Thank you for watching! Do you feel like the original Dragonlance game mechanics were too challenging for new players? Have you played AD&D with the original rules? Leave a comment below.
I DM'd several of the original modules back in the 80's. If you tried to run them as written it could be overwhelming so you just used the things that you liked and left the encumbering rules and mechanics behind. I still use some of them now in 5e. Chapter 4 of Hoard of the Dragon Queen was weak in my opinion so I pulled it for parts of DL1 and set it in the High Moor and tied it into a character's backstory about finding a lost temple. It was my player's most memorable part of the campaign and they could not tell that it was not part of the written storyline. I think much of the old DL content is amazing and with a little work and creativity can be ported over to 5e nicely.
Not remotely. And yes. The difference between Dragonlance AD&D and AD&D was mostly reading. If you didn't feel like reading, and learning how the world worked, you could still play a standard character and nothing in particular would change that couldn't be handled by the DM.
I think you made some fair and accurate points, but you also made some misleading statements as well. As far as the setting specific rules go, they were an improvement on 1st edition rules. Setting specific rules that change the general rules already existed before Dragonlance.
@@craigtucker1290 yep and adventure specific pregen characters existed in D&D boxed edition adventures as well as many of the competing game systems at the time. Even AD&D was just GG's house rules for D&D (he says as much in the preamble).
"Sturm's sun shattered" no character death has ever hit me as hard as Sturm's, even though it's foreshadowed hard. Dragonlance was my second fantasy series after Redwall, and I read it at a young and tender age. Devoured all the paperbacks for 25 cents each from the used book store I'd bike to, and saved my lawn mowing money to buy the D&D books. I didn't have anyone to play D&D with, so my horrible self-insert characters went through the modules alongside the Heroes of the Lance and it was an important escape for this lonely nerdy kid. Dragonlance deserves a modern video game, perhaps an MMO or a party based RPG like Dragon Age.
Whoa, same here. I started with Redwall, then got into Narnia, and then Dragonlance. Then after that nothing ever quite reached Dragonlance heights for me.
Dragonlance WAS ADnD to me. Devoured all the novels as a kid. Saved up, biked to the store, and bought the DL box set. What made me fall in LOVE with it was the complexity of the world and its unique classes and races. Loved how the gods felt like the greek gods to me, intimately involved with the affairs of mortals.
The thing I noticed most when Dragonlance first released was the massive increase in the quality of the art. In partcular the cover art for the modules. Standards for D&D art were never quite the same again.
I'm looking at Death of Sturm hanging on my wall right over my desk as I type this. Elmore shaped a lot of D&D imagery. Dragonlance definitely pushed D&D in a lot of new directions, but I will say from my perspective (I started playing in '79) it was just someone else's homeworld. We had our own back then with similar customizations and innovations. Dragonlance just got published and novelized.
Early TSR art was terrible and uninspiring, but the boom in quality and quantity really defined a golden era for D&D. Too bad the art slipped with WotC, though I think it is getting better again...
What was wonderful was that Krynn had a history. A very dark history, and you're starting at the end of a very broken line and have to learn about that history while you play. They also didn't try hard to explain things. This thing happened and no one knows why. Sort of the precursor to what TV shows do by establishing a background mythology that drives the show.
I usually end up rereading a few of them every few years. I still have all my old paperbacks. Now that I'm getting old and my eyes suck, Audible is making a fortune off me buying my way through the audiobooks. Escaping into Krynn with the Companions saved my sanity in 2020. Though the amount of times I cooked up some Otiks spiced fried potatoes definitely didn't helpy waistline. 🥔
Here's my perspective: Dragonlance is a highly specialized setting. There was once a time when DM's were encouraged to create their own highly defined worlds. Each with their own limitations and features ("Okay there are no Warlocks or Barbarians in this world and if you want to be a Paladin you must be only a specific alignment serving one diety...also there are no Elves but you can play a Hobgoblin as a character option, etc etc etc") a setting should reflect the vision of the DM, and not every option or 'build' in the various books might be suitable for what the DM is trying to present.
This is what made the game hard for most of the public but great for insiders. D&D basic should have been a beer and pretzel totally built out world... while, Advanced should have been a core set of rules and creative sandbox to build your own ideas with.
That's a good point: A lot of 1st ed AD&D (except for Oriental Adventures) felt like it had a kitchen sink approach: your game should have monks! and psionics! and orcs! and planar travel! While Dragonlance said in an official product: you can design and limit your setting however you like. You can say gold is worthless and what god you worship makes a mechanical difference to your cleric PC who isn't just a wizard with a different spell list and is powerless if the gods aren't listening. Your halflings and gnomes can be different and there are no monks or paladins or druids or orcs, and you can have PCs who care about things other than killing monsters, amassing loot, and building strongholds. It's not that you couldn't do this before (and plenty of DMs did), but Dragonlance gave you official licence to do so.
Amen to that! Since 3rd edition most players think it's their inalienable right to use everything ever published to make their characters. Whenever I tell them, "No, you can't play that" they act like I'm an oppressor of their freedom.
You know this is a really good point. I have hated most homebrewed settings I have ever heard of. Most DMs aren’t very good at making creative settings. No offense intended because neither am I, but to do it well is hard. For the most part it becomes a too cute sort of thing highlighting the DMs favorite things. That sort of nonsense is certainly, a big part of why I have always hated just about everything I have heard about Dragonlance.
I dont think Dragonlance broke D&D. You didnt HAVE to play the chronicles modules. With the info given, you could run a very immersive home brew game, which I have been doing since the late '80s. At the moment, I am helping my 10yo son play in his first foray in Dragonlance as a Knight of Solamnia, which he fell in love with after playing my old Knight character I first started with. His mum is the DM, so its also a family bonding thing, especially if my 11yo daughter graces us with her presence... I think all the modules did, was not so much railroad players, though it did feel that way from tme to time, but a good DM can alter that if they are creative enough, but they did give you a sense and scope to the game, and to Krynn itself. But thats just my 2 Steels worth.
You bring up a great point! Modules can be setting rather than the narrative. We are free to play the game however we want. My intention was to point out the evolution and differentiation of AD&D with Dragonlance. Keep up the good work with your family gaming, mine is more board game centered than RPG.
@@michaelmclaughlin261 I would love to, but at this stage in the game, they are packed along with all my other books/novels I would love for them to read. But definitely open to the idea... Especially if they were receptive to it.
Didn't play the Dragonlance stuff but read a couple of the novels but Larry Elmore knocked out the best illustrations (and one for Star Frontiers with a cunningly placed signature). Met him in the 90s at a game convention, really nice guy.
Larry Elmore is the best. Every time I’ve seen him at dragoncon he is extremely friendly and approachable and seems like he truly remembers you. Class act and definitely changed the art of DND.
@@DLSagaThe Four Horsemen, as they were know mesmerized my teenage mind with thier fantastic paintings. Larry Elmore, Jeff Easly, Clyde Caldwell and Keith Parkinson. Amazing artists.
You will all bow to Raistlin Majere when he's evicted that fat five headed dragon Takisis. ;-) Gandalf beards are getting old. Give gold skin an hour glass eyes a chance. These books would make the best Netflix series. X
@@brettloo7588 It could work if it was done in anime. Record of Lodoss War is the most faithful D&D based story out there. But I'd rather see it set in the Forgotten Realms than Dragonlance.
