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D&D Older Editions
[COMPLETE] Looking back at the leatherette series: PHBR, DMGR, HR and more!
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<blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 8347919" data-attributes="member: 8461"><p>The first of the short-lived Player's Guide series, <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/16964/PG1-Players-Guide-to-the-Dragonlance-Campaign-2e?affiliate_id=820" target="_blank"><em>PG1 Player's Guide to the Dragonlance Campaign</em></a> was a book I had mixed feelings about back when I first read it.</p><p></p><p>I'm given to understand that a lot of people find Dragonlance to be a world that's easier to read about than play in. The vivid personalities of the established characters, and the cohesive chronology their adventures present, give the impression (correct or not) that there isn't much room for original PCs to tell their own stories. But for me, it was kind of a non-starter from the beginning; I knew that Dragonlance had a campaign setting boxed set - it was practically a requirement that every campaign world had one, back in the days of AD&D 2E - but I couldn't for the life of me find a copy of <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/16961/Tales-of-the-Lance-2e?affiliate_id=820" target="_blank"><em>Tales of the Lance</em></a> anywhere.</p><p></p><p>Worse, the original adventures of the War of the Lance were all 1st Edition products, and back then I wasn't interested in an edition that was "obsolete" (a way of thinking I've since abandoned; ah, the follies of youth), not realizing that the <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17370/Dragonlance-Classics-Volume-I-2e?affiliate_id=820" target="_blank"><em>Dragonlance Classics</em></a> had been reprinted for 2nd Edition, since back then we didn't have things like the <a href="http://tsrarchive.com/" target="_blank">TSR Archive</a> where we could look product lines up (or even an Internet connection, for that matter).</p><p></p><p>What I was able to find at my local hobby shop was a series of products that really didn't <em>feel</em> like Dragonlance to me. I mean, <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/16960/Time-of-the-Dragon-2e?affiliate_id=820" target="_blank"><em>Time of the Dragon</em></a> was set on another continent where the conventions of the novels were eschewed. <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17372/DLS1-New-Beginnings-2e?affiliate_id=820" target="_blank"><em>DLS1 New Beginnings</em></a> was apparently one of several adventures set on that same continent. <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/188636/DLR1-Otherlands-2e?affiliate_id=820" target="_blank"><em>DLR1 Otherlands</em></a> went even further afield. In hindsight, it was obvious that these were trying to open up space for adventuring on Krynn, but they went too far in the opposite direction. By moving outside of virtually everything familiar, they negated the draw of giving those and other products the Dragonlance label in the first place.</p><p></p><p>Now obviously, that's a hard needle to thread - products that tread too close to the novels feel stifling, and those that move too far away feel like they're not Dragonlance at all - and I confess I'm not entirely sure how to square that particular circle. In that regard, PG1 is probably one of the better attempts to bring the fiction to the game world together, being a mixture of an original story and also an overview of the campaign world, all without game stats.</p><p></p><p>Even so, re-reading this now, the best word I can think of to describe this sourcebook is "clumsy."</p><p></p><p>Let's start with the framing fiction. After openly admitting that its main character, Abbra - a Kagonesti (i.e. wild elf) who wants to learn magic, presumably so she can evolve into a Kadabra - is unfamiliar with the wider world, and so serves as the reader's proxy, we launch into her story. It's nothing particularly special; Abbra is a bright young girl whose master, a Silvanesti (i.e. one of the most stuck-up high elves) is indulging her magical pursuits largely as a lark while he grooms her to be his servant/concubine, leading to her abandoning him and taking up with some new friends as she tries to find the Tower of High Sorcery to take the Test and become a fully-fledged mage.</p><p></p><p>Now, you'd think that Abbra's adventures would serve as the framing fiction for the various parts of the book. And it <em>sort of</em> does, but not very well. Abbra's story takes up twenty-five pages (roughly a fifth of the total page-count), and is broken up into four sections. Despite being interspersed between the overviews of the various countries and regions, the fiction doesn't really try to cover them. You'd think that the story would try to invent excuses for the heroes to wander through various locales, describing them from an in-character perspective - leading into the out-of-character presentations that make up most of the book - but that's not the case here.