occasions is "The Night of Doom: No records have ever been found concerning this night, for all who participated in it are now far removed from the knowledge of mortal man. On this night, thirteen days prior to the Cataclysm that ended the Age of Might, the true clerics of the land all disappeared. Legends have it, however, that they were taken up by the gods to protect them from the calamity that was to come. . . . Only clerics of pure faith and good heart were taken. There were few who qualified."

Surpsrisingly, the Cataclysm doesn't appear in this list

p 43 says that "During the tie of the Cataclysm, [Paladine] and his fellows withdrew their direct influence from the world and caused the Cataclysm. . . for 60 days after the Cataclysm, Paladine's tears filled the night sky with their brilliance."

p 101 further describes the Cataclysm: "The wrath of the gods descends upon Krynn. The Thirteen Warnings strike, one per day, preceding the end of the year. Trees weep blood, fires die or rage uncontrolled, and cyclones strike the Temple of the Kingpriest. On the thirteenth day, mountains of fire fall from the skies, ravaging the landscape. . . The Temple of the Kingpriest is shattered with the destruction of Istar, its pieces scattered throughout the planes of the universe. . . . the Foundation Stone of the Temple comes to rest in the Abyss, and is discovered by Takhisis, the Queen of Darkness."​

This all seems fairly consistent, except perhaps the failure to list the Cataclysm as a notable occasion of direct divine interference in the world. The Kingpriest committed a heinous sin of pride, and led his followers with him into this error. The Law of Consequence demanded a response, and divine warnings that it was coming were ignored. Thus the gods meted out the punishment due, even though - for the good gods, at least - it hurt them to do so (thus Paladine's tears).

Not everyone necessarily shares the moral outlook within which this all makes sense, but to me it seems a pretty familiar one. Playing a conventional Dragonlance campaign means buying into it for the purposes of play, just like - when we play FR (with Cormyr) or GH (with Furyondy) or Pendragon (with Arthur) we buy into the notion that feudal kingdoms can be just lands ruled by righteous paladins.

 

[pemerton]

@Faolyn, I don't really see the point of trying to make sense of Krynn or Middle Earth as if a humanist/enlightenment morality is true within those worlds. It would be like arguing - on pacifist/anti-militarist grounds - that the Knights of Solamnia must really be evil, because they accept the permissibility of the use of lethal violence in pursuit of their ends.

A romantic fantasy world like Krynn or Middle Earth or Arthurian Britain only makes sense if we suppose, when we imagine ourselves into the world, that the use of lethal violence - and frankly the rather casual use of lethal violence - is compatible with being good. Likewise they only make sense if we suppose, when we imagine ourselves into the world, that a whole people can make itself the legitimate target of retributive punishment in virtue of committing the sin of pride - as seen in the downfall of Numenor, and the downfall of Istar.

For those who prefer not to make those imaginative adjustments - who want their RPG worlds to conform to their real-world humanist/enlightenment outlook - then Krynn and Middle Earth and Arthurian Britain and FR with its knights of Cormyr and GH with its paladin king of Furyondy are already ruled out-of-bounds. They will need something like REH's Hyboria or Elric's Young Kingdoms.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Not everyone necessarily shares the moral outlook within which this all makes sense, but to me it seems a pretty familiar one. Playing a conventional Dragonlance campaign means buying into it for the purposes of play, just like - when we play FR (with Cormyr) or GH (with Furyondy) or Pendragon (with Arthur) we buy into the notion that feudal kingdoms can be just lands ruled by righteous paladins.

here is the thing... I can imagine a kingdom ruled by a LG or NG character. I can imagine (way easier) a kingdom ruled by a neutral aligned with good tendencies ruler that has done some bad but pragmatic things.

What I can't do is imagine a LG or NG character ruling and doing lots of evil thing (although pragmatic/necessary) and still be good.

It goes back to an argument I had with a player many many years ago. He wanted to play a LG paladin (in an edition where that was the only option) based on a mix of batman and punisher... so he gave me this backstory about a dead family and how he went on a revenge scheme and killed all the people who did it... I said "I can understand anyone breaking, but that story is the story of a paladin falling" when he insisted his god of justice would have been on his side and that he should still have his paladinhood. I was willing to let him start with his powers if he sought atonement... but he insisted that there was no atonement needed.

 

[pemerton]

here is the thing... I can imagine a kingdom ruled by a LG or NG character.

Well I can, too, if I check all my knowledge of history and sociology at the door and buy into the Arthurian legend, or the Mandate of Heaven.

But an actual feudal kingdom is based around inherited hierarchies, unfree labour, and government by a military caste whose whole reason for being is the use of lethal violence in pursuit of political ends.

There are moral outlooks that can make sense of all that. But those outlooks also have ample room for collective divine punishment in response to being a land of sinners!

What I can't do is imagine a LG or NG character ruling and doing lots of evil thing (although pragmatic/necessary) and still be good.

In the outlook of DL, inflicting just punishment is not evil. It might be tragic, even horrible - see Paladine's tears - but it's not wicked.

