I don't believe so. I just think its a fairly chaotic world so there is definitely more conflict, but I wouldn't call it "dark" in the sense of horror or ultra violence movies would be called dark.
It may be that that video was pretty new and Dragonlance isn't a core world for many players, not like Toril at least. It never got a 4th edition book and this is the first from 5th edition So its been like 16 years since anything was published about it.
As a result those that know Dragonlance likely don't need to watch a video on how to run a session 0 and those they don't know it may be wanted to get more information about the book (or get the book itself) before they dive into thinking about a session 0
Its definitely no Wild by Witchlight in terms of levity but no darker than Dark Sun. WotC don't really publish uber dark stuff that would upset people anymore (not a critique).
It's not say Curse of Strahd. The article is just tailoring the principles of Session 0, particularly Tasha's guidance on Session 0s, to the Dragonlance book. War is the overarching theme of the campaign it seems. "War" as an overarching theme has a number of sub-themes over which many groups would do well to have a discussion of boundaries and limitations. I don't think there's anything remarkably "dark" in Dragonlance compared to say Descent into Avernus or Out of the Abyss. It's just DDB's editorial trying to be helpful giving players a guide to how to Session 0 it in broad terms. As said, it isn't Witchlight, it isn't Candlekeep, nor Spelljammer but I'd be very surprised if it wasn't tonally in line with the rest of the 5e adventure books.
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Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
That article did have a comment trail, but it seems to have disappeared. Probably because it moved into the realm of the seemingly everlasting arguments about play styl, content, and inclusion in D&D.
I don't know about the adventure itself, but the general setting is one of a war-torn continent, which of course can get pretty dark and grim.
Having said that, there is definitely a tendency to reuse the existing publication streams and themes for 5th edition, but recasting content for the current times. That both creates interest and tension in the community, but in terms of a setting, I don't think it specifically has to be all that dark.
Many stories and movies have been developed around war, ranging from the grim and brutal to comedy - and ultimately it will be down to individual groups how they set the scene for their campaign and what they include/exclude.
Part of the challenge is perhaps that with a big baggage of previous editions there will be some players with very specific expectations based on experiences in those earlier editions, and some who come to it completely new and don't see the issue at all because they didn't experience the content in its previous incarnation. I'm not saying either is right or wrong - but it is what happens with sequels (or even prequels) :)
I would personally suggest the various novels put out in the Dragonlance world for references if you want a better feel!
Dragons of Autumn Twilight is great story put out by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. These were written based off of a series of D&D game modules taking place on Krynn which boasts a unique pantheon called "The True Gods", and picks up after the loss of the True Gods. Realize the books were written after the authors had play sessions. And is referred by some to be more important as supplemental material than a novel. I personally enjoyed the story and the series and I would recommend it whether you play or not.
If you are into some good retro fun, I have played Dragons of Despair and I would suggest molding it into your campaign. If nothing else, check out what it is about as the quest involves solving the mystery of what happened to the "true clerics", and discovering the invading draconians. Hickman is a great story teller, and I would easily endorse his modules and novels.
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I am not sure what my Spirit Animal is. But whatever that thing is, I am pretty sure it has rabies!
Lmao I didn't even notice the comments being removed. Too many people getting pissed off about others not wanting to include harmful content in their games I guess
As a long-time Dragonlance fan I find the reboot's "warface" a bit edgelord. It's a marketing thing.
It's not wrong, exactly, but traditionally, Dragonlance is set during a war in the same way that Casablanca is set during a war. if you had asked me last year to give you three concepts that embody Dragonlance, war would not have been one of them. I see the logic, I don't disagree with it, it's just not where my brain would have gone first.
If anything, Dragonlance was the most romantic of the original three D&D settings, in the sense that it clearly cared the least about realism. If you follow my meaning, it wasn't the kind of place you ran a campaign if you cared about tracking the party's supply of iron rations, or expected them to never leave home without a 10' pole, 50' of rope, and a set of iron spikes and a hammer, or if you were looking to kill anyone because of a failed Perception check. It was the kind of setting where you didn't really concern yourself with whether or not your fighter wore a helmet, because his hairstyle was more important.
...It had a lot in common with contemporary D&D5, really. That's not necessarily a criticism, just an observation.