</p><p></p><p>Instead, the story feels almost like an unrelated piece of fiction that was broken up into chunks and dispersed almost randomly throughout the book. It's not a bad tale, though it's not what I would call gripping, but neither the story itself nor its presentation do much to abet the reader's understanding of how things work on Krynn, besides tidbits like "gnome devices are always unreliable contraptions" and "kender are kleptomaniacs, but they mean well."</p><p></p><p>The rest of the book does a decent job of going over the setting (by which I mean Ansalon, thankfully), to the point where it almost feels like you're reading a campaign setting with the game mechanics excised.</p><p></p><p>...which, as it turns out, is exactly what the rest of the book is: a reprint of the <em>Tales of the Lance</em> boxed set.</p><p></p><p>I actually sat down and did some side by side comparisons to check. Sure enough, outside of the fiction, the rest of this book is almost 100% a reprint of the "World Book of Ansalon" from that boxed set. While there might be a few places where a sentence was rephrased or some paragraphs were rearranged, almost all of what's here looks like a straight copypasta (as the young people say) of what's there, minus the stats.</p><p></p><p>So basically, PG1 <em>is</em> the Dragonlance campaign setting, trading game mechanics for some new fiction. It's kind of like the Chinese release of <em>Deadpool 2</em>, which gave us a minute or so of Fred Savage in exchange for cutting out the worst of the violence.</p><p></p><p><img src="https://media2.giphy.com/media/yvBAuESRTsETqNFlEl/200.gif" alt="Annoyed GIF by 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" /></p><p></p><p>I'm sure I would have found that to be a poor trade-off back then, and I still do now. As it stands, this sourcebook does serve as a decent reference book for Dragonlance (at least before the Summer of Chaos and similar developments), but if it was trying to help people who'd read the novels make the jump to buying the game products, I wonder how well it worked.</p><p></p><p>Overall, this is a flawed work, and I can't help but think that that seems to be reflective of the Dragonlance line as a whole.</p><p></p><p><em>Please note my use of affiliate links in this post.</em></p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Alzrius, post: 8347919, member: 8461"] The first of the short-lived Player's Guide series, [URL='https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/16964/PG1-Players-Guide-to-the-Dragonlance-Campaign-2e?affiliate_id=820'][I]PG1 Player's Guide to the Dragonlance Campaign[/I][/URL] was a book I had mixed feelings about back when I first read it. I'm given to understand that a lot of people find Dragonlance to be a world that's easier to read about than play in. The vivid personalities of the established characters, and the cohesive chronology their adventures present, give the impression (correct or not) that there isn't much room for original PCs to tell their own stories. But for me, it was kind of a non-starter from the beginning; I knew that Dragonlance had a campaign setting boxed set - it was practically a requirement that every campaign world had one, back in the days of AD&D 2E - but I couldn't for the life of me find a copy of [URL='https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/16961/Tales-of-the-Lance-2e?affiliate_id=820'][I]Tales of the Lance[/I][/URL] anywhere. Worse, the original adventures of the War of the Lance were all 1st Edition products, and back then I wasn't interested in an edition that was "obsolete" (a way of thinking I've since abandoned; ah, the follies of youth), not realizing that the [URL='https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17370/Dragonlance-Classics-Volume-I-2e?affiliate_id=820'][I]Dragonlance Classics[/I][/URL] had been reprinted for 2nd Edition, since back then we didn't have things like the [URL='http://tsrarchive.com/']TSR Archive[/URL] where we could look product lines up (or even an Internet connection, for that matter). What I was able to find at my local hobby shop was a series of products that really didn't [I]feel[/I] like Dragonlance to me. I mean, [URL='https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/16960/Time-of-the-Dragon-2e?affiliate_id=820'][I]Time of the Dragon[/I][/URL] was set on another continent where the conventions of the novels were eschewed. [URL='https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17372/DLS1-New-Beginnings-2e?affiliate_id=820'][I]DLS1 New Beginnings[/I][/URL] was