So, I am a DM, I've been playing D&D 5e for about 2.5 years, and never played any TTRPG's before then, so I have never experienced playing in any campaign settings from before 5e, with the exception of a Spelljammer campaign I'm running. With all of the new campaign settings being published recently that are completely new to D&D (Wildemount, Theros, Ravnica) what are some of the things that made old campaign settings (greyhawk, planescape, dragonlance, dark sun, so on) so great? I have read some of the dragonlance novels, but still aren't completely aware about what that and other old settings are about.
This thread is just to discuss what the old campaign were about, why we liked them as a community, and anything about those settings that you'd like. This can also discuss why you'd prefer those settings to the new ones, or vice-versa.
I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
I’m fairly new to D&D as well. Came in a few months after Xanathar’s Guide came out. The only old settings I know about are Eberron, Spelljammer, and Dark Sun. And seeing as how Eberron just got a book, and you run a Spelljammer campaign, I’ll list the reasons I think Dark Sun is cool.
• It is post-apocalyptic. The world has lost most of it’s greenery, leaving scorched deserts. • Magic is taboo. Magic is blamed for sending the world to hell, and thus psionics are mostly used. There are also two broad types of magic. While the names of it escape me, there is one where you literally take the life of everything around you to use magic, but the spells are more effective. Or where you preserve it, but they’re less effective. • City-states. The world is divided into city-states ruled by cruel dictators.
I have not personally played Dark Sun. But it seems cool, and I know that I’ll buy it up when the setting book finally comes out.
Actually Greyhawk isn't the first D&D setting, that would be Dave Arneson's Blackmoor world, which predates Greyhawk by over a year. But you're right that it's Gygax's very own homebrew world and gave us a lot of what we now consider staples of D&D
Technically Blackmoor came first, but nobody gives a crap, Gygax shoved it into a corner of Greyhawk and that was the end of it. Anyway, what makes the old campaign settings so good is... it's kinda hard to explain. Dark Sun is obvious, it's a post apocolyptic desert world with playable Thri-Kreen. Dragonlance is high fantasy, and was massively successful in the past. Basically, Dragonlance was going on LoTR sized quests that had huge ramifications on the world. It was just... awesome, really. Greyhawk, tho, where do I start... that world is freaking amazing. All the powerful wizards you can think of, the ones that actually made spells (Mordenkainen, Bigby, Rary, Nystul, etc.) come from Greyhawk. Also, it just... i dunno, feels more real than FR, the bloated whale that is 5e. Greyhawks' nations fought over issues that are a lot more real, even if the two nations fighting shared ideals. The world is more gritty, and most NPCs met are neutral or evil. There isn't some uber powerful DMPC to save the world (cough Elminster cough), the Circle of Eight ain't gonna do shit to help you unless it preserves the balance. Though i've never played in Mystara, I do know that one thing that people liked about it is a lot of it correlated to real world areas, ethnicities, and nations.
Overall, I really wish wizards would bring back the old worlds, even if it was just one book: (___s guide to the material plane) with a chapter for each, except Dark Sun. That deserves its own book.
Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, and Dragonlance are pretty interchangeable. Aside from the popularity of the books at the time, the real catch to Dragonlance was that the setting actually had its own "house rules." The absence of divine magic, the three wizard orders, the Solamnic Knights as a class, giving gnomes a reason to exist, there's so much to like that it's easy to forgive them for creating kenders, especially now that I've had some time to heal. Kenders, for you youngsters, were a race that gave your "chaotic neutral" trouble players every damn excuse they needed to act the fool.
Greyhawk reflected a fascination with population migrations with all the talk about Suluoise and Bakluni and stuff. Forgotten Realms, when it came out, seemed less idiosyncratic, more modular, more focused on high fantasy and less on medieval European history. Over time, of course, the need to sell books, and the completist instinct led to every nook and cranny of Toril being mapped and detailed.
Something similar happened to Ravenloft, when it became its own setting. It just got to be a bloated, glued-together amalgamation of people's home campaigns. Some of them were great ideas, some of them were pure camp, and they all just got thrown at the wall to see what would stick.
Dark Sun was from a whole different fantasy school altogether. It was much more Robert E Howard/E.R. Burroughs than Tolkien or Poul Anderson. I'd like it to have gotten more popular, but the format of the books, the actual shape of them started getting really weird, and once you got past the Bron covers, I wasn't a fan of the art.
