Lets talk Dragonlance

souran · Post by **souran** » Mon Jul 21, 2014 12:37 am

So, lets talk Dragonlance for a little bit:

Dragonlance, like Greyhawk and Blackmoore was not actually built as an organized campaign setting. Instead it was built as the backdrop to a series of linked adventures that just happened to be some of the first (TSR) adventures to be written with an event based style instead of a location based style.

Based on things that Hickman has said about his working with TSR in the 80s, the original intent of these modules was to increase the visibilty of dragons in D&D modules as the namesake monster had not really had a major role in any of the other "classic modules."

Hickman has also made comments to the effect that he was asked to put together some game materials that would come across more like arthurian legend or LOTR than like the more Robert E. Howard/Fritz Lieber style of games/adventures that Gygax felt was more typical of D&D. While I cannot find anything to confirm it I have a suspicion that Hickman (especially when he was pared with Weis ) were STRONGLY influenced by David Eddings. Regardless of what you may think of Eddings, especially now in the era of the gritty reboot, Eddings was the GRRM of the 1980s. The first 14DL modules and their associated novels, have a lot of similarties in tone, writing style, philosophy, and even the humor used.

DL1-14 are, for pre-written modules, quite good. While they sometimes can veer into railroad territory, the players are asked to participate in events that clearly matter. Further, it is one of the few adventures where a player being a hidden prince, or getting a powerful artifact at low level, or being a one-of-a-kind super special snowflake is not a hindrance to the game but can easily be turned into a motivating factor.

The modules do have some issues. Gully Dwarves are a problem. The "barbarians" who have Native American culture are a problem, although they do get points for not making them some evil demi-human (On this I sometimes wonder if they were included because everything in the US in the 80s included some Native American to show they "understood the issues." The fact that it basically became cultural appropriation didn't matter till 1991). The particular thing that annoys me the most is that the whole setting is almost ruined by the D&D alignment system, especially the late 70s/early 80s version of it where "neutral" is written to mean "balances good and evil" instead of something remotely sensible like "decides based on factors at the time and reasonable self interest." Gygax's post vietnam era highschool dropout philosophy was dumb when he made it the guiding principle of the circle of 8. It was cosmically stupid when they tried to squeeze that crap into the background of the campaign about an cosmic war between good and evil. Here is a hint, if two groups are in an existential total war being the person who says "what we really need is for these two group to be balanced so that they are eternally deadlocked" makes you seem like a giant ass hat.

The whole campaign setting is built around creating a world that is at just the right point to run these adventures. Setting further adventures after DL1-14 of course works....however the conceits of the setting start to fall apart the further you get from the War of the Lance. The games whole campaign was built up to run a particular sequence of adventures and when that sequence is done things after it feel less important. The setting is also not helped by 20 years of crappy novels adding in all kinds of weird shit. Comparing the 1E and, to a lesser extend the 2E settings books for Dragonlance to the 3E shows is something that really puts this in sharp relief.

The 1E and 2E books are able to quickly explain the history of the setting, the gods, and the state of the games nations (both before and after the war of the lance) as a dramatic narrative that you could explain to new players quickly.

The 3E book has to deal with both the expansion of detail in the historical events, the nature of the deities, and then the rapidly increasing rate of "dramatic" events after the war of the lance. The sad fact is that all of this detail represents 20 years of dead weight.

The original 14 DL adventures were repackaged for use with D&D 2E, and again for 3E. I have no doubt that if 4E had lasted long enough for WOTC to end their fighting with Margariet Weis they would have republished them again for 4E. Since 5E is setting out to b nostalgia edition I will be fucking flabergasted if they don't reprint these modules for 5E and I would guess sooner rather than later.

The end result is that anything that occurs after the DL1-14 series modules basically DOES NOT MATTER. The campaign setting exists to support these modules and people who end up playing dragonlance do so to play these modules.