I consider Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk to both be darker than Dragonlance, at least in the sense that Dragonlance never concerned itself with grit, and no D&D setting has ever been interested in truly pulling back the curtain on human depravity (including Ravenloft). Most of them are pretty equally grim, which is to say not any more grim than your typical medieval fantasy. Maybe Dark Sun? But not really; Dark Sun is pretty pulpy.
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J Great Wyrm Moonstone Dungeon Master
The time of the ORC has come. No OGL without irrevocability; no OGL with 'authorized version' language. #openDND
Practice, practice, practice • Respect the rules; don't memorize them • Be merciless, not cruel • Don't let the dice run the game for you
I think DMZ2112 is onto it, "war" is being used to distinguish Dragonlance/Krynn from other worlds, though frankly Eberron strikes me as a more interesting take on "D&D War" at least its aftermath.
I mean, I was reading somewhere that the campaign will introduce "battlefield encounters" which are a new encounter type to represent what a party or PC may be doing during a battle (as opposed to having the game switch to a war-game to resolve the battle). Those encounters will include "battlefield effects" similar to lair actions over the course of the encounter to reflect the fact that whatever the PCs are doing is within the midst of warfare. That's a pretty good answer, without resorting to war gaming, to the "how do I run the Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny?" question that many DMs ask when planning campaign climaxes and the like.
But yeah, the DL novels, at least the original trilogy, most of the big battles were "off camera". The Knights of Solamnia's big defeat? You just see the horse arriving with the dead leader (which, yeah, is kinda grim for D&D usual 5e). The first major clash between the metallic dragon riders and the chromatic dragon riders, focuses almost entirely o Tass and forget the Dwarf's name sorta slapstick battle antics with little narration of what's actually going on in the battle. Laurana's military genius? You don't really see a lot of her victories, they're instead catalogued in what would be RP encounters of war councils if played through.
Really, the trilogy shows what "traditional" D&D adventurers could get up to in a war setting, and how traditional D&D adventuring can have a role in a larger war effort. That said, the new product seems to be putting characters more on the front lines, and the release is even tied to a board game about resolving the larger war, so slightly different direction from what we see the Heroes of the Lance get up to in the OT.
It's disappointing to know that the direction of the adventure is like taking Star Wars, but focusing on the soldiers instead of the Jedi and the Smugglers.
I think the setting as described above seems kinda interesting. And yes, modern DND does reflect the style over harsh grit, which isn't lost on the criticism of the last few years since release ("my players can't die!").
I think, to make this setting more romantic, playing into the cheesy black vs white war scenario, a romance subplot, a family subplot and a missing relative subplot. And maybe include the mcguffin of finding a weapon that only a player at the table can use because "they're special". Each player gets a new weapon and the fight against evil happens. And they win. Epic, silly, road to level 20 in a few weekends, narrative over mechanics adventure.
If anything, Dragonlance was the most romantic of the original three D&D settings, in the sense that it clearly cared the least about realism. If you follow my meaning, it wasn't the kind of place you ran a campaign if you cared about tracking the party's supply of iron rations, or expected them to never leave home without a 10' pole, 50' of rope, and a set of iron spikes and a hammer, or if you were looking to kill anyone because of a failed Perception check. It was the kind of setting where you didn't really concern yourself with whether or not your fighter wore a helmet, because his hairstyle was more important.
...It had a lot in common with contemporary D&D5, really. That's not necessarily a criticism, just an observation.
Really? I always felt the opposite: Dragonlance was a relatively gritty setting compared to the other original settings. It was very low magic for a D&D setting, the world was one that had survived a magical catastrophe that had wiped out the main civilization and most people were depicted as generally struggling to survive. There weren't any old mageocracy civilizations that had left ruins full of magical loot all around the land, magic items were few and far between compared to Greyhawk. Gods help you if you ran into a creature that was immune to nonmagical weapons when you only had a single +1 sword in the party. And the main conflict in the setting was "the armies of evil are threatening the entire world," there was rarely any sort of thing that was on a smaller scale than that and there weren't any corners of the continent that seemed like they could honestly be described as "peaceful and generally a pleasant place to live."
It was hardly as grimdark as Dark Sun or Ravenloft, but it definitely came across as on the darker end of the spectrum.
In the original trilogy, and it seems like a good amount of the subsequent fiction, there was some serious lifting of the plot by deus ex machina, like almost Flash Gordon level. Not necessarily a ding at the stories, but while there were some gritty violence, there was quite a lot of "oh, come on" contrivance.