The one setting that I thought could have used a re-evaluation, another crack of the whip, was Birthright. The world itself was pretty cookie-cutter high fantasy, but it came with a kingdom-level mini-game (or maybe it was a maxi-game? A supra-game?) where the actions of the PCs would transfer over to a turn-based strategy game and vice-versa. At the time, I think the idea was to integrate D&D with something like Settlers of Catan, but honestly, it seems in retrospect to be very Game of Thrones.
I liked Planescape, but I don't remember anything about it being super-interesting mechanically. It was just a fun, trippy, backdrop for your usual adventures. Replace the Zhentarim with the Takers and you're good to go.
All of the settings are kind of execution-dependent. There was lots of room to make any of them work, but if your players didn't want to run ship-to-ship space battles in Spelljammer, there wasn't really anything different about a Spelljammer campaign other than set dressing. And if they had already learned the rules for Starfleet Battles, you'd just do that instead. If you were already playing Call of Cthulhu or Chill, there wasn't much interest in buying Ravenloft supplements just so you could have an elf ranger instead of an alcoholic accountant (which sounds weird, but that's the way I remember it).
As far as the new ones go: FR keeps on plugging along. I'm happy with my little homebrew world, but I look in sometimes to see what's worth stealing. Ravnica seems completely redundant in a game that contains Sigil, but there's no reason not to combine ideas from one into the other, and the art is nice. I have yet to get hooked by CR, so Exandria doesn't mean much to me. Eberron isn't really new, though it came out during a time that I wasn't playing. It's got some great stuff, but like with FR, I just steal what I like.
I could see myself combining the Greco-Roman stuff with some of the old licensed Conan setting for a more Bronze-Age setting, but frankly, I doubt I'd ever get around to using it.
Dragonlance was nice because to me, it had the same kind of epic feel as Lord of the Rings. If Takhisis wins, it's game over for everyone. I liked the simplicity of the pantheon; there was a nice selection of gods and goddesses to choose from without the hodge-podge that FR and Greyhawk had.
FR was great in the old days because of the lore. What they did to the timelines for 4e, then pulling the sundering to put it all back again because it was a colossal goat-screw, just doesn't sit well. Back in the 2e days, it felt like a much more complete world.
Greyhawk? Meh. It always felt like a junior varsity forgotten realms to me. It felt kind of a mashup with no coherent theme...kinda like the realms are now.
Planescape had some cool ideas. Not my personal cup of tea, but cool and interesting if you liked it. Mostly lore and theme going on there.
Spelljammer? No, not interested in star trek meets D&D.
Ravenloft? Ravenloft had a lot of /great/ ideas, and a lot of crap ideas. *shrug* too much bloat there really, plus horror really isn't my thing. I guess past Sithicus, I didn't have much interest in it. I'd play it though if that's what my party wanted to do.
Dark Sun lost me when they took metal weapons away. If not for that, Dark Sun is kind of Barsoom, and I wouldn't mind trying that out, but I want cold steel in my hands.
Eberron? No. I'm not interested in Steam Punk, even a little.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Any time an unfathomably powerful entity sweeps in and offers godlike rewards in return for just a few teensy favors, it’s a scam. Unless it’s me. I’d never lie to you, reader dearest.
I think that there are 3 main old campaign settings that are likely to come to 5e, listed in the order I think they'll be brought to 5e:
Planescape
Dark Sun
Spelljammer
Planescape is easy to bring to 5e, and I think the Planescape manual will also be Xanathar's 2.0 in the same book. Planescape really only needs more lore for the planes, some maps, a gazetteer on Sigil, some monsters, and a few races.
Dark Sun needs a few races, psionics, and a map of the world. Dark sun is also easy to bring to 5e, besides the problem of psionics. The recent UA show that they're working on developing psionic options, but I don't think they're that close to finishing them up.
Spelljammer is fairly popular, which is why I think it will be brought to 5e, but would need major revisions. A lot of new players would love to do D&D in space, which I know for a fact as I play with mainly newer players. They'd have to list what worlds can be traveled to with Spelljammer, as the M:tG worlds, Wildemount, and Eberron all lack crystal spheres.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Greyhawk? Meh. It always felt like a junior varsity forgotten realms to me. It felt kind of a mashup with no coherent theme...kinda like the realms are now.
I think there's a weird irony in that the thing that fascinated Gygax as a world-builder (mass movements of populations over time) is utterly totally incapable of being addressed by the game he actually designed. If he made that old Civilization board game, then over the course of 500 years of play, it would make sense to talk about the spread of Suloise culture into the Flanaess. But he made something that was neither a civ-building board game, nor a tabletop wargame and suddenly there was a demand for it before he actually knew what he was selling.