Can someone recount this scene? I don't quite remember it. Its been decades since I read the books. Lauralanthalassa was always my favorite character. :)
The Dragonlance Saga was a much needed escape for a lot of nerdy kids. I still remember the first time "I" met Tasslehoff, his rapier-tongue, and his hoopak. Glorious.
Weird thing: DL were my favorite D&D novels, but I was never interested in playing a DL campaign, while I disliked the FR books but absolutely love playing in the world.
I read the books and the Dragonlance campaign book was my first AD&D gaming, but I did enjoy moving over to Forgotten Realms. It just felt like playing our own stories, not someone else's. Even though we never played the DL modules.
I think it was an absolutely wonderful inclusion to turn D&D into a storytelling adventure instead of a treasure-finding death-fest.... not that that isn't also very fun and I learned that way or played that for years. But I started playing in 1979 and then after about a year, the DL novels first hit and they swept me away in such a way that eventually my games I ran started twisting more into epic story just as much as epic treasure-seeking death fests. 😁 I've even played at the table with Margaret Weiss and with Tracy Hickman! Super, super cool memories!!! Thanks for the vid.👍
One of the first ever Fantasy books I read was Legend of Huma. I had no exposure to Tanis and his friends but I was hooked. It was actually interesting reading the series with the "flawed" timeline of the relative age past since the age of Huma
Yeah, I agree, Raistlin was the GOAT. I'm not sure which book it was, when Raistlin derisively declares magic rings and baubles as the trappings of "lesser mages". At that moment, the character, the book, and later the series, had my complete attention.
Everything in AD&D was Greyhawk and its variants. Dragonlance introduced the concept that the world is not set, and homebrew campaigns could be more than Lahnkmar knock-offs.
@@mikekennedy5879 I think we did some Blackmoor campaigns, we might have done a Greyhawk campaign and I know some of our stuff was Thieves' World components before the Dragonlance D&D stuff got published. Some of those Thieves' World inspired custom campaigns definitely stretched the world for us.
DL was always my go-to setting. It also gave us conflicted villains, like Kitiara, or just breathtaking character arcs, like Laurana. Amazing characters who were complex and lifelike; their choices understandable and relateable, with many bittersweet moments, not the usual Happy Ever After endings.
As a young D&D player and a first time Dungeon Master, 'DragonLance' was a hard sell to players at the time. Even I certainly didn't understand all the rule changes involved. Hell... we didn't even COMPLETELY understand all the rules and nuances of the AD&D or 2nd Edition rules. There were so many. But I loved DragonLance for it's epic storytelling, and I insisted on a campaign in the world. The best rule I have learned for roleplaying games (and life in general for that matter): If you don't know what the rule is and need to use it fast..... make it up. But... use common sense, and ideally it should result in enjoyment for all. ;)
Dragonlance got me into D&D in high school. 28 years later, I am still playing. This is such a nostalgic trip for me do to a place of wonderful carefree memories, curiosity and excitement. Thank you for putting this together!
I love the quote you finished with, I think that everyone should make sure to remember that, having a good time telling stories of high adventure with oure friends is what we're here for!
I've always said that Dragonlance is a great setting for stories, but a pain in the ass to play. The books made me rethink everything I knew as a young boy about my emotions when reading fantasy. When Flint died, I lost it. The world never appealed to my players due to the low magic setting. A +1 longsword in DL is legendary while the same sword in Forgotten Realms is what they hand out to city guards in Neverwinter.
@@DLSaga I totally get that. We played in multiple settings (Ravenloft, Planescape, Greyhawk and Darksun), but they just couldn't get into DL. They loved the books but not the gaming world part and that of course falls on me for not bringing it alive enough for them.
I read these out loud to my (not really young) children each night before going to sleep as a family. We are on the Second book now. They are enthralled and love them. Good laughs and good cries. They have opened up some surprisingly good discussion on life, morality, love, sex, and overall concepts of why people act the way they do.
Way back in the formative years of D&D, I was lucky enough to be part of the MIT Strategic Gaming Society (MITSGS). Luminaries like Glen Blacow were pushing the bounds of what the game could be and inventing new ways of doing things. The innovations we prompted were so far reaching that E. Gary Gygax warned gamers in general about "upsetting the delicate balance of his game, by inappropriate rules modifications". Yeah, in 1979, in The Dragon magazine. Things like critical hits, skills, optional and variant player character classes... We emphasized role-playing and story over hack-n-slash. What we were NOT was sanctioned by TSR. So when Dragonlance appeared as a game setting, we were all, "Interesting, but not revolutionary."
DragonLance certainly did make a lot of changes to the standard assumptions about many D&D-related things when it came out, but not all of them were good or well-received at the time, and none of them were ever intended to be applied to settings outside of Krynn. I think what I enjoyed most about DragonLance was “Leaves from the Inn of the Last Home”, specifically, the recipes. I cannot tell you over the years how many variations of “Otik’s Spiced Potatoes” I’ve made, or how many skillets full of them I’ve downed. And the first time I made Fizban’s Fireball Chili was a memorable experience! But, I wouldn’t say that DragonLance was even particularly unusual for its level of detail or immersion even in its day. Gamers of that era commonly took their inspiration from their favorite epic fantasy novelists and devoted great effort to worldbuilding. Every gamer I knew in the 1980s did so, and everyone had their “house rules” that departed from the AD&D rulebooks.
In addition to greatly increasing the polish/artwork/presentation of the modules, I also recall the dungeon and overland maps being much detailed and immersive too. I never actually played one of the modules but I remember pouring over the modules multiple times. So many epic ‘encounters’ to set up, and the modules really drove home the idea of an epic campaign where the players were heroes. Contrast with Isle of Dread which also had epic encounters, but relied on the players to write their own story. Even today I prefer games with a story/purpose vs. games like rogue-likes with only a general purpose. I don’t like choose your own adventure books because I feel a little to constrained, so some freedom in how to approach or fight the battles is necessary, but Dragonlance Modules we’re some of the first I recall that allowed the players freedom to explore while still being part of a heroic story. (Another great module that comes to mind along these lines was Red Hand of Doom by James Jacobs and Richard Baker.). 🥦🦖
Great video - but it feels you barely scratched the surface with the impact DL had on the game. Really great concept for a video and finely presented - thank you!
Just stumbled upon your videos. The quality is amazingly high for a smaller channel (I hope that comes off as a compliment). Subscribed and I wish you the best in your continuation of your channel.
We didn't use the supplied characters in major roles, only as NPCs. We also waited for the full series to come out before playing the majority of the story. Knowing the full story allowed the DM to veer from the rather railroading path. Since our Characters were brought through from another universe, they were not subject to many of the world's own changes to the rules.
Dragonlance is so iconic, that the picture used at the start is so easily recognized; Kitiara standing over the body of Sturm Brightblade, on the High Clerists Tower, when the Dragonarmies were advancing on Palanthas
There's actually two separate Dragonlance trilogies of games in addition to a dragonrider flight simulator and war of the lance strategy game. But your sentiment is spot on!
I remember the dungeon slogs that carried over into ad&d from the early days. In some ways I miss them but the idea of novel like world building brings so much joy. It is like arpg vs MMORPG. Both can be fun.
Dragonlance brought a depth and richness to AD&D that immediately drew me in. It was magical, and my favorite AD&D realm. It was there that I felt most at home - up until the Age of Mortals. That twist completely ruined the entire setting. I still have the annotated Chronicles and Legends, and go back and read or flip through every few years.
