Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
ShortQuests -- Pocket Sized Adventures! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed for 1-2 game sessions.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Edena_of_Neith" data-source="post: 487667" data-attributes="member: 2020">Once upon a time, I had the privilege of running Dragonlance.  Since some of you do not know what Dragonlance is, I will explain in detail the things in my scenario.  In my version of Dragonlance, there was a town set in giant trees called Solace.  This town was guarded by a stockade, had about three hundred militia men and women, and a handful of trained fighters.  Then the dragon came.  Not any dragon, but a Great Wyrm, and on his back was a high level fighter/cleric called the Dragon Highlord.  Three lesser dragons came with the Dragon Highlord, and this army demanded Solace surrender, and her jewels, gems, gold, and young ladies be turned over to the dragons (the former to keep, the ladies to eat.)  Of course, everyone else was to kneel to the Dragon Highlord, adopt his religion, become his personal property, and were to be taken away as useful slaves for the mines and for the whims of the dragons.  There were no draconians.  For those of you who do not know, they are dragonmen created from eggs of good dragons - the evil dragons in my dragonlance did not feel they needed any help from ground troops.  When you have a breath weapon and dragonarmor, you don't need troops.  But anyways ...  My players, with their mid level characters, fought for Solace against these attackers.  During the battle, a hole was blown in the fabric of reality, and assorted people, dragons, and trees were hurled through it into other times.  The party awoke in a strange world, 100 years in the future, along with the very puzzled and very angry red dragon who had been fighting them.  The main point of the adventure, from that point on (after they killed the dragon, of course) was to find a Gate back to Krynn (the world of Dragonlance), and hopefully to figure out a way to return to their own time (such a way did not exist in the strange world they were now on.)  The party, after many adventures, did find the Gate, and they did return to Krynn.  What they found, on Krynn, was something slightly new and different.  It seems that when magic failed after the Chaos War (see the book Dragons of Summer Flame) Krynn's gravity and natural climate returned.  Well, my Krynn had a diameter twice that of Earth's, and it's mass was three times greater, at least.  It's surface gravity was three times Earth gravity, it's atmospheric pressure three times as great, and it's climate ... well, my Krynn had an axle tilt of 80 degrees and a year of 24 months, so the temperature soared to 200 degrees in the summer and 100 below in the winter, with violent storms the year around.  Of course, the party was accustomed to Earth-like gravity, atmospheric pressure, and climate, so when they returned, in the dead of the winter, they were in for an unpleasant shock.  A 200 pound character wearing 150 pounds of armor and gear, now weighed 600 pounds plus 450 pounds of gear.  The sudden increase in atmospheric pressure was rather ... problematic.  The temperature of 60 below (it was unusually warm right then) with gale force winds, and snow several feet deep, was also problematic.  The party saw, to their amazement, tall conifers and deciduous trees which were bare for the winter.  Apparently, the native flora had somehow adapted to the changes.  This adaptation was realized when someone tried to cut the wood with an axe, to make firewood.  The wood was not harmed, and the axe was.    The trees and brush, had become very incredibly much stronger, denser, hardened against cold, heat, wind, and shocks of any sort.  Whether this was magical or natural, nobody could say.  It turned out that even breaking a twig or a piece of brush required titanic effort, and pushing brush out of the way required all the strength a man could put into the effort:  the brush might as well have been made - almost - of steel wire, for all the bend and give it seemed to have.  The trees and brush had this strength as an adaptation to the gravity, the powerful winds in an atmosphere three times as dense as Earth's, and the herculean changes of temperature during the long year.  What went for trees and brush, went for squirrels.  Now, squirrels are not generally aggressive, but Krynn features a type with a temper akin to wolverines.  This would not be a problem for a normal party in normal circumstances.  These were not normal circumstances.  After adapting somewhat (with magical aid) to the increased pressure, and after adapting to the cold, the party found they could not find the strength to do much more than weakly stumble around (whatever allowed everything else to adapt, had not come to the party's aid!)  They could not wear armor very well, could not swing their weapons very well, and even spellcasters had quite a time with somatic gestures.  The squirrel, like everything else on Krynn, was stronger - far stronger - than a normal squirrel should be.  It was effectively a 6 hit dice monster, with the strength of a full grown man, two claw attacks, a bite attack, and it's skin had become tough and imprenetrable like the bark of the trees.  As a result, the party suffered one fatality and two seriously wounded, in fighting it off (the resurrected their fallen, but they failed to kill that squirrel.)  Then two chipmunks showed up, just meaning to harmlessly observe the party - but the party got up and ran away as fast as they could.  That tactic worked with the chipmunks, who weren't interested in attacking anyways.  However, the tactic did not work with the hawk that decided to dive-bomb the party.  After they killed the hawk, and nearly lost another party member doing so, my players were very unhappy to find the bear tracks in the snow ...</blockquote>

Verification