It was also a lot sexier than a lot of other D&D fiction of the time. Even the Draconians were making jokes about one of the pairings.
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Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Really? I always felt the opposite: Dragonlance was a relatively gritty setting compared to the other original settings. It was very low magic for a D&D setting, the world was one that had survived a magical catastrophe that had wiped out the main civilization and most people were depicted as generally struggling to survive. There weren't any old mageocracy civilizations that had left ruins full of magical loot all around the land, magic items were few and far between compared to Greyhawk. Gods help you if you ran into a creature that was immune to nonmagical weapons when you only had a single +1 sword in the party. And the main conflict in the setting was "the armies of evil are threatening the entire world," there was rarely any sort of thing that was on a smaller scale than that and there weren't any corners of the continent that seemed like they could honestly be described as "peaceful and generally a pleasant place to live."
It was hardly as grimdark as Dark Sun or Ravenloft, but it definitely came across as on the darker end of the spectrum.
You are definitely not wrong -- like I said, I can see where the war focus is coming from, for sure. This has always been the odd thing about Dragonlance: if you look at it from 10,000 feet, it is extremely dark. Post-apocalyptic, no divine magic, arcane magic tightly controlled, continent at war, evil empire in ascendance lead by a dark god; I mean, the place is described as so grim that the common currency is STEEL PIECES because you can't make a sword out of gold. If that's not the most edgelord idea I don't know what is.
But this was always in direct opposition to the way the setting was presented in fiction (and, in my experience at least, at the table) -- it was far more 'heroic fantasy' than the other original settings. Fans of the setting have always been quick to protest that Dragonlance is more than just the Heroes of the Lance that feature in the main novel series, but it is undeniable that the presentation of the setting, front loaded with heroic fantasy as it was, greatly influenced perception and execution of the setting in practice.
You know what it is -- Dragonlance was a Points of Light setting before D&D4 came up with that nomenclature to describe the "ideal" D&D setting. The world is dark, certainly, but the adventure doesn't really focus on that; it focuses on stringing together hope. It reminds me of nothing so much as Lord of the Rings. Everyone says D&D is based on Tolkien's works, but it really wasn't for the most part -- it has far more in common with the "pulp" fantasy of Howard, Vance, or Moorcock.
Dragonlance, by contrast, was D&D's Lord of the Rings. And while Lord of the Rings certainly contains some very dark worldbuilding, I don't really hear folks referring to it as 'dark fantasy.'
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J Great Wyrm Moonstone Dungeon Master
The time of the ORC has come. No OGL without irrevocability; no OGL with 'authorized version' language. #openDND
Practice, practice, practice • Respect the rules; don't memorize them • Be merciless, not cruel • Don't let the dice run the game for you
Really? I always felt the opposite: Dragonlance was a relatively gritty setting compared to the other original settings. It was very low magic for a D&D setting, the world was one that had survived a magical catastrophe that had wiped out the main civilization and most people were depicted as generally struggling to survive. There weren't any old mageocracy civilizations that had left ruins full of magical loot all around the land, magic items were few and far between compared to Greyhawk. Gods help you if you ran into a creature that was immune to nonmagical weapons when you only had a single +1 sword in the party. And the main conflict in the setting was "the armies of evil are threatening the entire world," there was rarely any sort of thing that was on a smaller scale than that and there weren't any corners of the continent that seemed like they could honestly be described as "peaceful and generally a pleasant place to live."
It was hardly as grimdark as Dark Sun or Ravenloft, but it definitely came across as on the darker end of the spectrum.
You are definitely not wrong -- like I said, I can see where the war focus is coming from, for sure. This has always been the odd thing about Dragonlance: if you look at it from 10,000 feet, it is extremely dark. Post-apocalyptic, no divine magic, arcane magic tightly controlled, continent at war, evil empire in ascendance lead by a dark god; I mean, the place is described as so grim that the common currency is STEEL PIECES because you can't make a sword out of gold. If that's not the most edgelord idea I don't know what is.
Honestly, using steel coins was the biggest pile of WTF in the setting. It misses the point of currency, which is to establish a convenient, universally agreed upon unit of trade that can easily be stored for when you wish to make a transaction. A pre-industrial society using steel (which is hard to manufacture without industrial production) would be like a modern country using gasoline or microchips as money.
