doctorbadwolf
Heretic of The Seventh Circle
I agree. Elmore is classic, but I don't exactly view it as the best art ever. I'd love to see a new style emerge for Dragonlance.
I'd also, as I've said many times before, push the setting forward again, and bring it full circle, rather than reboot it. Treat the First War of The Lance as part of history.
In session 0 read the following;
"The gods were gone for so long, and when they came back it was to war and a century or more of upheaval and turmoil. For the last generation the lands of Krynn have been relatively calm, with the most recent cataclysm solidly in the past. You meet with old friends in the oldest inn in the region, the Inn of The Last Home, in the small tree-top and rope bridge town of Solace. The town is famous for it's Heroes' Tomb, and for being the birthplace of three of the famous Heroes of The Lance, and also for the inn itself, and it's famous fried potatos. Old friends and new greet you in the common room as the smell of cooking fat and spices wafts in from the kitchen. Now, we meet our heroes. "
DL would be a setting where the default assumption is that you are a group of people who know eachother before the campaign starts, and you've come together in a place where many noble quests have begun, to share news with eachother of the rumours you spread out into the world to gather one year ago. You make characters as a group, perhaps with a new group version of the "this is your life" system as an option for people who want some outside inspiration, and figure out what your Quest is, create bonds between party members, establish each PC's place in the world, cover any questions about the game, houserules, expectations, etc. The DM can describe the tone of the campaign, talk about what Romantic Fantasy is, what High Fantasy is, and how they intersect in Dragonlance, and answer questions about the world that players have while making characters.
The system that helps do all this can also act as a sort of guided roleplay engine for the scene of coming together and sharing news, with tables for places you might have gone searching out rumours, and tables for what rumours turned up false and what lead to a discovery, with those rolls helping the DM determine the course of the adventure just like drawing the cards in CoS.
Then, of course, in session 1 (if you're playing out the starting adventure in the book), solace is attacked by the New Dragon Army, or the Knights of Takhisis Returned, or the forces of the oppressive New Ishtar, and the fun kicks off from there.
Not everything would be fully full circle, though. The gods would be present, but be somehow out of balance in the last couple years. The Knights of Solamnia would have rumours of corruption in the higher ranks, with a faction of younger Knights seeking to find this corruption and strike it out, while the Knights of Neraka are internally struggling to reconcile their past and their future in some way, perhaps having come under the wing of a more Neutral god in recent times, or even transitioning in Takhisis' absense to an organization with three orders for each alignment. Maybe the Knights of Solamnia and Neraka have been unified to some degree by the efforts of a Neutral Knighthood dedicated to the librarian god. Some deeply nerdy knights who mix martial and magic traditions, and find the balance between justice and personal glory.
The gods are greatly diminished, and maybe that's for the best, but maybe not as there are signs that Takhisis has returned somehow, or is being returned, just as powerful as ever, but there is no sign of her counterpart, Paladine. I'd be all for some shuffling of identity amongst the gods, with perhaps the librarian god becoming androgynous rather than male, and Paladine and Takhisis having expressions of multiple genders, like sure Paladine was an older knight with a sweet mustache, but in coming back to Krynn, being reborn, perhaps she is a young fiery knight full of passion and the natural charisma to lead by example, platinum haired and beautiful as the dawn.
Or if not that, perhaps the goddess I described is a goddess of knighthood, honor, righteous passion, and leadership from the frontline, a sort of allied foil to Paladine's more staid and stoic leadership. The Lancer to his Leader, as it were.
Either way, I would include gods both old and new, some changed in the centuries that have passed, some exactly as we remember.
The elves I would have "newly" (within the last hundred years or so) returned to their traditional homes, and in the process of rebuilding them. For them, the cataclysms of the time since the War of The Lance are still fresh, many of their remaining elders recall the time when the gods were wholly absent from the world.
Kender would be presented as more well rounded people, but still very childlike in demeanor, curious, impervious to fear but like...not cartoonishly incapable of understanding what danger even is, and with the natural mindset of optimistic anarcho-socialists.
Gnomes I would simply dial down the absurdity a bit, not completely rewrite. Their inventions often seem to always blow up to outsiders because you remember the explosion of the prototype that maybe shouldn't have left the lab so early a lot more than you recall the finished product that is only ever seen in the presence of gnomes. I do worry that these tinker gnomes make it hard to believe in a world that hasn't progressed past RL medieval tech, so I'd play up the idea that crossbows do work better here than in RL, because of gnomish advancements in winches and other mechanical advantage mechanisms, and maybe have one or two technologies that aren't combat related that are spreading across the continent, having been iterated in gnomish hands for a couple generations. Maybe the most expensive wagons in Krynn have fancy leaf spring suspension, idk.
Gully Dwarves would be the biggest change, because they would be presented as a group of dwarves that were outcast and subjugated, barred from forming schools or creating true cities, a great crime in Dwarven history. Modern gully dwarves have found education on their own, built secret cities between the very walls of their cousin's dwellings, and in the last century have worked with hill dwarfs to create towns upon the surface of the mountains, and have attained some measure of wealth by acting as intermediaries between their cousins and non-dwarfs as their cousins struggled to come out of isolation. Now there is an uneasy tension between them and their mountain cousins as they use economic pressure to force their kin to recognise their rightful place in dwarven society. Also maybe I'd move some of them into forests in the foothills of the mountains, and treat them almost like forest gnomes? Like, mostly they're dwarves but they can talk to small critters and hide really well? A more dextrous, clever, forest dwarf would be a new niche for dwarves and would make sense for a group of them who sought out a place where they could thrive as things got even worse within the mountain home during the period of deep isolation, and such a society would be sensible as the ones who found ways back and forth in and out of the mountain in secret over the years, and found themselves in a position to write the terms of dwarven reentry into the broader world.
Oh and the dragonlances are all lost or missing, and one of the supernatural gifts a PC can take up is a silver arm and the skills and training of a smith. Another would be being favored by Paladine or his daughter (the platinum haired younger knight god I talked about), filling a role similar to Goldmoon.
Speaking of Goldmoon, that whole culture would be subject to revision by Plains Native creators.