The forgotten realms is basically the same way. Its at its best either during or shortly after the time of troubles because that event has worked better and was more interesting than anything else they have EVER done with the setting. The further they have gotten from that the more "who cares" the setting has become. If I were more familiar with Dark Sun I bet there was a point where the setting stopped being what it was billed as and I am certain that once Ebberon has 20 years of crappy novels behind it all the novelty will be drained from that setting to.

The point of this is:
We have discussed how a setting backed by crappy rules can drive a game and keep it going. However, there is another aspect to this. A setting can be good for telling a PARTICULAR story. Once that story has been told it may be better to move on to another setting than to try and keep pigeonholing more and more stories that dilute your original theme. Especially if your rules is not so fundamentally tied to your setting that you can't develop other settings without having to rewrite large swaths of rules.

D&D settings need to be turned over and added to all the time because honestly most of their settings have only 2-3 really interesting stories to be told in them. After that its star wars prequels all the way down.

Blicero · Post by **Blicero** » Mon Jul 21, 2014 1:09 am

Did the modules go into / share the reasoning for the gods abandoning Krynn after the Cataclysm that the novels used? Because, even as a kid, those struck me as dumb.

Also, can you explain this statement?

Eddings was the GRRM of the 1980s.

I've never finished anything by him, because the one time I picked up one of his books, I found that it was filled with trite shit.

I did always get the impression that Dragonlance was a world written to support Hickman & Weis' novels, though. It never seemed like a full-fledged campaign setting. I disagree that the only point to the Forgotten Realms is the Time of Troubles. A lot of the other stuff is shit, certainly, but they occasionally had decent ideas.

souran · Post by **souran** » Mon Jul 21, 2014 2:08 am

Blicero wrote:Did the modules go into / share the reasoning for the gods abandoning Krynn after the Cataclysm that the novels used? Because, even as a kid, those struck me as dumb.

The original version is just more tower of babelesque: The Kingpriest tried to become a god because he thought that the gods were not being godly enough and were unwise. So when he tried to make himself a god the actual gods turned on everybody.

It is at least in line with the sort of things from mythology that they were aiming for. Is it super great? No. As they produced more material they kept making things more and more like the novels and then they kept expanding till its what it is now.

Also, can you explain this statement?
Eddings was the GRRM of the 1980s.

Eddings was THE fantasy author that people were trying to imitate in the 80s. Even though it tended to be a tad trite and very campy. Piers Anthony may have been close but Eddings was the "style" that 80s fantasy works tended to adopt. You can even see this in other better authors from the 80s. Robin Hobb, Tad Williams, even continuing into the 90s with recluse. Eddings fits into the history of Fantasy fiction as coming after the Terry Brooks and Stephen R Donaldsons who wrote imitating tolkien directly to the 80s author's who wrote in a stye that was affected by the 1960s sci-fi/fantasy authors like lin Carter.

Basically, David Eddings was the person who people were talking about in the 80s even if you hated everything he ever wrote. Thats all I meant.

I've never finished anything by him, because the one time I picked up one of his books, I found that it was filled with trite shit.

I agree, and yet he is fucking rich as all get out because people at one time thought that was ground breaking fantasy. I AM NOT KIDDING. He was seriously considered an exceptional talent in the field.

I did always get the impression that Dragonlance was a world written to support Hickman & Weis' novels, though. It never seemed like a full-fledged campaign setting. I disagree that the only point to the Forgotten Realms is the Time of Troubles. A lot of the other stuff is shit, certainly, but they occasionally had decent ideas.

The modules came first, and Hickman was a writer/designer on the first one and then a person with a support credit on the rest. The first novels were actually partially based on notes of in-house play-throughs but then also modified because it turns out that the default structure of a D&D campaign is not the default structure for a novel. As more material was created it did tend to be based more on novel first -> product second.

The 2E release of the modules took some more liberties and made the action closer to the novels and less like a typical adventure.