I can appreciate that. Fifth Age was a massive change to Dragonlance, not only in game mechanics. Personally I like how it ended with the Dark Disciple Trilogy. A bit of bringing it all back around by Margaret Weis.
Yeah like most campaign settings, there's a point where they evolve past what the "interesting" parts were, and then get artificially stretched out to sell more books.
Dragonlance the best novel series ever,been a fan since day one when it was first written 30 odd years ago.Still have the original paperbacks on the shelf i bought in the 80's.
@@DLSaga bit of both,but when it came out in the 80's i went straight out and got it on the recommendation of the shop owner who knew when it was being released and i always read the trioligy once a year and have done nver missing a year and always in the autumn lol of course.
It's a shame that later editions of D&D didn't keep the DL alignment-tracker thing, since that idea seems pretty cool. Also, the way Tinker Gnomes influenced how all gnomes would be portrayed moving forward is similar to Dak'kon from Planescape Torment who did that, but for the Githzerai.
When I started rol games, We got inspired by Dragonlance but I didin't play in Krynn, we created our own world (with the available minis we had) . During the year we played in Krynn but with homebrew rules. DL is another great RPG.
This was fascinating to learn about. The link seems obvious but I never knew how my favorite book series was so involved with the dungeons and dragons.
While I understand what you are saying, I would say that Unearthed Arcana and the game changes in that book were more effective in breaking AD&D 1.5. Dragonlance added some variety to our games, but we added story elements (including alternate currencies) from Thieves' World and Briarwood early on and later had the majority of campaigns in the Forgotten Realms. Our Dragonlance campaigns, the few we had, were more of a novelty of novelization as every book character was like a celebrity in the campaign. Used by the DM creatively your alignment was just as effective and tracked as the spectrum of Krynn. I can see where playing the campaigns in order and opening up magic and abilities might be fun, but we just had the handbook. Consider how I tend to feel about 5th edition, you are correct in saying that adding a bunch of playable monster races and super special races probably lead to breaking the game. Thanks for this
Just spitballing a theory here: Whatever the setting's sourcebooks and modules influence on the game's mechanics and design, I think the Dragonlance novels were far more impactful to D&D's role in the mass culture. D&D originally comes from this stew of medieval wargaming, pulp fantasy including Conan, Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser, and Moorcock's Eternal Champion stories, Lovecraft, pulp SF and science fantasy, Poul Anderson and Andre Norton's 1960s/70s fantasy stories, and of course Tolkien. But by the early 1980s, the dominant form of fantasy fiction in the mass culture was shifting towards epic fantasy. Less Conan-esque sword & sorcery, 70s trippy surrealist fantasy, or fairy-tale derived fantasy, and more Tolkien-esque grand quests against the Dark Lord in a sprawling secondary world like in Terry Brooks and David & Leigh Eddings novels. For real: the fantasy section of the bookstore from the late 1980s well into the early 2000s was like 90% epic fantasy, until A Song of Ice and Fire and "grimdark" made sword and sorcery and "dark" fantasy more popular and then urban fantasy exploded. Dragonlance firmly plants the Dungeons & Dragons flag in that epic fantasy subgenre, but still remaining D&D: the characters are a large adventuring party with defined races and classes who behave like D&D characters (Raistlin has to memorize spells that come straight out of the PHB, Tasselhoff picks every pocket he sees, etc.), and Krynn is a distinct secondary world with its own history and flavour. And it helps that the Dragonlance novels were pretty good fantasy novels for their time. Someone reading the Belgariad or Shannara books could look easily move on to Chronicles and Legends and enjoy them and maybe want to see what this Dungeons & Dragons stuff is all about. And if the Dragonlance novels hadn't paved the way and been so successful, would we have had the flood of 90s Forgotten Realms novels and other campaign setting books? I don't think Dragonlance has much appeal as a game setting: anecdotally, while a lot of other Gen Xers have fond memories of the DL novels, I don't encounter a lot of D&D players who've actually played in a DL game, except maybe a few grognards who maybe played through some of the original modules. While it seems like thousands and thousands of gamers have played in Greyhawk, FR, or Nentir Vale.
Great thoughts, and on point! I have played mostly in DL with my gaming, but I may be a minority. I only tried playing the campaign modules in 3.5ed though. The rest was all our own story, since we were all intimately familiar with the Novels and wanted to be in the setting, not relive the novels. I do thing D&D owes a lot to DL for propelling the game in the early 90's. Thank you for sharing!
For me it has a LOT of appeal as a setting. Nowadays I'm preferring it to the other "standard AD&D fantasy worlds" (i.e. Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms). I love that it takes bits and pieces from several different sources. It takes the "Dark Lord ascending" global structure of LotR (high fantasy), but has many influences from Conan the Barbarian (low fantasy)... it has less magic (but still more than Tolkien) and a harsher world than FR, more prevalent barbarian figures, etc. It explains its full cosmological rules, finally giving sense to alignments (Good, Evil and Neutrality are forces akin to gravity, that are even beyond the gods themselves, and have its own rules of interaction). It gives great examples as to how breaking the balance can screw the world (like when the forces of Good triumphed in the last Dragon War, only to give way to the obtuse and fanatical rule of Istar). Contrary to FR and GH, it has restrictions that give it more personality. It's not kitchen sink, "anything goes", fantasy world. The origin of most sapient species is explained. It's a focused fantasy world... but it can also be used as a sandbox. There're many places that aren't detailed, or even described (at least, prior to D&D 3.5). The beautiful but chaotic map from Tales of the Lance gives a lot of very evocative names to sites that appear nowhere else, that aren't described.
My buddy had a Deities and Demigods with the Melnibonean mythos + one other I can't recall. My copy did not. He ended up throwing his books out along with my MM1. What a shame.
I did what any good DM did... used what worked and ignored the rest, incorporating it into my own fantasy world. Having said that, I really did enjoy the novels.
So cool story. When I was a kid my parents bought some “dragon books” for their fantasy loving kid (me). A couple of the Dragon codexes And the complete Guide to Dragon riding. I loved these books and they molded my expectation w/ fantasy. Then later we found the Dragon lance movie. Fast forward to high school, I saw the dragonlance series at the library but never read any (now I regret it) but it wasn’t till years later when I discovered D&D did I put the two things together! I was exposed to d&d long before I ever played a game! All thanks to Dragonlance!
@@DLSaga not with those modules. Where characters are protected by plot armor and important scenes where the agency is taken away from players. We literally quit buying the modules and just read the books because why play a module when it's a book. Amazing modules if you ignore the "rules"
I started to play adyd with 2ed in the 89, never cared about dragonlance world as we played in our homemade world, but now i see that a lot of 2ed things come from thia setting campaign
I liked AD&D when it was introduced to me, but I saw it for it was at the time, a hack-n-slash game. I perused the Dragonlance source book in the game shop, then found Dragons of Autumn Twilight. From then on it was Dragonlance or nothing. It was a completely different game that did what it intended, I found myself immersed in an exciting world of adventure, exactly what I wanted from AD&D. Friends not into Dragonlance brought me in on Greyhawk or Forgotten Realms a time or two but... it wasn't the same. It was like drinking a soda that had been left in the fridge for a day... flat. I still remember getting in trouble at work because I was reading Dragons of autumn Twilight on a 15-minute break and lost track of time, like 45 minutes of it! Ha ha, yeah... good times, good times. In fact, I'm about to start The War of Lance -- DL1 through DL14 -- starting this Sunday! As DM, boy am I gonna take them for a ride!