I think that discrepancy is either a symptom or a cause of the incoherence you sense, I'm not sure which.
Planescape, Dark Sun and Spelljammer are high on my list of settings that I would like to see just so I can steal races, classes and rules to use in my own homebrew.
My nostalgic side wants Dragonlance. Lots of fond memories of that setting, though if I am honest with myself, I would not run the setting very often if at all. It was high fantasy, but had lots of built in rules that made it feel different. The gods were "gone", the Towers of High Sorcery controlled who could learn magic and what magics they could use. Dragons were powerful beings that played a major role in the world. Every adventure felt important, It was fun.
I recently started reading Dragonlance books, and I've read probably 12 of them. I like the setting, but it's just not different enough from the Forgotten Realms to be relevant in 5e.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Dragonlance doesn't really need a campaign setting. A few little things like solamnic knights and the orders of high sorcery that could be used in a 5e game is about all you'd really need.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Any time an unfathomably powerful entity sweeps in and offers godlike rewards in return for just a few teensy favors, it’s a scam. Unless it’s me. I’d never lie to you, reader dearest.
Technically Blackmoor came first, but nobody gives a crap, Gygax shoved it into a corner of Greyhawk and that was the end of it. Anyway, what makes the old campaign settings so good is... it's kinda hard to explain. Dark Sun is obvious, it's a post apocolyptic desert world with playable Thri-Kreen. Dragonlance is high fantasy, and was massively successful in the past. Basically, Dragonlance was going on LoTR sized quests that had huge ramifications on the world. It was just... awesome, really. Greyhawk, tho, where do I start... that world is freaking amazing. All the powerful wizards you can think of, the ones that actually made spells (Mordenkainen, Bigby, Rary, Nystul, etc.) come from Greyhawk. Also, it just... i dunno, feels more real than FR, the bloated whale that is 5e. Greyhawks' nations fought over issues that are a lot more real, even if the two nations fighting shared ideals. The world is more gritty, and most NPCs met are neutral or evil. There isn't some uber powerful DMPC to save the world (cough Elminster cough), the Circle of Eight ain't gonna do shit to help you unless it preserves the balance. Though i've never played in Mystara, I do know that one thing that people liked about it is a lot of it correlated to real world areas, ethnicities, and nations.
Overall, I really wish wizards would bring back the old worlds, even if it was just one book: (___s guide to the material plane) with a chapter for each, except Dark Sun. That deserves its own book.
Mystara is my favorite setting. I have adapted it from 2e to 3e and now to 5e. I am DMing a party in Karameikos, or will be again after CV19 isolation is over. And Blackmore wasn’t shoved into a corner, it was placed into Mystaran ancient history.
Dragonlance doesn't really need a campaign setting. A few little things like solamnic knights and the orders of high sorcery that could be used in a 5e game is about all you'd really need.
Yeah, it would not take much really.
As you said, the Knights and High Sorcery. Maybe some backgrounds. Adapt the Minotaurs, make an Ogre race ...and if you must, make Kender. But only if you absolutely must.
Dragonlance doesn't really need a campaign setting. A few little things like solamnic knights and the orders of high sorcery that could be used in a 5e game is about all you'd really need.
Yeah, it would not take much really.
As you said, the Knights and High Sorcery. Maybe some backgrounds. Adapt the Minotaurs, make an Ogre race ...and if you must, make Kender. But only if you absolutely must.
We have Minotaurs, Kender are basically halflings, right? Ogres are more difficult, WotC is scared of large races, but I would like an Ogre race. The Knights were basically Crown Paladins, right? Also, High-Sorcerers are more akin to Wizards, right? I don't think anything from Dragonlance needs a book.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
That is like saying sorcerers can cast telekinesis so why make a psion?
No, because what I've seen from the books so far, they're essentially wizards in every regard. I'm not an expert on the subject of the High Sorcerers, so correct me if I'm wrong. Also, that's not a great analogy, because psionic is so much more than just telekinesis, and it doesn't seem to me that the High Sorcerers are much more than just fancy wizards called sorcerers.
I know there are 3 different types of them, red, white, and black, but couldn't you just very easily reflavor existing wizard or sorcerer subclasses to those categories?