I guess whether the setting is grimdark or romantic depends in large part when the campaign is taking place: during the War or the Lance or before or after it or one of the other Big Events (one of the things that annoyed me about the setting is that it only ever seemed to have Big Events that affect the entire continent).
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Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
As Matt Sernett has said in what was a style guide for content writers ...Dragonlance is a setting of romance and tragedy. That's not the same as 'dark'...imo.
As Matt Sernett has said in what was a style guide for content writers ...Dragonlance is a setting of romance and tragedy. That's not the same as 'dark'...imo.
It was also a lot sexier than a lot of other D&D fiction of the time. Even the Draconians were making jokes about one of the pairings.
That's... very charitable. Have you never read Ed Greenwood's Elminster novels?
The Sage of Shadowdale got around, if you know what I'm saying. Wizard got game.
Ed Greenwood wrote stories about thirsty wizards.
True, and Salvatore had basically a barbarian orgy early on the first Icewind Dale book ... I forget what bent the Moonshae books took. But all that was a few years or more after Dragonlance had pushed D&D fiction into bestsellers lists. I don't know if Greenwood's FR in Dragon referenced Elminsters bedpost notches or not, but my comment "of the time" spoke to Gygax fiction and the like.
Moreover, I think Hickman and Weis got D&D on getting far better than the early FR writers did in FR's earliest novels.
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Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
True, and Salvatore had basically a barbarian orgy early on the first Icewind Dale book ... I forget what bent the Moonshae books took. But all that was a few years or more after Dragonlance had pushed D&D fiction into bestsellers lists. I don't know if Greenwood's FR in Dragon referenced Elminsters bedpost notches or not, but my comment "of the time" spoke to Gygax fiction and the like.
Moreover, I think Hickman and Weis got D&D on getting far better than the early FR writers did in FR's earliest novels.
Point well taken; I always forget that there were Dragonlance novels four years before there were Forgotten Realms novels.
I am sure you already know this, but for the benefit of the peanut gallery: the Dragonlance Chronicles sprung from heavily fictionalized session reports of running the first Dragonlance module. The Dragonlance modules were serialized, and more or less followed the plot of the novels. Dragons of Autumn Twilight, in particular, reads a bit formulaic, until Weis and Hickman hit their stride and stop relying so much on in-game events.
The first Moonshae novel (and the first FR novel), Darkwalker on Moonshae, was of course not a D&D novel at all until they decided to slap the FR logo on the cover and the Moonshae Isles off the coast of Faerun. My copy doesn't even have the FR logo on the spine. Moonshae is entirely Douglas Niles' creation. Salvatore is on record saying that when TSR asked him to write The Crystal Shard he didn't know the first thing about D&D and based his pitch on Niles' novel. Guenhwyvar owes his existence to Tristan Kendrick's dog, Canthus, because Salvatore thought the man-animal bond was a key element.
Many of Greenwood's novels include segments that parallel D&D play, but they are narrative set pieces that usually end in grisly TPKs or close to it (again, darkety dark dark). For an early Forgotten Realms novel that really captures the feel of D&D, I recommend Kate Novak and Jeff Grubb's Azure Bonds. I'm sure there are others, though.
The Moonshae trilogies are pretty chaste, despite centering on a romantic pairing. To be clear, I'm not shaming Ed or the Realms; he writes a good novel, sexy or not. There's nothing there to be shy about.
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J Great Wyrm Moonstone Dungeon Master
The time of the ORC has come. No OGL without irrevocability; no OGL with 'authorized version' language. #openDND
Practice, practice, practice • Respect the rules; don't memorize them • Be merciless, not cruel • Don't let the dice run the game for you
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I ask because the article about starting session zero has no comments section.
Is the setting that dark that it's too problematic to release in it's original form?
And if it is too dark, why release a version that could actually increase sales of older problematic content?
"All I'm hearing is words... DO SOMETHING!"
I don't believe so. I just think its a fairly chaotic world so there is definitely more conflict, but I wouldn't call it "dark" in the sense of horror or ultra violence movies would be called dark.
It may be that that video was pretty new and Dragonlance isn't a core world for many players, not like Toril at least. It never got a 4th edition book and this is the first from 5th edition So its been like 16 years since anything was published about it.
As a result those that know Dragonlance likely don't need to watch a video on how to run a session 0 and those they don't know it may be wanted to get more information about the book (or get the book itself) before they dive into thinking about a session 0
Its definitely no Wild by Witchlight in terms of levity but no darker than Dark Sun. WotC don't really publish uber dark stuff that would upset people anymore (not a critique).