I truly believe Dragon Lance, Tracy & Laura Hickman added so much to D&D. My brother went from have little interest inAD&D to massive interest thanks to Ravenloft. My whole group bonded over Krynn and we have being begging WOTC for 5E material. We are all stoked for the new adventure. I also think Dragon Lance emphasis on story over just dungeon delving paved the way for critics role to shine
"'til then, unknown" Yeah, not exactly unknown to the fandom. The AD&D fandom of the time were also the fantasy/scifi/horror genre fans, of the time. And fan conventions had been embracing filk singing and such for decades, at that point. And, without knowing the details, I'll bet Hickman was a fan con attendee, back then. So, really, it was just a strong fan tendency which was brought into "official" light. New to the game, but not to the fandom.
Dragonlance brought so many good memories of our group of friends playing That game helped me to practice my English (since Im French Canadian) I played with a group composed of English speaking friends. Makes me want to read the books
Good vid. But I'm not sure I agree with all the conclusions. The first modules to really start adding new regions to worlds are probably the Basic and Expert modules. B3 (the original, recalled version) introduces a whole region of Glantri. B4 brings us a city lost in the Ylari desert. Then X1, X2, X3 and X4 all give us new parts of what would later be known as Mystara, and they all pre-date the Dragonlance modules. As for prestige classes, they paladin, druid, avenger and knights as presented in the D&D companion set (as opposed to the versions of some of those that appear in AD&D) are distinctly prestige classes. This was published months before DL1 (January as opposed to March). Modules had player handouts from at least the initial publication of X1 in 1981. So... Great video, but you're kind of missing the fact that much of the innovation from TSR at the time was happening in Dungeons and Dragons, NOT in Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. This was a trend that would continue through much of the 1980s.
Thank you for the clarifications! The world building you are speaking to was not part of a cohesive campaign world but the generic prime material. They weren’t focused on a cohesive overarching story that wove together either but short series at best. Prestige classes you mention were not unlockable but selectable at start, correct? The whole evolution of the game is very interesting.
@@DLSaga No, the prestige classes (as we would call them now) in the Companion set were unlockable. 9th level or above, specific class, alignment and roleplay requirements. There are four of them (Paladin. Knight. Avenger and Druid) there in the Companion set. Add in the two part-formed classes in the Masters set and the approach that the classic game took to character class is more about "these are the ones in the book, but here's how you make your own if you want", and you can either take the material from the Companion set as is and thats all of it, or you can use it as a basis for how to do more.
Nice video. I've been playing AD&D since it was first released and most of the previous comments have covered anything I wanted to say except for 1 thing. Halflings weren't "completely transformed into Kenders" - It was a decision by the authors to simply not have Halflings on the world of Krynn so the Kenders were created to be similar to, but not actually, Halflings. By the way I, and most of my players, absolutely despise Kenders lol
I quickly learned to despise kender as well, because of their propensity to ruin games by creating disharmony among the players, and for doing stupid stuff that absolutely destroys the roleplay that other characters are trying to do. And when the player is asked why they're doing that stuff, when they know it's going to be an issue, they always seem to have the same response - "That's how kenders are, I'm just roleplaying my character!"
All of my original DragonLance novels are signed by Margaret Weis. She was very nice offering to do so when I inquired on her site about hard back replacements for the two Dragon’s Gate books I thought I had lost. I have all of their novels where the collaborated. They are a way to connect to the 80’s...
Those books defined fantasy for me. The first module blew me away with it's presentation and extra preparation work. Those isometric maps were awesome! Total game changer for me.
"up until then, a very Hack'n'slash game": depends on the group, many modules were and many weren't, e.g. U1-3 Saltmarsh series was distinctly not, for example, D3 was not (if you tried hack'n'slash you'd be dead very quickly), Desert of Desolation was not (though only Oasis of the White Palm had any lengthy roleplay)... Though there were plenty of examples of previous hack'n'slash modules (Tomb of the Lizard King), DL obviously was extremely story oriented. DL1 was great (but we were bemused by having to play PCs given to us). The rest were more a visual feast than anything else. That art was awesome.
Started playing @ age 8 with my older sister, never just did "hack n slash' we made dungeons with stories. (Yes the first ones were lame, we was young) loved when Lance came out too
I really enjoyed the novels I read - Hickman’s fantasy world creation is top shelf. But our group loathed the substantive changes it made to AD&D as a game, and we quickly abandoned it. Preestablishing lore made the system as constraining as MERP or 40K (or a video game for that matter). And for our group, building our own mythos during a campaign a once or twice a year was one of the chief draws.
@@DLSaga No, we haven’t. I’ve had the same core gaming group since HS - even through college, grad school, kids, etc - and I guess we have always been fogeys. We mostly stick to the (admittedly sometimes clunky) AD&D 2nd Ed. rules - unless we’re venturing into something else, like Pathfinder, Gloomhaven, etc. I do have several of the Hickmans audiobooks and enjoy them.
I think AD&D first offpsring was Greyhawk, then Toril, Ravenloft, and Krynn came about. Many of the named spells came from the first characters of Greyhawk. Further offshoots of AD&D came about, such as Dark Sun, Kara-Tur, Al Qadim, Planescape, and many others, including AD&D settings based on various games, such as Diablo 2 (Sanctuary), Magic: The Gathering (Zendikar), and Warcraft (Azeroth). But even then, there were influences that inspired AD&D before it was conceived, such as Middle Earth, Erewhon, The Land, Ghormenghast, and Hyboria. The most recent I have seen incorporating D&D settings has been the SCP foundation based Crimson Chains, which has an almost perpendicular alignment system to Dragonlance, in that order and chaos are important while the concept of good and evil is secondary.
I played 1st Ed. AD&D, we moved on about the time DragonLance appeared. It didn't feel like real D&D. TSR was losing its way a bit, too many different campaign worlds, too many bad quality modules, abandoning its original framework. Too many paperback novels.
@@DLSaga Besides cleric spheres, did anything from Dragonlance Adventures transition over to 2ED? Maybe kender and tinker gnomes eventually informed core D&D halflings and gnomes somewhat, but I don't think that really takes root until 3E. 2ED halflings and gnomes aren't very different from their 1ED versions. Am I missing anything else?
A great topic and would at least love to see a Xak Tsaroth board game, much like Castle Ravenloft or Legend of Drizzt. I've never played D&D itself but enjoy reading the 5th edition books all the same, and it would be nice to add a Dragonlance book to the collection.
That is a great idea! There are two Dragonlance board games, self titled and Mage Stones, but a game in the style of the Castle Ravenloft game would rule! I have that board game and love it.
@@DLSaga Just checked out those two games and they do look rather splendid. Ravenloft is indeed a lovely game and couldn't help but purchase it with Curse of Strahd for inspiration.
These books are fantastic, and I had no idea people still read them or cared about them. I've been happy to see the rise and proliferation of D&D and similar games like Magic: the Gathering. This kind of imagination use is missing a lot in today's world. Is love to see an Avengers-style movie series for the main books.
I ran the modules back in the day but never had the source book so it had no real effect on us. No special wizard rules, didn't use Minotaurs. Did have a Kenders. It was just a module set for me - one we never finished because my players got tired of "being railroaded" around number 8.