As for Forgotten Realms: Its a kitchen sink setting so it has a little more longevity, but not much. The 3E version of the setting adds detail for NO real gain. The 4E version is so bad that it is going to be dropped like a bad habit. Both of these have lacked anything that was as compelling as "the gods broke all this shit and now things are new and exciting." Unlike dragonlance, which was built around a SPECIFIC sequence of adventures FR was built and then adventures were written for it. So its not like there some central event that everything was built towards from day one like DL, but it also means that it doesn't have a group of adventures that get republished over and over. However, except for the time of troubles the other attempts that have been made to Advance the realms have basically resulted in "who cares" or "complete failure". 3E was a giant bucket of extra detail that nobody gave 2 shits about and 4E was complete failure.

Forgotten Realms might be a better setting if they DID NOT advance the timeline all the time and didn't try and encorpate every one of Ed Greenwood's and R.A. Salvatore's self masterbatory novels.

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Mon Jul 21, 2014 2:29 am

Eddings started publishing in 82 and Dragonlance started in 84. I doubt it's TOO busy imitating Eddings because the Belgariad was, like, finishing up the year this stuff released.

When I read Dragonlance, I always see more Mormon influences. Hickman and Weis are Mormon and it seriously shows up in their work. The "Disks of Mishakal" are the Golden Plates with a fresh coat of paint. The gods corresponding to constellations, the fucking stupid justification for the Cataclysm, a lot of crazy stuff of how characters work...yeah. They wear it on the sleeves.

souran · Post by **souran** » Mon Jul 21, 2014 2:51 am

Maxus wrote:Eddings started publishing in 82 and Dragonlance started in 84. I doubt it's TOO busy imitating Eddings because the Belgariad was, like, finishing up the year this stuff released.

And TSR was pulling college students to write stuff for them and the college students they were pulling were reading Eddings in their free time. The closeness is part of the reason I felt like it was an imitation particularly to the first couple of books. However, like I said I can't find anything firm either way so I won't belabor that point to much. Its possible that they had never even heard of Eddings.

When I read Dragonlance, I always see more Mormon influences. Hickman and Weis are Mormon and it seriously shows up in their work. The "Disks of Mishakal" are the Golden Plates with a fresh coat of paint. The gods corresponding to constellations, the fucking stupid justification for the Cataclysm, a lot of crazy stuff of how characters work...yeah. They wear it on the sleeves.

I agree with some of the Mormon stuff. However, god's corresponding to constellations and planets is a thing that happened on basically every continent and as a part of human history. As for the cataclysm, its level of stupidity is directly related to how much alignment, novel, and other garbage is layered on top of it. Its not honestly that different from how crappy other gods have acted in various real world mythologies (I can think of one really big one which has multiple cataclysms for significantly less assholish things than DL). However, I am totally done defending Weis and Hickmans dumbass cataclysim. Except for this:

When there was LESS WRITTEN about the details of the cataclysm it allowed the GM to fill in stuff so that it was not so epically stupid. As the setting got more detail you either ignore the detail or accepted the stupid. Basically, more detail made the setting worse and less able to fullfill its purpose. This is in line with the point I was making above.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Mon Jul 21, 2014 3:14 am

Whenever someone reads Eddings' stuff, they do it for the same reason they might watch Buffy or House: it has fuck all to do with any plot, it's 100% about the characters in it and their dialogue. Snappy one-liners that (these days) go well in image macros and all that. They don't care about the intricacies of a reluctant hero using a big blue gem to kill an evil god, or whether this particular patient will die of not-Lupus. They just want Sparhawk/House/Spike to crack a joke at someone's expense.

And honestly, that works pretty well. I enjoyed the Elenium way more than, say, anything Feist wrote after Magician.

If DL were less Mormonic and more of a camp, joke-filled Eddings adventure (complete with mandatory traits you need to choose that make you stand out, like "I'm a veteran of two wars and despite being a Paladin I get to use a variety of dirty tricks" and "I got chosen by an almost-dead god to be a special champion" and "I own the thieves guild. Not even they know this."), it would be much better than what we have.

Voss · Post by **Voss** » Mon Jul 21, 2014 3:31 am

The end result is that anything that occurs after the DL1-14 series modules basically DOES NOT MATTER. The campaign setting exists to support these modules and people who end up playing dragonlance do so to play these modules.