It's not say Curse of Strahd. The article is just tailoring the principles of Session 0, particularly Tasha's guidance on Session 0s, to the Dragonlance book. War is the overarching theme of the campaign it seems. "War" as an overarching theme has a number of sub-themes over which many groups would do well to have a discussion of boundaries and limitations. I don't think there's anything remarkably "dark" in Dragonlance compared to say Descent into Avernus or Out of the Abyss. It's just DDB's editorial trying to be helpful giving players a guide to how to Session 0 it in broad terms. As said, it isn't Witchlight, it isn't Candlekeep, nor Spelljammer but I'd be very surprised if it wasn't tonally in line with the rest of the 5e adventure books.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
That article did have a comment trail, but it seems to have disappeared. Probably because it moved into the realm of the seemingly everlasting arguments about play styl, content, and inclusion in D&D.
I don't know about the adventure itself, but the general setting is one of a war-torn continent, which of course can get pretty dark and grim.
Having said that, there is definitely a tendency to reuse the existing publication streams and themes for 5th edition, but recasting content for the current times. That both creates interest and tension in the community, but in terms of a setting, I don't think it specifically has to be all that dark.
Many stories and movies have been developed around war, ranging from the grim and brutal to comedy - and ultimately it will be down to individual groups how they set the scene for their campaign and what they include/exclude.
Part of the challenge is perhaps that with a big baggage of previous editions there will be some players with very specific expectations based on experiences in those earlier editions, and some who come to it completely new and don't see the issue at all because they didn't experience the content in its previous incarnation. I'm not saying either is right or wrong - but it is what happens with sequels (or even prequels) :)
I would personally suggest the various novels put out in the Dragonlance world for references if you want a better feel!
Dragons of Autumn Twilight is great story put out by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. These were written based off of a series of D&D game modules taking place on Krynn which boasts a unique pantheon called "The True Gods", and picks up after the loss of the True Gods. Realize the books were written after the authors had play sessions. And is referred by some to be more important as supplemental material than a novel. I personally enjoyed the story and the series and I would recommend it whether you play or not.
If you are into some good retro fun, I have played Dragons of Despair and I would suggest molding it into your campaign. If nothing else, check out what it is about as the quest involves solving the mystery of what happened to the "true clerics", and discovering the invading draconians. Hickman is a great story teller, and I would easily endorse his modules and novels.
I am not sure what my Spirit Animal is. But whatever that thing is, I am pretty sure it has rabies!
Lmao I didn't even notice the comments being removed. Too many people getting pissed off about others not wanting to include harmful content in their games I guess
[REDACTED]
As a long-time Dragonlance fan I find the reboot's "warface" a bit edgelord. It's a marketing thing.
It's not wrong, exactly, but traditionally, Dragonlance is set during a war in the same way that Casablanca is set during a war. if you had asked me last year to give you three concepts that embody Dragonlance, war would not have been one of them. I see the logic, I don't disagree with it, it's just not where my brain would have gone first.
If anything, Dragonlance was the most romantic of the original three D&D settings, in the sense that it clearly cared the least about realism. If you follow my meaning, it wasn't the kind of place you ran a campaign if you cared about tracking the party's supply of iron rations, or expected them to never leave home without a 10' pole, 50' of rope, and a set of iron spikes and a hammer, or if you were looking to kill anyone because of a failed Perception check. It was the kind of setting where you didn't really concern yourself with whether or not your fighter wore a helmet, because his hairstyle was more important.
...It had a lot in common with contemporary D&D5, really. That's not necessarily a criticism, just an observation.
I consider Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk to both be darker than Dragonlance, at least in the sense that Dragonlance never concerned itself with grit, and no D&D setting has ever been interested in truly pulling back the curtain on human depravity (including Ravenloft). Most of them are pretty equally grim, which is to say not any more grim than your typical medieval fantasy. Maybe Dark Sun? But not really; Dark Sun is pretty pulpy.
J
Great Wyrm Moonstone Dungeon Master
The time of the ORC has come. No OGL without irrevocability; no OGL with 'authorized version' language. #openDND
Practice, practice, practice • Respect the rules; don't memorize them • Be merciless, not cruel • Don't let the dice run the game for you
I think DMZ2112 is onto it, "war" is being used to distinguish Dragonlance/Krynn from other worlds, though frankly Eberron strikes me as a more interesting take on "D&D War" at least its aftermath.