(Also, if they were to bring them to 5e, what would be different about them, and what would their name be? They can't be called sorcerers for obvious reasons, so Mages is probably the best option. I am just not convinced there's enough different about Dragonlance to warrant a campaign guide book.)
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
So, I am a DM, I've been playing D&D 5e for about 2.5 years, and never played any TTRPG's before then, so I have never experienced playing in any campaign settings from before 5e, with the exception of a Spelljammer campaign I'm running. With all of the new campaign settings being published recently that are completely new to D&D (Wildemount, Theros, Ravnica) what are some of the things that made old campaign settings (greyhawk, planescape, dragonlance, dark sun, so on) so great? I have read some of the dragonlance novels, but still aren't completely aware about what that and other old settings are about.
This thread is just to discuss what the old campaign were about, why we liked them as a community, and anything about those settings that you'd like. This can also discuss why you'd prefer those settings to the new ones, or vice-versa.
I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Spells, Monsters, Subclasses, Races, Arcknight Class, Occultist Class, World, Enigmatic Esoterica forms
I’m fairly new to D&D as well. Came in a few months after Xanathar’s Guide came out. The only old settings I know about are Eberron, Spelljammer, and Dark Sun. And seeing as how Eberron just got a book, and you run a Spelljammer campaign, I’ll list the reasons I think Dark Sun is cool.
• It is post-apocalyptic. The world has lost most of it’s greenery, leaving scorched deserts.
• Magic is taboo. Magic is blamed for sending the world to hell, and thus psionics are mostly used. There are also two broad types of magic. While the names of it escape me, there is one where you literally take the life of everything around you to use magic, but the spells are more effective. Or where you preserve it, but they’re less effective.
• City-states. The world is divided into city-states ruled by cruel dictators.
I have not personally played Dark Sun. But it seems cool, and I know that I’ll buy it up when the setting book finally comes out.
Dominick Finch
Greyhawk is the OG dnd setting, it’s gygax’s personal setting and a lot of characters are actually from there
Marvarax and Sora (Dragonborn) The retired fighter and WIP scholar - Glory
Brythel(Dwarf), The dwarf with a gun - survival at sea
Jaylin(Human), Paladin of Lathander's Ancient ways - The Seven Saints (Azura Claw)
Urselles(Goblin), Cleric of Eldath- The Wizard's challenge
Viclas Tyrin(Half Elf), Student of the Elven arts- Indrafatmoko's Defiance in Phlan
Actually Greyhawk isn't the first D&D setting, that would be Dave Arneson's Blackmoor world, which predates Greyhawk by over a year. But you're right that it's Gygax's very own homebrew world and gave us a lot of what we now consider staples of D&D
Find my D&D Beyond articles here
Technically Blackmoor came first, but nobody gives a crap, Gygax shoved it into a corner of Greyhawk and that was the end of it. Anyway, what makes the old campaign settings so good is... it's kinda hard to explain. Dark Sun is obvious, it's a post apocolyptic desert world with playable Thri-Kreen. Dragonlance is high fantasy, and was massively successful in the past. Basically, Dragonlance was going on LoTR sized quests that had huge ramifications on the world. It was just... awesome, really. Greyhawk, tho, where do I start... that world is freaking amazing. All the powerful wizards you can think of, the ones that actually made spells (Mordenkainen, Bigby, Rary, Nystul, etc.) come from Greyhawk. Also, it just... i dunno, feels more real than FR, the bloated whale that is 5e. Greyhawks' nations fought over issues that are a lot more real, even if the two nations fighting shared ideals. The world is more gritty, and most NPCs met are neutral or evil. There isn't some uber powerful DMPC to save the world (cough Elminster cough), the Circle of Eight ain't gonna do shit to help you unless it preserves the balance. Though i've never played in Mystara, I do know that one thing that people liked about it is a lot of it correlated to real world areas, ethnicities, and nations.
Overall, I really wish wizards would bring back the old worlds, even if it was just one book: (___s guide to the material plane) with a chapter for each, except Dark Sun. That deserves its own book.
This is all just my opinion, but:
Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, and Dragonlance are pretty interchangeable. Aside from the popularity of the books at the time, the real catch to Dragonlance was that the setting actually had its own "house rules." The absence of divine magic, the three wizard orders, the Solamnic Knights as a class, giving gnomes a reason to exist, there's so much to like that it's easy to forgive them for creating kenders, especially now that I've had some time to heal. Kenders, for you youngsters, were a race that gave your "chaotic neutral" trouble players every damn excuse they needed to act the fool.
