AKA Why let the rules bother us?
Don't believe I've shared this pic on Ye Old Blog yet:
So that, my friends, is a culmination of both my obsession with DragonLance, and my completist collection habits: the fourteen original TSR-published adventure modules, DL1 through DL14. DL11: Dragons of Glory is, unfortunately, missing the counters...but since I've never owned, read, or played the BattleSystem rules, that's not much skin off my nose.
Why O Why would I put out the money for such a spread? Nostalgia? Some unfulfilled desire from my childhood of wanting to own and/or run DragonLance? Morbid curiosity? My natural hoarding instinct?
Nah. I actually wanted the maps (most of these have good maps and not-too-terrible ideas for dungeons), and..(yes, this part is insane)...and some Quixotic notion that I might rehabilitate the series for my own, and others, enjoyment.
[yeah, I admit that bit IS crazy]
But MORE than either of those things, I wanted to see how this...the first, really large scale themed D&D campaign...was designed. What went into the series? How was it written to take characters from relatively low level (all apologies to the OSE crowd, but 4th - 6th is LOW level for AD&D), to a respectably HIGH level (10th-14th for the final module of the series).
I haven't finished reading them all, nor am I reading them in chronological order. The majority of the modules are new to me (though I've owned DL1 for a while, and the first four in a later compilation book) and, for the most part, I've been reading them in order of what interests me: DL6 (blood and snow), DL10 (freaky dream-stuff), DL14 (showdown with Tiamat!), and DL13 (do the PCs fight Bahamut, er, Paladine?). The original concept for DragonLance was an attempt to write a series of modules, each of which would feature ONE of the 12 dragons (metallic and chromatic) in the original Monster Manual. That there are 14 modules in the series does not mean the designers over-stepped; DL5 is a setting book (providing info on the campaign world of DragonLance) and DL11 is a boardgame/wargame with its own rules used to simulate the Dragon War (I think...haven't actually gotten around to perusing that one yet, but it seems to be a different animal from BattleSystem).
SO...setting aside those "supplemental" entries into the DL saga, we have the following adventures:
DL1: Dragons of Despair (for PCs levels 4th-6th)
DL2: Dragons of Flame (5th-7th)
DL3: Dragons of Hope (6th-8th)
DL4: Dragons of Desolation (6th-8th)
DL6: Dragons of Ice (6th-9th)
DL7: Dragons of Light (7th-9th)
DL8: Dragons of War (8th-10th)
DL9: Dragons of Deceit (8th-10th)
DL10: Dragons of Dreams (8th-10th)
DL12: Dragons of Faith (9th-10th)
DL13: Dragons of Truth (10th-13th)
DL14: Dragons of Triumph (10th-14th)
Of course, even though they're written for a particular level range, none of the adventures appear to provide enough experience points to advance the characters at the rates listed. Not that THAT matters: each module opens with a strong suggestion that the adventure be played with the pregenerated PCs provided. And those simply seem to advance "as needed," perhaps in order to fulfill the needs of "the epic story" that is DragonLance.
Rules don't really seem to be the Hickmans' strong suit...as I pointed out in prior reviews of Ravenloft, it's fairly clear that their knowledge of the actual game for which they're writing (i.e. 1st edition AD&D) has a lot of holes in it. You find it in the DL modules as well: demihumans exceeding racial limits (Tanis, Flint), characters in classes they don't qualify for (Riverwind), dual-class characters that don't qualify as such (Tika), advancement that just seems waaaay off (Caramon advances to 12th level fighter by the end of the series...1,000,001 x.p. needed...while his magic-user brother only achieves level 11...350,000-750,000 x.p....and trails 2-3 levels behind him for most of the series. What?).
But, whatever. The series has worse malfeasances...plenty of them, from "obscure death" rules, to inconsistent economies, to lack of value (in g.p. or x.p.) of new magic items, to forcing players to recite bad poetry. *sigh* Just...a lot of stuff that's not "good D&D."