I'm going to disagree with this. While the first couple books were written after/about play sessions of the modules, the modules are bad and no one gives a shit about them.

If people get excited about DL at all, its because they want to try to slap Lord Soth around, fuck Kitiara, murder kender and have elves be assholes to them. The novels have a lot more weight then the shitty modules, of which people maybe remember one or two of the early ones. If they remember the mass battle module at all, it is because they have failed to suppress the painful memories.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Mon Jul 21, 2014 7:35 am

A weird thing that stood out to me was in the DragonLance world gold is worthless and coins are made with steel. It was suppose to reflect how current society values strength.

It struck me as odd, but I never looked into if it was a bad idea or not.

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Mon Jul 21, 2014 8:00 am

Well, it was supposed to reflect how a post-apocalyptic society (what they were originally going for) values utility, and how arbitrary currency is.

(Notice that the Golden Plates became the Platinum Disks when gold got bumped down to 'most worthless metal'. Platinum remains tops in Dragonlance).

Hickman once went on about how this meant a portcullis at a fortress might have been carted off and sawed into coins or something, so he at least recognized Greyhawking as a thing. I know this because I once read the Annotated Dragonlance Chronicles when I was 15 or 16. Thereabouts, anyway.

I will concede that a steel coin does sound pretty cool.

Voss · Post by **Voss** » Mon Jul 21, 2014 8:01 am

OgreBattle wrote:A weird thing that stood out to me was in the DragonLance world gold is worthless and coins are made with steel. It was suppose to reflect how current society values strength.

It struck me as odd, but I never looked into if it was a bad idea or not.

It's excessively bad. Compare the cost a dagger (or troll the equipment list for the best ratio of cost/weight for steel items) to its weight and the weight of coins in D&Dland. Get a coin press. You now have infinite monies.

It also makes no sense the other way. People still wear and value jewelry. You have ancient treasure piles of fairly pure 'worthless' coins. But melt them into a different shape and suddenly they aren't.

Any capacity to smelt metal breaks the entire fucking setting.

Laertes · Post by **Laertes** » Mon Jul 21, 2014 8:05 am

Voss's point is a good one, but only applies if coins are valued for the weight of metal in them. If coins are fiat currency like they are in our world, then getting a coin press and making your own is definitely profitable, but it's also illegal.

Voss · Post by **Voss** » Mon Jul 21, 2014 8:11 am

Laertes wrote:Voss's point is a good one, but only applies if coins are valued for the weight of metal in them. If coins are fiat currency like they are in our world, then getting a coin press and making your own is definitely profitable, but it's also illegal.

And that honestly means shit. There are maybe three 'countries' in the entire setting. Mostly it's just individual towns and the occasional city like Kalaman. So no real authority and barely any communication. So if you have bags of solanmic steel pieces, haven pieces, sanction pieces and Kalaman pieces, no one is going to give any shits. If they don't accept steel pieces from other places then no sort of economy functions at all and the setting is even more fucked.

Laertes · Post by **Laertes** » Mon Jul 21, 2014 8:20 am

In which case yeah, it's a fucking stupid way to do currency. Agreed.

Voss · Post by **Voss** » Mon Jul 21, 2014 4:26 pm

Speaking of non-countries, anyone want to touch the elves? You basically have the Hatfield-McCoys and McCoy-Hatfields, and everybody else is hanging out around their houses1. And their populations are small enough that everybody fits in two refugee camps on opposite banks of a river on (the south half) of some island that barely supports another small group of elves.

And the dwarves are similar, except the mountain dwarves actually had the sense to build a kingdom in their fallout shelter.

Given the huge wilderness and small populations, the setting really talks around the fact that it is Post-Apocalyptia.

Ganbare Gincun · Post by **Ganbare Gincun** » Tue Jul 22, 2014 3:39 am

Dragonlance introduced Kender. And for that, I can never forgive them.