Love the setting. Devoured as many Dragonlance books as I could when I was in high school, and am currently in a 20+ year game that has Krynn as the pivotal point for the multiverse/spelljamming world. Our DM has made Krynn into the prison of the primal manifestation of Chaos, and it must remain in balance in order to keep Chaos imprisoned there. It was one of the reasons the Cataclysm happened; the balance of the world had shifted too much to good, and it had to be rectified before Chaos was released to destroy everything. It's also the reason why higher level characters are so restricted on Krynn and shunted offworld as soon as they become too high level in a way that disrupts the balance.
I found Dragonlance to defeat the purpose of D&D. The point of D&D was for the players to make their own stories up. Sure... most modules of the time were limited in scope (area, setting, encounters) and fairly linear, but that wasn't the point. You had really open world modules where players could do anything, even if there were set encounters. Even in the large series modules such as Slavers or Against the Giants... players still had choices. And in many settings... I didn't care of my players went completely off the rails and headed north, where I created everything from scratch as a DM, or where the encounters reacted to the players. Yes, there was a story... it was the combined choices and experiences of the players and their characters. If they went even and burned a town down... we have a wanted criminal campaign. If they wanted to start a trading business... sure. Want to deal with the slavers by trickery... go for it. That's your story. Dragonlance to play was awful. Encounters made no sense unless you played the pre-gens. Nor did you have a tie to the world. Even with pre-gens, you needs a butt-load of them to play. Made no sense with 3 or 4 players unless the DM was running everyone else. The game played like a movie and one the DM had to railroad the heck out of because it wanted really big scenes to play out like a book. It had limited replay. It switched characters starting in other modules. Had so many NPCs it wasn't funny. Took so much time to adapt that it wasn't worth it. It was also darn hard to figure out why encounters needed to play that way and hard for players to figure out what was going on without a lot of backstory -- i.e. read the books. Why is a goblin talking to me in the first scene? I loved the art work, writing, and story as a DM to read it. But you'd do better with just the book. Playing it... I never got a party past module 3 despite a half-dozen attempt to play. It was boring. Meanwhile, I've run groups through the ToEE, Slavers, Against the Giants... three or four times and they loved it until they died. Something like Ravenloft... dozens and dozens of times. Home campaigns... no problem.
@@DLSaga Tried that. We had the modules a long time before we got the setting book, so it was kind of backward. With Greyhawk, it was an open setting book with modules. DL was always modules with the setting tacked on. Even the setting had issues -- it was still died so closely to timelines, characters, and story they you were essentially tossing 3/4 of the book (and all the modules) out trying your own thing. I started maybe three campaigns in the setting, but they fizzled quickly. You had to localize it heavily to avoid the main plot -- or time set it elsewhere and it all seemed to just be more work for another setting. Meanwhile, we could always pull Greyhawk out, pick a starting hex and easily dream up a starting situation, home campaign plot, etc. easily without butting heads against some major plots going. And you could run players to X level and then toss in a module for a few sessions if you wanted, or start a module and then take it off in a different direction.
Though raistlin will alwahs be my fav character ever, i do remeber shedding more than one tear at Flints death.... And i am anxious to see what the upcoming trilogy has in store for krynn
I am running the DL modules currently. The party is about to find Skullcap in DL3. We are using the BX rules, however, so spells based on robe colors, spells based on god, etc. are not a thing in our game. So far the players are having a ball. They most certainly are using their own characters and most of them are on their 2nd character as several have died.
The biggest shift was the introduction of heroic immunity to death. Suddenly story trumped rules for the first time. Later editions of D&D have shifted more and more towards making it harder for PC's to die, as they are the heroes of the story. This definitely has pros and cons!
@@trebormills I think for an epic plot like Dragonlance they had to do this. In other games though I like to let the dice fall where they may. That creates its own drama.
It was another option....Nothing more. The first few books were incredible. The modules were fun, I had no trouble running them at all. As far as AD&D being nothing more than just a "hack & slash" game in those days, that is entirely false. The game was what you made it. In fact, you had more freedom for character interaction and role playing than you do now......not do many rules. This is a fine video! Keep up the good work! 🙂
I definitely agree with you about the state of the game pre-DL. I was in gaming groups with fans of the fantasy genre, and world-building was a big deal for the DMs of the group. While we did focus on going on various quests, module-style, they were within detailed game worlds, and as part of an overarching storyline, where as the characters leveled up and gained reputation and prominence, the scope of the game expanded as well. And, as you said, the rules were there to support the game, not to force you to buy a never-ending succession of overpriced books. All you really needed was a DMG, a PH, and whatever monster books caught your fancy, plus after a certain point and then only sometimes Unearthed Arcana (don't get me started on cavalier-paladins), and off you went.
FYI, Dragonlance Adventures wasn't the last, Greyhawk Adventures came after. And I'm pretty sure the Greyhawk Adventures novels came out before DL Chronicles. I'm not sure about the publisher, but the Gord the Rogue books by Gary Gygax definitely came earlier, and they were set mostly in the city of Greyhawk. But all in all, a good video highlighting an underrated gaming world.
There is a lot of kickback from Greyhawk fans about this. I am not trying to pit Dl and GH against each other or say one was better than the other, but Greyhawk wasn't set up with the same epic storytelling world and history that DL was from the start. It was instead built on piece by piece. That is the biggest difference. You are right about the sourcebook. GH was 88, DL was 87. My source was off by a year.
@@DLSaga To be honest, I vastly prefer Dragonlance as a fantasy world over Greyhawk. But for gaming, Ill take Forgotten Realms. Yes, it's a badly-cobbled-together mess of Earth cultures and pantheons, but it's got anything you could want in a game world (except maybe coherence.)
Absolutely was a change for the betterment of the game! I don't like the discourse around " Post Dragonlance made PCs into un-killable heroes" DL just introduced a new, more immersive, thematic and story rich version of DND gameplay, it certainly didn't force people to stop playing the old way. Fast forward 40 years and the vast majority of people are playing the game way closer to the Dragonlance version than the ODND version. Dragonlance for the win!
I loved the Dragonlance Novels. Memorable characters, great storyline, extensive world building. The modules on the other hand were absolutely terrible, and took railroading the party to unheard of heights. The setting itself is fabulous (as long as you ignore the stupid gold is worthless and a sword can be bought for less than it's weight in steel pieces economics), and who hasn't tried their hand at cooking Otik's Spiced Potatoes? The big problem with the setting is it's actually constrained by the epic nature of the novels. To let the party have any real agency with respect to big storylines you have to pick an unexplored timeframe. It's hard to have a meaningful campaign in the shadows of the storyline.
You are certainly not alone in your perspective. I ran DL games for year concurrent to the War of the Lance and in the Age of Mortals and had a great time. I never played the original modules. I use them for source information.
Yeah Forgotten Realms definitely got the corporate focus. FR was more of a sandbox & collaboration between many writers and fans b/c it was new and tsr's own world. That's one reason there were so many terrible FR novels. It was a come one come all offer to writers to populate sections of the FR map with their novels and most of the module writers were given the green light to write novels also (which wasn't where their talents lied).
Can't speak for DnD as I never played but from a story-telling perspective it was gigantic. I read it over 20 years ago and it consumed me and then spread to the spin-offs with the Twin series and the other one where Tasselhoff saves the world. I've forgotten a lot of it, not sure I want to read it again knowing what happens to Flint and Sturm but that's part of the gigantic story telling. Weiss and Hickman's creation is quite epic in every sense of the word.