[the capper, of course, is that the characters do NOT fight Tiamat...er, Takhisis...in the final adventure. Instead, in a nod to the success of Ravenloft, they make you pick from a random of selection of six possible ways of achieving victory, four of which involve an NPC doing the actual work of "defeating" the Dark Queen, and none of which involve facing her directly. What a gyp]
Even so, the IDEA of DragonLance is pretty "epic." Dragon-riding warlords leading armies of humanoids in a world-conquering jihad, spurred on by their theocrat-emperor...and all the vanilla fantasy goody-goodies forced to grow a pair or end up enslaved in an iron mine somewhere. All it needs is some human sacrifice stuff to be a bit more sword & sorcery...it's really not that far off (although I kind of hate draconians.
[also...why does Takhisis reside in the Abyss? She's still Lawful Evil (as are the dragon army officers)...what's the matter with keeping her on her rightful plane in Hell? My theory that the Hickmans never bothered to learn more than OD&D (and still use a Law vs. Chaos alignment axis) remains viable]
The rather interesting thing to do here...and, I think, the proper tactic to take...is to work BACKWARDS through these adventures in formulating the basis for a campaign. I've never written "detective fiction," but my understanding is that one must first conceive of the crime (the murder, the killer, the motives, etc.) and THEN obfuscate it such that the protagonist must follow the clues needed to unravel the thing. In this case, I must conceive of the whole Dragon War: how the armies gather, how they invade, how the nations of the world fall (and when they fall)...all BEFORE setting the PCs loose in some town or other. "Steel pieces" and "kender" are, of course, right out the window (for reasons I've written about extensively in past posts...here, for example).
[I *do* kind of like the idea of "false clerics," however]
Working backwards, using DL14 and its source material (as well as DL11's "mini-wargame") I can set up the entirety of the setting, throw down all the various "dungeons" (from the published modules) and construct my own timeline of war events, that will be going on in the background while the PCs adventure and investigate. This is something I first had a mind to do a couple years back, but was stymied by my lack of the source material...said source material now having been acquired, I could set things in motion if I really wanted.
The PROBLEM is...I really kind of love my current campaign world. And I'm not sure I want to blow it up with cataclysmic events (no pun intended). And I don't think it would just "work" to throw the DL scenario on top of the existing polities...my Red Empire is no "knights of Solamnia," and would probably rough up any dragon highlords that sought to overthrow the emperor.
Mm...
I could put my own game on hold for a bit, and just run Krynn. That's not a terrible idea, though there's a lot about the world I dislike (friendly minotaurs, walrus men, tinker gnomes, etc.). No, Krynn kind of sucks. Plus, I don't particularly like the lay of its land(mass).
Mmm...
Okay, it's late and I need to sleep (a reason, perhaps, for some of the grouchiness on display). I'll post this in the morning. Later, gators!
; )
Re: the Abyss. My understanding is that it's just the "local" name for where Takhisis lives, and not the actual Abyss from the standard D&D cosmology.
ReplyDeleteWhich is unnecessarily confusing, but not technically an error.
Indeed, and that makes sense. But originally, the chromatic dragon ("Queen of Evil Dragons") appearing in the Greyhawk supplement was Chaotic in alignment (back in the three-alignment days) so it's not incorrect for someone used to using OD&D either.
DeleteHi! This has reminded me a series in a Spanish blog where the author reviewed all the old Dragonlance modules. In the last post, he recommended reading this:
ReplyDeletehttps://writeups.letsyouandhimfight.com/purplexvi/dragonlance/
Thank you so much for the link! Yes, I've read this before and was trying to find it again (prior to writing this) and could not!
DeleteYeah, "PurpleXVI" did a great job of reviewing all these. Now that I own them all myself, I wanted to do a comparison of his/her thoughts and my own.
Thank you (again) for helping me find this!
I'm sure I mentioned this the last time you were blogging about DL, but I had a similar inclination about 5 years ago. I thought to just take the setting and dungeons and turn it into more of a sandbox setting. Ended up bumping into all the annoying setting details that I don't like, and the fact that I would need a lot more dungeons at each level range to make it a real sandbox. And I gave up. Maybe I will give it a try some day...
ReplyDeleteI *did* use the word “Quixotic,” right?
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I am kinda with you on these. I love the epicness of them. I love what they tried to do. But sadly I don't think they ever lived up to the hype AND (and maybe more to the point) I am not sure I would want to go back an tinker with them. I mean I a big epic battle against dragons back in 1986-1988, I am not sure this would live up to that.
ReplyDeleteBUT I do admire your tenacity on this and will be following to see what you do.
Oh, @Rol Baza, thanks for that link, really helpful!