Greyhawk reflected a fascination with population migrations with all the talk about Suluoise and Bakluni and stuff. Forgotten Realms, when it came out, seemed less idiosyncratic, more modular, more focused on high fantasy and less on medieval European history. Over time, of course, the need to sell books, and the completist instinct led to every nook and cranny of Toril being mapped and detailed.
Something similar happened to Ravenloft, when it became its own setting. It just got to be a bloated, glued-together amalgamation of people's home campaigns. Some of them were great ideas, some of them were pure camp, and they all just got thrown at the wall to see what would stick.
Dark Sun was from a whole different fantasy school altogether. It was much more Robert E Howard/E.R. Burroughs than Tolkien or Poul Anderson. I'd like it to have gotten more popular, but the format of the books, the actual shape of them started getting really weird, and once you got past the Bron covers, I wasn't a fan of the art.
The one setting that I thought could have used a re-evaluation, another crack of the whip, was Birthright. The world itself was pretty cookie-cutter high fantasy, but it came with a kingdom-level mini-game (or maybe it was a maxi-game? A supra-game?) where the actions of the PCs would transfer over to a turn-based strategy game and vice-versa. At the time, I think the idea was to integrate D&D with something like Settlers of Catan, but honestly, it seems in retrospect to be very Game of Thrones.
I liked Planescape, but I don't remember anything about it being super-interesting mechanically. It was just a fun, trippy, backdrop for your usual adventures. Replace the Zhentarim with the Takers and you're good to go.
All of the settings are kind of execution-dependent. There was lots of room to make any of them work, but if your players didn't want to run ship-to-ship space battles in Spelljammer, there wasn't really anything different about a Spelljammer campaign other than set dressing. And if they had already learned the rules for Starfleet Battles, you'd just do that instead. If you were already playing Call of Cthulhu or Chill, there wasn't much interest in buying Ravenloft supplements just so you could have an elf ranger instead of an alcoholic accountant (which sounds weird, but that's the way I remember it).
As far as the new ones go: FR keeps on plugging along. I'm happy with my little homebrew world, but I look in sometimes to see what's worth stealing. Ravnica seems completely redundant in a game that contains Sigil, but there's no reason not to combine ideas from one into the other, and the art is nice. I have yet to get hooked by CR, so Exandria doesn't mean much to me. Eberron isn't really new, though it came out during a time that I wasn't playing. It's got some great stuff, but like with FR, I just steal what I like.
I could see myself combining the Greco-Roman stuff with some of the old licensed Conan setting for a more Bronze-Age setting, but frankly, I doubt I'd ever get around to using it.
Dragonlance was nice because to me, it had the same kind of epic feel as Lord of the Rings. If Takhisis wins, it's game over for everyone. I liked the simplicity of the pantheon; there was a nice selection of gods and goddesses to choose from without the hodge-podge that FR and Greyhawk had.
FR was great in the old days because of the lore. What they did to the timelines for 4e, then pulling the sundering to put it all back again because it was a colossal goat-screw, just doesn't sit well. Back in the 2e days, it felt like a much more complete world.
Greyhawk? Meh. It always felt like a junior varsity forgotten realms to me. It felt kind of a mashup with no coherent theme...kinda like the realms are now.
Planescape had some cool ideas. Not my personal cup of tea, but cool and interesting if you liked it. Mostly lore and theme going on there.
Spelljammer? No, not interested in star trek meets D&D.
Ravenloft? Ravenloft had a lot of /great/ ideas, and a lot of crap ideas. *shrug* too much bloat there really, plus horror really isn't my thing. I guess past Sithicus, I didn't have much interest in it. I'd play it though if that's what my party wanted to do.
Dark Sun lost me when they took metal weapons away. If not for that, Dark Sun is kind of Barsoom, and I wouldn't mind trying that out, but I want cold steel in my hands.
Eberron? No. I'm not interested in Steam Punk, even a little.
Any time an unfathomably powerful entity sweeps in and offers godlike rewards in return for just a few teensy favors, it’s a scam. Unless it’s me. I’d never lie to you, reader dearest.
Tasha
I think that there are 3 main old campaign settings that are likely to come to 5e, listed in the order I think they'll be brought to 5e:
Planescape is easy to bring to 5e, and I think the Planescape manual will also be Xanathar's 2.0 in the same book. Planescape really only needs more lore for the planes, some maps, a gazetteer on Sigil, some monsters, and a few races.