Played D&D since 1983. Hasn't changed all that much over the years. If you're a rule nazi, you'll get bogged down in rules. If you're a play as feel type and use a consistent set of basic rules, things will cruise along nicely.
I would like to make a note that while DL definitely popularized the concept of Tinker Gnomes, BECMI's Mystara already had Gnomes mostly going in that direction. I don't know if they fully committed to the full on 'tinker gnome' concept before DL was a thing or if it was afterwards, but they definitely had a crafting focus to them established within the BECMI setting. But of course that was very little known, so DL definitely is primarily responsible for solidifying that concept in the minds of many.
When I came into D&D I was a huge fan of DragonLance. It basically was D&D to me. I just assumed that things like the tower of high sorcery was the default. To this day my current campaign has gods inspired by Paladine and Tahkisis, major international orders of holy and unholy knights and orders of sorcery. Though I switched things up when my players just started killing anyone in a black robe lol.
Thank you for watching! Do you feel like the original Dragonlance game mechanics were too challenging for new players? Have you played AD&D with the original rules? Leave a comment below.
I DM'd several of the original modules back in the 80's. If you tried to run them as written it could be overwhelming so you just used the things that you liked and left the encumbering rules and mechanics behind. I still use some of them now in 5e. Chapter 4 of Hoard of the Dragon Queen was weak in my opinion so I pulled it for parts of DL1 and set it in the High Moor and tied it into a character's backstory about finding a lost temple. It was my player's most memorable part of the campaign and they could not tell that it was not part of the written storyline. I think much of the old DL content is amazing and with a little work and creativity can be ported over to 5e nicely.
I think if the first one you played was DL then that is just what you were used to. I played 1st, 2nd and 3rd edition. I liked 2nd the best.
Not remotely. And yes.
The difference between Dragonlance AD&D and AD&D was mostly reading. If you didn't feel like reading, and learning how the world worked, you could still play a standard character and nothing in particular would change that couldn't be handled by the DM.
I think you made some fair and accurate points, but you also made some misleading statements as well. As far as the setting specific rules go, they were an improvement on 1st edition rules. Setting specific rules that change the general rules already existed before Dragonlance.
@@craigtucker1290 yep and adventure specific pregen characters existed in D&D boxed edition adventures as well as many of the competing game systems at the time. Even AD&D was just GG's house rules for D&D (he says as much in the preamble).
"Sturm's sun shattered"
no character death has ever hit me as hard as Sturm's, even though it's foreshadowed hard. Dragonlance was my second fantasy series after Redwall, and I read it at a young and tender age. Devoured all the paperbacks for 25 cents each from the used book store I'd bike to, and saved my lawn mowing money to buy the D&D books. I didn't have anyone to play D&D with, so my horrible self-insert characters went through the modules alongside the Heroes of the Lance and it was an important escape for this lonely nerdy kid. Dragonlance deserves a modern video game, perhaps an MMO or a party based RPG like Dragon Age.
I love that idea!
Sturm’s death very sad, but I cried my eyes out when Flint died, especially feeling Tas’s pain. Masterful writing
Whoa, same here. I started with Redwall, then got into Narnia, and then Dragonlance. Then after that nothing ever quite reached Dragonlance heights for me.
@@TheGolfMasterDadFlint’s death is one of the only times I actually cried real tears while reading a book.
Couldn't Skyrim be re-skinned with a mod. I'd settle for Krynn in the Skyrim Engine.
Sturm Brightblade
Yea. It was a devastating moment.
We need a big budget Hollywood movie. Dragonlance was so much fun to read and play.
Yes! That would be awesome.
Amen!
or even a decent modern animated movie series
I agree, but I fear woke Hollywood might ruin it
Arnold Schwarzenegger can play Tracy Hickman and Julia Roberts as Margaret Weiss
Dragonlance WAS ADnD to me. Devoured all the novels as a kid. Saved up, biked to the store, and bought the DL box set. What made me fall in LOVE with it was the complexity of the world and its unique classes and races. Loved how the gods felt like the greek gods to me, intimately involved with the affairs of mortals.
Yes! That is fantastic, thank you for sharing!
Agreed... Probably strongly influenced The Forgotten Realms universe, particularly the Times of Troubles lore & saga...
Sturm’s death and Flint’s death both drove me to tears. Through the novels they had grown and developed so very much!
Same here. Yea there was some great character moments in the books.
Oh, crushing formative moments in my life for sure. Though Tanis and Tas's deaths also got me.
The thing I noticed most when Dragonlance first released was the massive increase in the quality of the art. In partcular the cover art for the modules.
Standards for D&D art were never quite the same again.
Absolutely! I am always a fan of raising the bar.
its great art, but i personally loved Brom's work on Darksun. It gave the campaign a perfect feel.
I'm looking at Death of Sturm hanging on my wall right over my desk as I type this. Elmore shaped a lot of D&D imagery. Dragonlance definitely pushed D&D in a lot of new directions, but I will say from my perspective (I started playing in '79) it was just someone else's homeworld. We had our own back then with similar customizations and innovations. Dragonlance just got published and novelized.
I preferred the older art (especially erol otus.) I thought the excessively realistic stuff didn't look very good. But I did love the 3d maps.
Early TSR art was terrible and uninspiring, but the boom in quality and quantity really defined a golden era for D&D. Too bad the art slipped with WotC, though I think it is getting better again...
What was wonderful was that Krynn had a history. A very dark history, and you're starting at the end of a very broken line and have to learn about that history while you play. They also didn't try hard to explain things. This thing happened and no one knows why. Sort of the precursor to what TV shows do by establishing a background mythology that drives the show.
Yes! There were random references to this epic history and heroes that unraveled throughout the story. Loved it.
Those books are still SO AWESOME
I agree. I’m reading the annotated chronicles now.
Some of the those books were really ground breaking
I usually end up rereading a few of them every few years. I still have all my old paperbacks. Now that I'm getting old and my eyes suck, Audible is making a fortune off me buying my way through the audiobooks. Escaping into Krynn with the Companions saved my sanity in 2020. Though the amount of times I cooked up some Otiks spiced fried potatoes definitely didn't helpy waistline. 🥔
Good stories but the writing is low quality
The original saga would make an excellent movie series or miniseries.
Here's my perspective: Dragonlance is a highly specialized setting. There was once a time when DM's were encouraged to create their own highly defined worlds. Each with their own limitations and features ("Okay there are no Warlocks or Barbarians in this world and if you want to be a Paladin you must be only a specific alignment serving one diety...also there are no Elves but you can play a Hobgoblin as a character option, etc etc etc") a setting should reflect the vision of the DM, and not every option or 'build' in the various books might be suitable for what the DM is trying to present.
I completely agree. It is up to the DM to make a cohesive world experience, if so inclined. For some of us, DL was a great immersive starting point.
This is what made the game hard for most of the public but great for insiders. D&D basic should have been a beer and pretzel totally built out world... while, Advanced should have been a core set of rules and creative sandbox to build your own ideas with.
That's a good point: A lot of 1st ed AD&D (except for Oriental Adventures) felt like it had a kitchen sink approach: your game should have monks! and psionics! and orcs! and planar travel! While Dragonlance said in an official product: you can design and limit your setting however you like. You can say gold is worthless and what god you worship makes a mechanical difference to your cleric PC who isn't just a wizard with a different spell list and is powerless if the gods aren't listening. Your halflings and gnomes can be different and there are no monks or paladins or druids or orcs, and you can have PCs who care about things other than killing monsters, amassing loot, and building strongholds. It's not that you couldn't do this before (and plenty of DMs did), but Dragonlance gave you official licence to do so.