These moral frameworks aren't mysterious ones: I mean, besides the classics like King Arthur and JRRT, there are modern variants like the whole MCU canon!

 

[Faolyn]

@Faolyn, I don't really see the point of trying to make sense of Krynn or Middle Earth as if a humanist/enlightenment morality is true within those worlds. It would be like arguing - on pacifist/anti-militarist grounds - that the Knights of Solamnia must really be evil, because they accept the permissibility of the use of lethal violence in pursuit of their ends.

A romantic fantasy world like Krynn or Middle Earth or Arthurian Britain only makes sense if we suppose, when we imagine ourselves into the world, that the use of lethal violence - and frankly the rather casual use of lethal violence - is compatible with being good. Likewise they only make sense if we suppose, when we imagine ourselves into the world, that a whole people can make itself the legitimate target of retributive punishment in virtue of committing the sin of pride - as seen in the downfall of Numenor, and the downfall of Istar.

For those who prefer not to make those imaginative adjustments - who want their RPG worlds to conform to their real-world humanist/enlightenment outlook - then Krynn and Middle Earth and Arthurian Britain and FR with its knights of Cormyr and GH with its paladin king of Furyondy are already ruled out-of-bounds. They will need something like REH's Hyboria or Elric's Young Kingdoms.

Sure, this is all true. But we're also supposed to accept that these gods have always been considered both morally and cosmically Good despite performing acts that are pretty evil. If these gods were just lower-case good, then it would be OK. They'd be jerks IMO, but hey, they're not paragons of Goodness. That is my problem here.

About the Knights of Solamnia. Do they seek out evildoers to stop? Because this is a good act, or at least as good as one can expect in this sort of setting (I'm not requiring a Medieval Fantasy setting to have "no lethal force, take them alive, read them their rights, rehabilitate them properly, because that would be silly). Or do the Knights go around slaughtering innocents? Because that's not good. And the supposedly cosmically and morally Good gods did just that--unless that mountain was really precise in who got smooshed under it.

When the setting has always had a single deity of disease, is there any distinction between "natural" diseases and those made by said god (even if he doesn't spread them himself)?

Presumably diseases continued when Morgion went away, so yes.

The "lose their powers" bit is presumptive. Crysania was still able to use her divine magic after turning Loralon down, including after being brought a century into the future (which was still the past to her, just not as far back).

Fair enough.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Because Krynn is a campaign setting, not mythology.

Its a created mythology. I don't see how that's relevant.

 

[Micah Sweet]

What does feudal government have to do with free will? People don't choose to be peasants subjected to compulsory labour!

But anyway, as per my post upthread, I don't think the act/omission distinction carries much weight in the context of gods. If they're evil for killing people via the Cataclysm, then they're evil for not using their huge magical power to relieve all sort of suffering that they could trivially relieve. Conversely, if we make up reasons why they can't do the latter - rules about non-intervention, or rules about respecting mortal choices - then we can make up reasons why the former is not murder - rules about the necessity for punishment, and about respecting choices to do bad by inflicting appropriate retribution.

The Kingpriest + Cataclysm motif sits in the same general place as JRRT's downfall of Numenor. Both are about divine punishment for mortal hubris. Both involve punishment on a mass scale - whole lands sunk, destroyed, etc - because that is the literary device that conveys the point. Looking at these through a modern lens, in which collective punishment is eschewed and each individual life lost to the punishment is a wrong, makes no sense.

And, conversely, if that modern lens is going to be applied, then many of the tropes of high/romantic fantasy come unstuck.

Ultimately, it's like arguing that Storm is evil because she squanders her power fighting Magneto and Doom rather than relieving mass suffering. I mean sure, you can make the argument - Watchmen does - but then you're arguing to drop the superhero genre.

But if we drop the high/romantic fantasy genre then I'm not sure that there's much left of DL.

Thank you for finding a way to voice my concerns.

 

[pemerton]

Sure, this is all true. But we're also supposed to accept that these gods have always been considered both morally and cosmically Good despite performing acts that are pretty evil. If these gods were just lower-case good, then it would be OK. They'd be jerks IMO, but hey, they're not paragons of Goodness. That is my problem here.

The whole of the Superman canon makes sense only if Superman is a paragon of goodness - of truth, justice and the American way! Yet he has never stopped mass poverty, mass starvation, mass conflict, or many of the other affronts to truth and justice that are found in the real world and that are replicated in Superman comics and films.

We suspend our ordinary moral judgement when we watch a superhero film, or read a superhero comic, and instead step into the moral world that makes sense of supers - where stopping Luthor, or Magneto, or Doom, or whomever is of higher moral weight than reliving the real causes of real human suffering.

There are moral and political critiques of the superhero genre that build on the point I've just made - again, Watchmen is one of them produced in the same medium as the genre itself - but if you take those critiques fully on board you have to abandon the genre, casting it aside as romantic or reactionary nonsense.

