Dragonlance Dragonlance Shadow of the Dragon Queen shows up in the wild!

[Reynard]

OK so something that bugs me a little bit about the premise of not just this adventure but the beginning of the War of the Lance in general is that, despite international trade continuing as normal in places like Kalaman, the existence of the Dragon Armies and their conquest of eastern Ansalon is still mere rumor.

Shouldn’t there either be merchants (and maybe even refugees) bringing tales of the Dragon Armies and their conquests? Or perhaps there are suddenly no more merchants or travelers from the east – but no one seems to wonder why.

It’s just always struck me as somewhat unbelievable that the Dragon Armies are essentially able to take all of western Ansalon by surprise – especially when you consider how small Ansalon is.

It's almost as if the original authors and designers were just using tropes to tell a particular kind of genre story and weren't over concerned with realism or even verisimilitude.


Many of us have very fond memories of Dragonlance because of when it came out [or when we discovered it. And it was very popular. But neither of those facts should be confused with the idea that it actually good in a literary sense. It wasn't. It's a pastiche of Tolkien through a D&D and Mormon lens and relies heavily on cliche. I loved it but we shouldn't ask too much of it.

 

[Reynard]

You seem to be vastly underestimating his statblock.

The Level 11 party has very little chance of beating him.

I'm tempted to run the combat a few times just to see. Is it out for Fantasy Grounds yet?

 

[GMforPowergamers]

TBF rogue one wasn't main cast of heroes being slaughtered... it was redshirts.

If vader walked in on rey fin luke leia han and jarjar he would not have done what he did...

so Soth can totaly do the hallway scene agains 10 knights or 30 guards or god forbid 100 commoners no issue... but no not against 11th level party (not that he might not win, but it wont be that curb stomp)

 

[Micah Sweet]

You seem to be vastly underestimating his statblock.

The Level 11 party has very little chance of beating him.

He has less than 300 hit points. A 9th level party wouldn't have any trouble knocking that down in 3-4 rounds.

 

[Micah Sweet]

His default statblock will kill nearly any party not built to counter him at mid levels.

I strongly disagree.

 

[overgeeked]

Here’s a thread for the Soth tangent. Number crunching preferred.

https://www.enworld.org/threads/lord-soth’s-stats-and-cr.693405/

 

[MonsterEnvy]

moved to new thread

 

[GMforPowergamers]

He has less than 300 hit points. A 9th level party wouldn't have any trouble knocking that down in 3-4 rounds.

in a lucky or nova situation I have seen 8th-10th level parties do 300hp in2 rounds... in a lucky AND nova round soth may not get a second round himself...

 

[Demetrios1453]

Not with that statblock, unfortunately. PCs aren't quite generic Rebel troops in any event.

Beyond the points made by others, in the adventure, the characters have to go through at least 6 encounters of varying difficulty (including a CR 14 foe) to even get to him, at minimum, and that's by lucking out and finding the direct route to him, and without further exploring the location where he's at, where further encounters will whittle then down even further. And, even beyond that, it's a time-sensitive mission, so there's no time to take a long rest.

(Yes, I know it has its own thread, but this concerns how Soth appears in the adventure itself, and not white room theory crafting...)

 

[pukunui]

So one thing that I'm noticing as I read further into the adventure is that, while it says that Warriors of Krynn is entirely optional, I feel like you'd end up missing out on a good chunk of the "war experience" by not using it. Basically, the adventure doesn't provide any substitute for the board game. If you don't use it, there just aren't any mass battles -- or at least, they all happen entirely off-screen and have little-to-no effect on the rest of the adventure.

Granted, even if you do use the board game, the outcomes of the mass battles seem to have little-to-no effect on the adventure as well, but at least the PCs can potentially earn themselves some nice magic items by participating. And the players get to feel like their PCs are part of something much larger.

Without the mass battle element, this adventure feels like it would play out like Red Hand of Doom but without the Victory Points subsystem. (I feel like it has some strong RHoD vibes regardless.)