Amen to that! Since 3rd edition most players think it's their inalienable right to use everything ever published to make their characters. Whenever I tell them, "No, you can't play that" they act like I'm an oppressor of their freedom.
You know this is a really good point. I have hated most homebrewed settings I have ever heard of. Most DMs aren’t very good at making creative settings. No offense intended because neither am I, but to do it well is hard. For the most part it becomes a too cute sort of thing highlighting the DMs favorite things. That sort of nonsense is certainly, a big part of why I have always hated just about everything I have heard about Dragonlance.
I dont think Dragonlance broke D&D. You didnt HAVE to play the chronicles modules. With the info given, you could run a very immersive home brew game, which I have been doing since the late '80s. At the moment, I am helping my 10yo son play in his first foray in Dragonlance as a Knight of Solamnia, which he fell in love with after playing my old Knight character I first started with. His mum is the DM, so its also a family bonding thing, especially if my 11yo daughter graces us with her presence... I think all the modules did, was not so much railroad players, though it did feel that way from tme to time, but a good DM can alter that if they are creative enough, but they did give you a sense and scope to the game, and to Krynn itself. But thats just my 2 Steels worth.
You bring up a great point! Modules can be setting rather than the narrative. We are free to play the game however we want. My intention was to point out the evolution and differentiation of AD&D with Dragonlance. Keep up the good work with your family gaming, mine is more board game centered than RPG.
...are you going to give them the novels to read?
@@michaelmclaughlin261 I would love to, but at this stage in the game, they are packed along with all my other books/novels I would love for them to read. But definitely open to the idea... Especially if they were receptive to it.
Yeah, I've played in a _LOT_ of Dragonlance games...and I've never played any of the original chronicles modules.
Didn't play the Dragonlance stuff but read a couple of the novels but Larry Elmore knocked out the best illustrations (and one for Star Frontiers with a cunningly placed signature). Met him in the 90s at a game convention, really nice guy.
The artists beginning with Larry Elmore are a massive part of the popularity of the setting.
Was always my favourite artist as well, Jeff easley was good as well, but Larry was tops for me
Larry Elmore is the best. Every time I’ve seen him at dragoncon he is extremely friendly and approachable and seems like he truly remembers you. Class act and definitely changed the art of DND.
@@DLSagaThe Four Horsemen, as they were know mesmerized my teenage mind with thier fantastic paintings. Larry Elmore, Jeff Easly, Clyde Caldwell and Keith Parkinson. Amazing artists.
You will all bow to Raistlin Majere when he's evicted that fat five headed dragon Takisis.
;-)
Gandalf beards are getting old. Give gold skin an hour glass eyes a chance. These books would make the best Netflix series. X
Haha, indeed! Yes they would!
OMG NO! with the current state of media it would be a train wreck!
The Twins Trilogy was amazing. The ending when Caramon saves Raistlin...younger me cried man.
@@sensoukami it's all good man.
@@brettloo7588 It could work if it was done in anime. Record of Lodoss War is the most faithful D&D based story out there. But I'd rather see it set in the Forgotten Realms than Dragonlance.
"Touch his body and not even your dragon can save you."
Fuck ya!
Laurana - this part was sooooo heart wrenching - but so good for HER characters growth. One of my favorite lines for her.
Yep!
@@scott2115 Laurana became a legend in this scene….
Can someone recount this scene? I don't quite remember it. Its been decades since I read the books. Lauralanthalassa was always my favorite character. :)
Dragonlance gave us Lord Soth, one of the best villains ever. The fact that Tasselhoff is scared shitless of him and noone is else shows this.
He is my favorite villain in DL. The Darth Vader of Krynn.
Talking about Characters just look at the Twins! Raistlin became a Prime villain. Kitiara with Soth was an amazing sub plot as well.
@@subzero9113 damn straight. Even the dragons like Khellendros and Cyan Blooodbane were awesome. I used tons of like characters in my DnD campaigns
Little known fact Tasselhoff saw Demogorgon once and felt fear in the Tasselhoff novel series.
Lord Soth b%$@h slapping Count Strahd around is my favorite event in all of D&D
The Dragonlance Saga was a much needed escape for a lot of nerdy kids. I still remember the first time "I" met Tasslehoff, his rapier-tongue, and his hoopak. Glorious.
haha, he enters the scene messing with Tanis and Flint and never stops.
Weird thing: DL were my favorite D&D novels, but I was never interested in playing a DL campaign, while I disliked the FR books but absolutely love playing in the world.
haha, Hey, however you enjoy it all is the perfect way to do so. Thank you for watching!
I read the books and the Dragonlance campaign book was my first AD&D gaming, but I did enjoy moving over to Forgotten Realms. It just felt like playing our own stories, not someone else's. Even though we never played the DL modules.
I think it was an absolutely wonderful inclusion to turn D&D into a storytelling adventure instead of a treasure-finding death-fest.... not that that isn't also very fun and I learned that way or played that for years.
But I started playing in 1979 and then after about a year, the DL novels first hit and they swept me away in such a way that eventually my games I ran started twisting more into epic story just as much as epic treasure-seeking death fests. 😁
I've even played at the table with Margaret Weiss and with Tracy Hickman! Super, super cool memories!!!
Thanks for the vid.👍
That is awesome! Weaving the characters into a personal and epic tale is my preferred method as well.
I don't think the books hit in 1980
Sorry....1984 was when the first DL book came out. Thnx Raymond, for the clarification on that.
One of the first ever Fantasy books I read was Legend of Huma. I had no exposure to Tanis and his friends but I was hooked.
It was actually interesting reading the series with the "flawed" timeline of the relative age past since the age of Huma
Nice! Do you have a second favorite novel in DL?
Raistlin is my favorite character in anything, not just books to this day! The Soul Forged is my favorite book ever.
That's a good one!
You and I are kindred spirits!
@@greenewatson4867 you mean "Kendered spirits", don´t you?
@@Mucknuggle you... I like you! 👍
Yeah, I agree, Raistlin was the GOAT. I'm not sure which book it was, when Raistlin derisively declares magic rings and baubles as the trappings of "lesser mages". At that moment, the character, the book, and later the series, had my complete attention.
Everything in AD&D was Greyhawk and its variants. Dragonlance introduced the concept that the world is not set, and homebrew campaigns could be more than Lahnkmar knock-offs.
Thank you for watching!
Actually don't know which setting came first; Greyhawk or Mystara.
@@kenthil Greyhawk actually came after Blackmoor, then came Dragonlance. Blackmoor never took off though.
@@mikekennedy5879 I think we did some Blackmoor campaigns, we might have done a Greyhawk campaign and I know some of our stuff was Thieves' World components before the Dragonlance D&D stuff got published. Some of those Thieves' World inspired custom campaigns definitely stretched the world for us.
DL was always my go-to setting.
It also gave us conflicted villains, like Kitiara, or just breathtaking character arcs, like Laurana. Amazing characters who were complex and lifelike; their choices understandable and relateable, with many bittersweet moments, not the usual Happy Ever After endings.
Exactly, thanks for watching.