apparently one of several adventures set on that same continent. [URL='https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/188636/DLR1-Otherlands-2e?affiliate_id=820'][I]DLR1 Otherlands[/I][/URL] went even further afield. In hindsight, it was obvious that these were trying to open up space for adventuring on Krynn, but they went too far in the opposite direction. By moving outside of virtually everything familiar, they negated the draw of giving those and other products the Dragonlance label in the first place. Now obviously, that's a hard needle to thread - products that tread too close to the novels feel stifling, and those that move too far away feel like they're not Dragonlance at all - and I confess I'm not entirely sure how to square that particular circle. In that regard, PG1 is probably one of the better attempts to bring the fiction to the game world together, being a mixture of an original story and also an overview of the campaign world, all without game stats. Even so, re-reading this now, the best word I can think of to describe this sourcebook is "clumsy." Let's start with the framing fiction. After openly admitting that its main character, Abbra - a Kagonesti (i.e. wild elf) who wants to learn magic, presumably so she can evolve into a Kadabra - is unfamiliar with the wider world, and so serves as the reader's proxy, we launch into her story. It's nothing particularly special; Abbra is a bright young girl whose master, a Silvanesti (i.e. one of the most stuck-up high elves) is indulging her magical pursuits largely as a lark while he grooms her to be his servant/concubine, leading to her abandoning him and taking up with some new friends as she tries to find the Tower of High Sorcery to take the Test and become a fully-fledged mage. Now, you'd think that Abbra's adventures would serve as the framing fiction for the various parts of the book. And it [I]sort of[/I] does, but not very well. Abbra's story takes up twenty-five pages (roughly a fifth of the total page-count), and is broken up into four sections. Despite being interspersed between the overviews of the various countries and regions, the fiction doesn't really try to cover them. You'd think that the story would try to invent excuses for the heroes to wander through various locales, describing them from an in-character perspective - leading into the out-of-character presentations that make up most of the book - but that's not the case here. Instead, the story feels almost like an unrelated piece of fiction that was broken up into chunks and dispersed almost randomly throughout the book. It's not a bad tale, though it's not what I would call gripping, but neither the story itself nor its presentation do much to abet the reader's understanding of how things work on Krynn, besides tidbits like "gnome devices are always unreliable contraptions" and "kender are kleptomaniacs, but they mean well." The rest of the book does a decent job of going over the setting (by which I mean Ansalon, thankfully), to the point where it almost feels like you're reading a campaign setting with the game mechanics excised. ...which, as it turns out, is exactly what the rest of the book is: a reprint of the [I]Tales of the Lance[/I] boxed set. I actually sat down and did some side by side comparisons to check. Sure enough, outside of the fiction, the rest of this book is almost 100% a reprint of the "World Book of Ansalon" from that boxed set. While there might be a few places where a sentence was rephrased or some paragraphs were rearranged, almost all of what's here looks like a straight copypasta (as the young people say) of what's there, minus the stats. So basically, PG1 [I]is[/I] the Dragonlance campaign setting, trading game mechanics for some new fiction. It's kind of like the Chinese release of [I]Deadpool 2[/I], which gave us a minute or so of Fred Savage in exchange for cutting out the worst of the violence. [IMG alt="Annoyed GIF by 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment"]https://media2.giphy.com/media/yvBAuESRTsETqNFlEl/200.gif[/IMG] I'm sure I would have found that to be a poor trade-off back then, and I still do now. As it stands, this sourcebook does serve as a decent reference book for Dragonlance (at least before the Summer of Chaos and similar developments), but if it was trying to help people who'd read the novels make the jump to buying the game products, I wonder how well it worked. Overall, this is a flawed work, and I can't help but think that that seems to be reflective of the Dragonlance line as a whole. [I]Please note my use of affiliate links in this post.[/I] [/QUOTE]
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[COMPLETE] Looking back at the leatherette series: PHBR, DMGR, HR and more!
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