Wiseman · Post by **Wiseman** » Tue Jul 22, 2014 4:08 am

Really, like a lot of things in DnD, the core idea behind kender (slightly naieve, optimistic, curious, fearless) are fine, and make for good adventurers. It's just taken to such ridiculous extremes that it becomes unworkable. I've run kender before, and i think the best idea is to tone them back a lot.

otherwise you get stuff like this.

Then there were the kender themselves. None of
the Plainsfolk had ever seen more than a handful
in one place at any time. Here, though, there
were thousands, more than the city was meant to hold,
thanks to the refugees who had flooded into town over
the past few weeks. They jammed the streets, a pushing,
shoving yammering sea of topknotted heads. The humans,
Riverwind in particular, felt like giants as Paxina and
Kronn led them through the crowds. Many of the kender
stopped and stared at them, their jaws hanging open in
awe as they looked up. The mob around them grew steadily
thicker as people crowded around, trying to get a look at the
rare Plainsfolk.
That wasn’t the worst of it, though. Kender being kender,
for every one who was content simply to stand and gawk at
Riverwind, Brightdawn and Swiftraven, there were three
who just had to find out what was inside the Plainsfolk’s
purses. The humans quickly discovered they had to carry
their pouches—along with swordbelts, quivers, and anything
else they wanted to hold on to—above their heads, where the
kender’s reaching, grasping hands couldn’t get near them.
Even so, the Plainsfolk lost the buckles off their boots and
most of the beads from the fringes of their buckskin tunics.
The noise too, was incredible. The air was filled with
the clamor of voices, screeching hoopaks and other strange
weapons, and occasional musical instruments or exploding
firecrackers.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Tue Jul 22, 2014 4:22 am

Kender justify the existence of those "bags of holding" that actually eat anything that tries to open them. Every PC should carry five.

Voss · Post by **Voss** » Tue Jul 22, 2014 4:31 am

I've had the displeasure of playing in dragon lance games a couple times over the years. Every single one involved the unabashed murder of NPC kender, usually with only one or two dissenting opinions.

Wiseman · Post by **Wiseman** » Tue Jul 22, 2014 4:51 am

I also forgot about this, where it pretty much tells you "we fucked up, don't play kender as written."

The best way to play a kender character is to rein in some
of the more overbearing kender personality traits. Many
DMs have banned kender characters from their games,
because most players feel in order to successfully play a
kender they must be foolish and disruptive to the game.
Be friendly without talking endlessly, be fearless but not
foolhardy, be curious but smart. If you are a true kender,
don’t always attempt to steal valuable items. Keep in mind
that to a kender a shiny river stone is just as enticing as a
diamond.
Play against stereotype—the kender stereotype is so
well defined and so overplayed that it has garnered a bad
reputation. Not all kender are like Tasslehoff Burrfoot.
Nightshade Pricklypear is an excellent example of a kender
from the novels who is not good at handling and instead
has the interesting ability to communicate with the dead.
Try something different and look for a unique niche for
your kender character.

Voss · Post by **Voss** » Tue Jul 22, 2014 5:18 am

Who/what is that quote from?

Wiseman · Post by **Wiseman** » Tue Jul 22, 2014 5:20 am

It's from the 3.5 sourcebook Races of Ansalon.

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Tue Jul 22, 2014 6:20 am

yeah, see, if PCs could pull that junk and just GET stuff from people, that'd be marginally more tolerable.

But I really doubt they can.

Count Arioch the 28th · Tue Jul 22, 2014 6:26 am

I always wondered if there was a way to balance a mechanic where a character gets to pull a certain gp amount of gear per level out of their ass to mimic kender handling without having them be a nuisance. As in, they just happened to pick up a random object that's handy right now (and it is assumed that they grabbed it when it wasn't being watched closely), but it doesn't require them to steal from the party or angry npcs in a disruptive fashion.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Tue Jul 22, 2014 11:42 am

The mentally handicapped dwarves. What's up with that.

Schleiermacher · Post by **Schleiermacher** » Tue Jul 22, 2014 12:21 pm

Straight-up racist miscegenation jokes, if I remember correctly. One of many reasons why I won't touch Dragonlance with the titular silver 10-ft. pole.