Dark Sun needs a few races, psionics, and a map of the world. Dark sun is also easy to bring to 5e, besides the problem of psionics. The recent UA show that they're working on developing psionic options, but I don't think they're that close to finishing them up.
Spelljammer is fairly popular, which is why I think it will be brought to 5e, but would need major revisions. A lot of new players would love to do D&D in space, which I know for a fact as I play with mainly newer players. They'd have to list what worlds can be traveled to with Spelljammer, as the M:tG worlds, Wildemount, and Eberron all lack crystal spheres.
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Spells, Monsters, Subclasses, Races, Arcknight Class, Occultist Class, World, Enigmatic Esoterica forms
I think there's a weird irony in that the thing that fascinated Gygax as a world-builder (mass movements of populations over time) is utterly totally incapable of being addressed by the game he actually designed. If he made that old Civilization board game, then over the course of 500 years of play, it would make sense to talk about the spread of Suloise culture into the Flanaess. But he made something that was neither a civ-building board game, nor a tabletop wargame and suddenly there was a demand for it before he actually knew what he was selling.
I think that discrepancy is either a symptom or a cause of the incoherence you sense, I'm not sure which.
Planescape, Dark Sun and Spelljammer are high on my list of settings that I would like to see just so I can steal races, classes and rules to use in my own homebrew.
My nostalgic side wants Dragonlance. Lots of fond memories of that setting, though if I am honest with myself, I would not run the setting very often if at all. It was high fantasy, but had lots of built in rules that made it feel different. The gods were "gone", the Towers of High Sorcery controlled who could learn magic and what magics they could use. Dragons were powerful beings that played a major role in the world. Every adventure felt important, It was fun.
She/Her Player and Dungeon Master
I recently started reading Dragonlance books, and I've read probably 12 of them. I like the setting, but it's just not different enough from the Forgotten Realms to be relevant in 5e.
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Spells, Monsters, Subclasses, Races, Arcknight Class, Occultist Class, World, Enigmatic Esoterica forms
Dragonlance doesn't really need a campaign setting. A few little things like solamnic knights and the orders of high sorcery that could be used in a 5e game is about all you'd really need.
Any time an unfathomably powerful entity sweeps in and offers godlike rewards in return for just a few teensy favors, it’s a scam. Unless it’s me. I’d never lie to you, reader dearest.
Tasha
The novels were good, but the Modules that they were based on were way more interesting and the books left a lot stuff out.
She/Her Player and Dungeon Master
Mystara is my favorite setting. I have adapted it from 2e to 3e and now to 5e. I am DMing a party in Karameikos, or will be again after CV19 isolation is over. And Blackmore wasn’t shoved into a corner, it was placed into Mystaran ancient history.
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting
Yeah, it would not take much really.
As you said, the Knights and High Sorcery. Maybe some backgrounds. Adapt the Minotaurs, make an Ogre race ...and if you must, make Kender. But only if you absolutely must.
She/Her Player and Dungeon Master
The DL series, updated for 5e, might actually be worth doing. Moreso than just a Krynn sourcebook.
We have Minotaurs, Kender are basically halflings, right? Ogres are more difficult, WotC is scared of large races, but I would like an Ogre race. The Knights were basically Crown Paladins, right? Also, High-Sorcerers are more akin to Wizards, right? I don't think anything from Dragonlance needs a book.
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Spells, Monsters, Subclasses, Races, Arcknight Class, Occultist Class, World, Enigmatic Esoterica forms
Kender are like halflings, only manic.
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting
That is like saying sorcerers can cast telekinesis so why make a psion?
She/Her Player and Dungeon Master
No, because what I've seen from the books so far, they're essentially wizards in every regard. I'm not an expert on the subject of the High Sorcerers, so correct me if I'm wrong. Also, that's not a great analogy, because psionic is so much more than just telekinesis, and it doesn't seem to me that the High Sorcerers are much more than just fancy wizards called sorcerers.
I know there are 3 different types of them, red, white, and black, but couldn't you just very easily reflavor existing wizard or sorcerer subclasses to those categories?
(Also, if they were to bring them to 5e, what would be different about them, and what would their name be? They can't be called sorcerers for obvious reasons, so Mages is probably the best option. I am just not convinced there's enough different about Dragonlance to warrant a campaign guide book.)
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Spells, Monsters, Subclasses, Races, Arcknight Class, Occultist Class, World, Enigmatic Esoterica forms