The same thing is true of JRRT. We are meant to suppose, in enjoying Return of the King, that Aragorn re-establishing himself as king is a moment of great moral triumph; not that it is the perpetuation of a system of human misery and oppression. Likewise in Arthurian stories;, in those versions of Robin Hood in which Robin is an exiled nobleman allied with King Richard; etc.

There are criticism of this genre which think it is so irredeemably tainted, as reactionary ideology, that one shouldn't even enjoy it in imagination. When we play our FRPGs with righteous paladin rulers, and contented peasants in their rightful place, we are implicitly rejecting those criticisms. It doesn't mean, though, that we think that divine right of kings is a genuine political principle. We're just pretending!

And the same with DL, just as with JRRT's downfall of Numenor. We use our imagination to step into a world where a people's hubris is a grave sin; where righteous punishment is what the Law of Consequence demands. In using our imaginations that way, we're not endorsing the imagined moral outlook any more than we do so when enjoying a King Arthur story, or a superhero story.

(Of course, there are real people in the real world who don't need to use their imaginations to step into the moral outlook of DL, because it is one they actually inhabit. This is what I mean when I say that the moral outlook of DL is an extremely familiar one.)

About the Knights of Solamnia. Do they seek out evildoers to stop? Because this is a good act, or at least as good as one can expect in this sort of setting (I'm not requiring a Medieval Fantasy setting to have "no lethal force, take them alive, read them their rights, rehabilitate them properly, because that would be silly).

I don't know what you mean by "as good as one can expect". Someone who is a sincere pacifist or anti-militarist would expect the knights of Solamnia, in so far as they are genuinely good, to eschew the use of lethal violence - for instance, as various real-world religious figures in multiple traditions have done from time to time.

But the setting invites us to imagine that heroic, valiant knighthood is a moral possibility - even a moral ideal! And so when we step into the setting in our imagination we do that. It doesn't mean that we embrace this ideal in reality. We are participating in an exercise in imagination, that draws on a very well known literary and folk tradition.

Exactly the same is the case with the Cataclysm.

do the Knights go around slaughtering innocents? Because that's not good. And the supposedly cosmically and morally Good gods did just that--unless that mountain was really precise in who got smooshed under it.

The whole point of the Cataclysm motif is that those who suffer deserve the punishment. I quoted the bits of text upthread that refers to the gods punishing the people. In the fiction, it's a collective punishment for a collective sin of pride.

Of course we can imagine that theologians in Krynn debate how a baby, newly-born on the morning of the Cataclysm, warranted the punishment they suffered. Some of them might also ask how it is just for a Knight of Solamnia to kill an enemy and thus ruin the livelihood of that enemy's innocent spouse and children. Or even how it is just for a Knight of Solamnia to spend a fortune upkeeping arms, armour, steed, castle etc while the ordinary people live in poverty. In the real world, theologians and moral philosophers and policy makers come up with answers to these questions that satisfy some of the questioners at least some of the time. Maybe our thinkers of Krynn do the same. But the more we imagine these sorts of questions being asked, and the harder we press them, the closer we are coming to imagining our way out of the genre altogether.

Likewise, a Superman comic in which Luthor buys column inches in the Daily Planet to place an ad mocking Superman for not stopping any number of epidemics, wars, famines, etc, would be a Superman comic that is coming close to dismantling the superhero genre from within.

These genres rest on certain conceits. You have to accept those conceits for the imaginative projection to work at all.

 

[Hussar]

Another way of putting it.

Is Batman evil for not stopping the Joker permanently? For not killing the Joker? How many hundreds, if not thousands, of people are dead because Batman refuses to kill the Joker. Is Batman evil? After all, he doesn't do "everything he can do" to stop the Joker. He most certainly could have killed the Joker, or even allowed the Joker to be killed, numerous times.

Yet, people will insist over and over again that Batman is good.

 

[Vaalingrade]

The whole of the Superman canon makes sense only if Superman is a paragon of goodness - of truth, justice and the American way! Yet he has never stopped mass poverty, mass starvation, mass conflict, or many of the other affronts to truth and justice that are found in the real world and that are replicated in Superman comics and films.

This is where a lot of people fail to understand the point of Superman and the archetype of the Paragon.

Clark isn't the ultimate, infallible Good. He would never claim to be. He is a good (little g) man who has the values of his parents and who will do anything in his power to hold to that.

However.

While Superman knows he could cause world peace and end starvation and war and car accidents... he also knows that the only way he could do it would be to remove free will from humanity and become Supreme or Ultraman or all the other 'beware the superman' characters out there.

Mass poverty and crime and starvation and war are all a result of humans just plain interacting with one another.

We are a vastly flawed species. Let's say Supes goes out right now and creates a post-scarcity society. Do you really believe that we won't come up with a way to make sure there's still somehow have and have nots? If he throws all our nukes into space, do you think we don't pick up heavy sticks?

The only way to stop human ills is to stop humans.

So basically, Superman is constantly making the correct choice not to murder just a ton of people and taking away the agency of all the others for the percieved greater good, as opposed to the choice the Kyrnnish gods who chose to do that.