Thanks, Tim. I appreciate that.
DeleteNitpick: D11 was not Battlesystem, but an entirely self-contained strategic boardgame. D8 and D12 are the modules that included Battlesystem counters and rules. The D11 game was amazingly actually quite good, with enough replayability to run several times.
ReplyDeleteYou've probably seen it, but Justin Alexander also did a series of tweets (blogposts?) evaluating most or all of the adventure modules.
I have not (I haven’t read much of the Alexandrian), but I’ll have to take a look. Thanks!
DeleteBeat me to it. I was a big fan of Battlesystem, personally. Then again, my first set of miniatures rules was Legions of teh Petal Throne, so I've always identified TSR with minis games more than most people. Fond memories of seven year old me puzzling over LPT - and mostly spoiled now that I know the author was neo-Nazi filth.
DeleteYeah, the bit about Barker is tough.
DeleteI've never used BattleSystem. I had friends in high school who used it (and enjoyed it) for playing through the "H" ("Bloodstone") series of TSR adventures, but I wasn't a part of that and never saw it in action.
I actually ran the DL8 Battlesystem scenario once among the 3 different--though briefly combined--DL campaigns I was DMing--even made a literal sandbox for the battlefield--but the campaigns fizzled in DL9, DL10, & DL12, right before the next battlefield.
Delete(I hauled out the Battlesystem chits again this year for the culminating battle of a 5-year campaign that certainly was an homage [rip-off] to the Krynn conflict, although I used *By this Axe* mini rules this go-round.)
Whoa whoa, there, easy on those hot takes!
ReplyDeleteWhat on earth is there to dislike about walrus men?
LOL. Walrus men are fine, Anders. Hell, as a six year old Star Wars fan, one of my favorite Christmas gifts under the tree was the iconic Cantina action figures, including "Walrus Man" (I think their canonical species name is "aqualish").
DeleteBut DL has a habit of cutting out traditional sentient humanoids (of the D&D game)...which is fine, prune the kitchen sink setting!...and then ADDING their own sentient humanoids (like thanoi or shadowfolk or pirate minotaurs or whatever) ONLY for "plot purpose" or (as with the walrus men) as beefy cannon fodder for the PCs to cut down. With giant hit dice! *THAT* is a very typical Hickman-design trait (see, for example, the SIX HD gypsy/bandits in Ravenloft). It's clumsy and distasteful and...I believe...ineffective for DMs that want to run AD&D using the rules of the game.
So...the IDEA of "walrus men" in a fantasy world? Sure, that's cool. The implementation/execution of that concept in DragonLance? Not really a fan.
I'll try to turn down the heat on my "hot takes."
; )
I've used Tony Bath's blueprint you referenced in Learning From The Oldest School to great advantage in my own campaign. It's remarkably easy for me to know what's going on with all 93 individual "movers and shakers" NPCs so far identified in this campaign with Bath's approach. Rather than abandon or blow up your current campaign in order to fit your backwards engineering of the epic war events into it, why not use Bath's approach to start that moving forward from where you are?
ReplyDeleteThe advantages to this are that 1) you don't need to ever risk steering your players in any particular direction because of events that need to happen and 2) you have the fun of watching these events unfold from the actions of your campaign's prominent families without know where it all will go or when. Plus, 3), it won't be Hickman-y at all!
That's pretty much exactly what I was thinking, Stirling. In fact, my intention this morning was to sit down with my campaign setting and see which nations might map to various Krynn factions. The nice thing about the Krynn war is that it takes place over something like a year of game time? So it's not like it would (necessarily) be a long-lasting event/scenario.
DeleteTwo challenges immediately present themselves:
1) Leaving Krynn behind means leaving behind a few setting things I like (for example, "false clerics")...and *some* of the various adventure motivations based on the setting history (isolationist dwarves and elves, dragon lance technology, etc.).
2) The size of Ansalon (the main continent on which the Dragon War takes place) is a bit larger than my campaign world. The DL wiki says it's roughly 1300 miles EW by 1000 miles NS, which would take me halfway through B.C. (starting with my world's southern border) and farther east than the Dakotas. Now, probably I'm just making mountains out of molehills here (clearly a lot of the Ansalon continent is frozen tundra, for example, and I could just throw all that into Canada), but I worry slightly about the timeline of the war and conquest of the Dragon Armies...not to mention the need to come up with new nations (east of Montana and Idaho) for the Highlords to conquer. In my own world, that's all fairly untamed wilderness...though, again, this is probably a non-issue (put the blasted plains of Neraka and the "dragon isles" over in THAT area). But still...I can see possible obstacles.