I mean, I was reading somewhere that the campaign will introduce "battlefield encounters" which are a new encounter type to represent what a party or PC may be doing during a battle (as opposed to having the game switch to a war-game to resolve the battle). Those encounters will include "battlefield effects" similar to lair actions over the course of the encounter to reflect the fact that whatever the PCs are doing is within the midst of warfare. That's a pretty good answer, without resorting to war gaming, to the "how do I run the Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny?" question that many DMs ask when planning campaign climaxes and the like.
But yeah, the DL novels, at least the original trilogy, most of the big battles were "off camera". The Knights of Solamnia's big defeat? You just see the horse arriving with the dead leader (which, yeah, is kinda grim for D&D usual 5e). The first major clash between the metallic dragon riders and the chromatic dragon riders, focuses almost entirely o Tass and forget the Dwarf's name sorta slapstick battle antics with little narration of what's actually going on in the battle. Laurana's military genius? You don't really see a lot of her victories, they're instead catalogued in what would be RP encounters of war councils if played through.
Really, the trilogy shows what "traditional" D&D adventurers could get up to in a war setting, and how traditional D&D adventuring can have a role in a larger war effort. That said, the new product seems to be putting characters more on the front lines, and the release is even tied to a board game about resolving the larger war, so slightly different direction from what we see the Heroes of the Lance get up to in the OT.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
It's disappointing to know that the direction of the adventure is like taking Star Wars, but focusing on the soldiers instead of the Jedi and the Smugglers.
I think the setting as described above seems kinda interesting. And yes, modern DND does reflect the style over harsh grit, which isn't lost on the criticism of the last few years since release ("my players can't die!").
I think, to make this setting more romantic, playing into the cheesy black vs white war scenario, a romance subplot, a family subplot and a missing relative subplot. And maybe include the mcguffin of finding a weapon that only a player at the table can use because "they're special". Each player gets a new weapon and the fight against evil happens. And they win. Epic, silly, road to level 20 in a few weekends, narrative over mechanics adventure.
"All I'm hearing is words... DO SOMETHING!"
Really? I always felt the opposite: Dragonlance was a relatively gritty setting compared to the other original settings. It was very low magic for a D&D setting, the world was one that had survived a magical catastrophe that had wiped out the main civilization and most people were depicted as generally struggling to survive. There weren't any old mageocracy civilizations that had left ruins full of magical loot all around the land, magic items were few and far between compared to Greyhawk. Gods help you if you ran into a creature that was immune to nonmagical weapons when you only had a single +1 sword in the party. And the main conflict in the setting was "the armies of evil are threatening the entire world," there was rarely any sort of thing that was on a smaller scale than that and there weren't any corners of the continent that seemed like they could honestly be described as "peaceful and generally a pleasant place to live."
It was hardly as grimdark as Dark Sun or Ravenloft, but it definitely came across as on the darker end of the spectrum.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Dragonlance isn’t that dark. It has a lot of romance but also a lot of war stuff. I’m actually really excited about the adventure being released soon.
I really like D&D, especially Ravenloft, Exandria and the Upside Down from Stranger Things. My pronouns are she/they (genderfae).
You are definitely not wrong -- like I said, I can see where the war focus is coming from, for sure. This has always been the odd thing about Dragonlance: if you look at it from 10,000 feet, it is extremely dark. Post-apocalyptic, no divine magic, arcane magic tightly controlled, continent at war, evil empire in ascendance lead by a dark god; I mean, the place is described as so grim that the common currency is STEEL PIECES because you can't make a sword out of gold. If that's not the most edgelord idea I don't know what is.
But this was always in direct opposition to the way the setting was presented in fiction (and, in my experience at least, at the table) -- it was far more 'heroic fantasy' than the other original settings. Fans of the setting have always been quick to protest that Dragonlance is more than just the Heroes of the Lance that feature in the main novel series, but it is undeniable that the presentation of the setting, front loaded with heroic fantasy as it was, greatly influenced perception and execution of the setting in practice.