HOWEVER...I do still like the idea.
; )
Yeah. Actually after reviewing the Ansalon maps in DL14 and DL5 (DL14 does NOT, unfortunately, have a scale) I see that most of the "game area' of the modules would fit quite readily into my campaign world. Things will still have to be moved around a bit (Washington is in the northern hemisphere, not the south), but Solamnia is actually a good fit for WA proper, Abanasinia can work in northern Oregon, and the "Dragon lands" (Estwilde, Neraka, and such) can just be Idaho and western Montana, with all the "eastern stuff" being out-of-sight, out-of mind.
DeleteThe southern wastelands of Idaho (Craters of the Moon, etc.) I already had earmarked for my reworked Desert of Desolation...that can still be a stand-in for the "Plains of Dust" (not a whole lot happening there during the war anyway). Icewall Castle *does* still need to be moved up into Canada.
Yeah, it's all pretty workable with a bit of juggling. Fun stuff.
; )
I'll make the simple suggestion that you build an introduction scenario in your present world, which involves a "gate" into your DragonLance material. Something like Richard Corben's "Den." As the players follow the introduction, it gives you time to build up your DL game; then, once they're whisked off to the other plane of existence, or whatever, this gives you time to work on your present campaign.
ReplyDeleteEventually, they achieve whatever goals there are in DL, pick up the whatnot McGuffin that's needed in your regular campaign, return, wrap up the introduction adventure and all's done neat and tidy.
I did this for a year back in 1986, running my characters through a series of adventures I built for the map of Minaria, from the old game Divine Right.
That's not a bad idea. I think sometimes folks forget (well, sometimes *I* forget) that D&D offers a LOT of possibilities like this. Back in the late 80s, we definitely had extradimensional gates that would take characters to other settings/worlds (specifically, we spent time running characters in Boot Hill, the Marvel Superheroes universe, and somewhere (I think) that was present day England).
DeleteThat being said, I kind of like the idea of a large-scale dragon war touching off conflict amongst the various nations of my setting. I would not run it as something the PCs have to solve (i.e. I do not want to run "DragonLance" as a story with the players in the roles of "Heroes")...I'd just like to see how they interact with the war...perhaps they join the dragon armies, or become war profiteers, or wage a guerrilla war in their own small corner of the setting. Lots of interesting possibilities for involvement.
I do not know how strong exactly is Red Empire in your setting, but if it doesn't have an army of dragon-riders, then the invasion of such an army will cause a lot of problems. On the other hand, if it does have such an army, then maybe a civil war begins with half of the army supporting some pretender. Or maybe the invasion targets another realm, a far-away ally of the empire, so the empire is unable to send its entire army to support its ally, but can send some adventurers...
DeleteThe Red Empire military forces are pretty potent, especially its palatial champions, the Bogatyr. However, they don't have much in the way of "air power" (at least not as currently constituted) and, yes, dragons are likely to be a problem...though not an unstoppable one. In DL terms, they're quite a bit more organized than the Knight of Solamnia, and as such should put up an even stiffer resistance than what is displayed in the novels.
DeleteMaybe. Who knows...I'm still mulling it over.
; )
If you put off the breaking out of the war until the characters reach name level (maybe just "foreshadowing" it now, slowly aligning/re-aligning your campaign's polities with different factions) the characters could take larger roles in the conflict, bringing their own forces to bear in the fight. Just a thought.
ReplyDeleteThat's an excellent idea! The players' best PCs are all approaching their max levels (because they chose to make demihumans with level limits), and they've already created new, low-level PCs with a little more potential...HOWEVER, they *are* also still playing the demihumans, and I am hoping that when they "retire" they become prominent fixtures of the campaign.
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I'm always interested in adventure design and wonder how much of what was actually played by the Hickmans in their campaign made it into the published adventures.
ReplyDeleteIf you are going to dissect the modules to see how the campaign should've developed then that's a good (but long) project.
I'm looking forward to a winter series of blogposts already.