You know what it is -- Dragonlance was a Points of Light setting before D&D4 came up with that nomenclature to describe the "ideal" D&D setting. The world is dark, certainly, but the adventure doesn't really focus on that; it focuses on stringing together hope. It reminds me of nothing so much as Lord of the Rings. Everyone says D&D is based on Tolkien's works, but it really wasn't for the most part -- it has far more in common with the "pulp" fantasy of Howard, Vance, or Moorcock.
Dragonlance, by contrast, was D&D's Lord of the Rings. And while Lord of the Rings certainly contains some very dark worldbuilding, I don't really hear folks referring to it as 'dark fantasy.'
J
Great Wyrm Moonstone Dungeon Master
The time of the ORC has come. No OGL without irrevocability; no OGL with 'authorized version' language. #openDND
Practice, practice, practice • Respect the rules; don't memorize them • Be merciless, not cruel • Don't let the dice run the game for you
That's... very charitable. Have you never read Ed Greenwood's Elminster novels?
The Sage of Shadowdale got around, if you know what I'm saying. Wizard got game.
J
Great Wyrm Moonstone Dungeon Master
The time of the ORC has come. No OGL without irrevocability; no OGL with 'authorized version' language. #openDND
Practice, practice, practice • Respect the rules; don't memorize them • Be merciless, not cruel • Don't let the dice run the game for you
Honestly, using steel coins was the biggest pile of WTF in the setting. It misses the point of currency, which is to establish a convenient, universally agreed upon unit of trade that can easily be stored for when you wish to make a transaction. A pre-industrial society using steel (which is hard to manufacture without industrial production) would be like a modern country using gasoline or microchips as money.
I guess whether the setting is grimdark or romantic depends in large part when the campaign is taking place: during the War or the Lance or before or after it or one of the other Big Events (one of the things that annoyed me about the setting is that it only ever seemed to have Big Events that affect the entire continent).
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
Ed Greenwood wrote stories about thirsty wizards.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
As Matt Sernett has said in what was a style guide for content writers ...Dragonlance is a setting of romance and tragedy. That's not the same as 'dark'...imo.
Guide to the Five Factions (PWYW)
Deck of Decks
Yeah, I can agree with this.
"All I'm hearing is words... DO SOMETHING!"
True, and Salvatore had basically a barbarian orgy early on the first Icewind Dale book ... I forget what bent the Moonshae books took. But all that was a few years or more after Dragonlance had pushed D&D fiction into bestsellers lists. I don't know if Greenwood's FR in Dragon referenced Elminsters bedpost notches or not, but my comment "of the time" spoke to Gygax fiction and the like.
Moreover, I think Hickman and Weis got D&D on getting far better than the early FR writers did in FR's earliest novels.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Point well taken; I always forget that there were Dragonlance novels four years before there were Forgotten Realms novels.
I am sure you already know this, but for the benefit of the peanut gallery: the Dragonlance Chronicles sprung from heavily fictionalized session reports of running the first Dragonlance module. The Dragonlance modules were serialized, and more or less followed the plot of the novels. Dragons of Autumn Twilight, in particular, reads a bit formulaic, until Weis and Hickman hit their stride and stop relying so much on in-game events.
The first Moonshae novel (and the first FR novel), Darkwalker on Moonshae, was of course not a D&D novel at all until they decided to slap the FR logo on the cover and the Moonshae Isles off the coast of Faerun. My copy doesn't even have the FR logo on the spine. Moonshae is entirely Douglas Niles' creation. Salvatore is on record saying that when TSR asked him to write The Crystal Shard he didn't know the first thing about D&D and based his pitch on Niles' novel. Guenhwyvar owes his existence to Tristan Kendrick's dog, Canthus, because Salvatore thought the man-animal bond was a key element.
Many of Greenwood's novels include segments that parallel D&D play, but they are narrative set pieces that usually end in grisly TPKs or close to it (again, darkety dark dark). For an early Forgotten Realms novel that really captures the feel of D&D, I recommend Kate Novak and Jeff Grubb's Azure Bonds. I'm sure there are others, though.
The Moonshae trilogies are pretty chaste, despite centering on a romantic pairing. To be clear, I'm not shaming Ed or the Realms; he writes a good novel, sexy or not. There's nothing there to be shy about.
J
Great Wyrm Moonstone Dungeon Master
The time of the ORC has come. No OGL without irrevocability; no OGL with 'authorized version' language. #openDND
Practice, practice, practice • Respect the rules; don't memorize them • Be merciless, not cruel • Don't let the dice run the game for you