As a young D&D player and a first time Dungeon Master, 'DragonLance' was a hard sell to players at the time. Even I certainly didn't understand all the rule changes involved. Hell... we didn't even COMPLETELY understand all the rules and nuances of the AD&D or 2nd Edition rules. There were so many. But I loved DragonLance for it's epic storytelling, and I insisted on a campaign in the world. The best rule I have learned for roleplaying games (and life in general for that matter): If you don't know what the rule is and need to use it fast..... make it up. But... use common sense, and ideally it should result in enjoyment for all. ;)
I did a fair amount of that as a DM as well. Thank you for watching.
The hardest hitting part was when Flint is passing and the way it effects Tasslehoff. That was a hard pill to swallow.
Yea. It gets me every time.
The thumbnail is the greatest picture in all of D&D
The saddest IMO.
@@DLSaga the two are synonymous with me. At least as far as D&D art.
I remember reading when that thumbnail moment happened. I was was the same way I felt when Eddard Stark was executed. Open mouthed shock.
Dragonlance got me into D&D in high school. 28 years later, I am still playing. This is such a nostalgic trip for me do to a place of wonderful carefree memories, curiosity and excitement. Thank you for putting this together!
You are very welcome! Thank you for watching.
The draconian picture at the beginning of one of the chapters in Dragons of Autumn Twilight. I got that put on my arm about 30 years ago.
Cool! I had a friend who had it tattooed on his back.
Basic dnd had the first prestige classes. Fighters could become knights, avengers, or paladins. Clerics could be come druids. All at 9th level
I’ve learned that recently from another commenter. Thank you for the information!
Companion Set. BECMI, still the best.
I love the quote you finished with, I think that everyone should make sure to remember that, having a good time telling stories of high adventure with oure friends is what we're here for!
Absolutely! Thank you for watching.
I've always said that Dragonlance is a great setting for stories, but a pain in the ass to play. The books made me rethink everything I knew as a young boy about my emotions when reading fantasy. When Flint died, I lost it. The world never appealed to my players due to the low magic setting. A +1 longsword in DL is legendary while the same sword in Forgotten Realms is what they hand out to city guards in Neverwinter.
Yea. I try not to compare settings when trying to set up a game. I like to focus on the story when selling players on the setting.
Teenage me lost it when Flint died too man.
Wait Flint died ? :(
@@DLSaga I totally get that. We played in multiple settings (Ravenloft, Planescape, Greyhawk and Darksun), but they just couldn't get into DL. They loved the books but not the gaming world part and that of course falls on me for not bringing it alive enough for them.
@@ArdaKaraduman heart attack it was like losing a loved grandparent.
I read these out loud to my (not really young) children each night before going to sleep as a family. We are on the Second book now. They are enthralled and love them. Good laughs and good cries. They have opened up some surprisingly good discussion on life, morality, love, sex, and overall concepts of why people act the way they do.
That's great! I have always said the novels are as based in reality and are as complex as we allow them to be.
Way back in the formative years of D&D, I was lucky enough to be part of the MIT Strategic Gaming Society (MITSGS). Luminaries like Glen Blacow were pushing the bounds of what the game could be and inventing new ways of doing things. The innovations we prompted were so far reaching that E. Gary Gygax warned gamers in general about "upsetting the delicate balance of his game, by inappropriate rules modifications". Yeah, in 1979, in The Dragon magazine. Things like critical hits, skills, optional and variant player character classes... We emphasized role-playing and story over hack-n-slash. What we were NOT was sanctioned by TSR. So when Dragonlance appeared as a game setting, we were all, "Interesting, but not revolutionary."
I would’ve like to sit in on one of those games. Thanks for watching and sharing your experience!
DragonLance certainly did make a lot of changes to the standard assumptions about many D&D-related things when it came out, but not all of them were good or well-received at the time, and none of them were ever intended to be applied to settings outside of Krynn. I think what I enjoyed most about DragonLance was “Leaves from the Inn of the Last Home”, specifically, the recipes. I cannot tell you over the years how many variations of “Otik’s Spiced Potatoes” I’ve made, or how many skillets full of them I’ve downed. And the first time I made Fizban’s Fireball Chili was a memorable experience!
But, I wouldn’t say that DragonLance was even particularly unusual for its level of detail or immersion even in its day. Gamers of that era commonly took their inspiration from their favorite epic fantasy novelists and devoted great effort to worldbuilding. Every gamer I knew in the 1980s did so, and everyone had their “house rules” that departed from the AD&D rulebooks.
Recording the recipes is on my list of things to do. Thank you for watching!
I love the Dragonlance world. I find it much more "encompassing' than regular AD&D
I’m with ya
In addition to greatly increasing the polish/artwork/presentation of the modules, I also recall the dungeon and overland maps being much detailed and immersive too. I never actually played one of the modules but I remember pouring over the modules multiple times. So many epic ‘encounters’ to set up, and the modules really drove home the idea of an epic campaign where the players were heroes. Contrast with Isle of Dread which also had epic encounters, but relied on the players to write their own story. Even today I prefer games with a story/purpose vs. games like rogue-likes with only a general purpose. I don’t like choose your own adventure books because I feel a little to constrained, so some freedom in how to approach or fight the battles is necessary, but Dragonlance Modules we’re some of the first I recall that allowed the players freedom to explore while still being part of a heroic story. (Another great module that comes to mind along these lines was Red Hand of Doom by James Jacobs and Richard Baker.). 🥦🦖
Thank you for watching and sharing your thoughts! I will have to check out that module.
Dragonlance sucked ass compared to forgotten realms and dark sun.
Great video - but it feels you barely scratched the surface with the impact DL had on the game. Really great concept for a video and finely presented - thank you!
Thank you for watching!
Just stumbled upon your videos. The quality is amazingly high for a smaller channel (I hope that comes off as a compliment). Subscribed and I wish you the best in your continuation of your channel.
Thank you! I’m trying to grow, and I appreciate the subscribe.
why you gotta show my boy Sturm like that the whole video :'(
Sorry. It was the best illustration I had.
Lol!
Still waiting for a live action film based on these books .
You and me both!
Dragonlance novels were the first introduction to D&D for much of my group. Think it might be the only official setting we never played in.
You should give it a go if given the chance, it can be fun!
Dragonlance was definitely my door into the world of dungeons and dragons. It will always have a special place in my heart.
That’s great to read. Thanks for watching!
Autumn Twilight was the very first book I ever read. I've read the majority of all the DragonLance series. I've read thousands of books since.
That's fantastic! Reading in any form can never be underrated in personal development.
We didn't use the supplied characters in major roles, only as NPCs. We also waited for the full series to come out before playing the majority of the story. Knowing the full story allowed the DM to veer from the rather railroading path. Since our Characters were brought through from another universe, they were not subject to many of the world's own changes to the rules.
That’s an interesting way to do it!
My VERY FIRST exposure to TTRPGs was in the DragonLance campaign setting where I played an exiled Minotaur Myrmidon Fighter.
It was AWESOME!
That sounds fun!
Dragonlance is so iconic, that the picture used at the start is so easily recognized; Kitiara standing over the body of Sturm Brightblade, on the High Clerists Tower, when the Dragonarmies were advancing on Palanthas
The paintings by the artists are truly magnificent!
I agree. I love the new artwork too, but theres something about the older art thats just so great
Laurana is the one portrayed in the painting.
Dragonlance is awesome. I still have the first novel somewhere.
Agreed! You should revisit it sometime.
I never read a singlle Dragonlance Novel, but I loved all of the game content! The Krynn Trilogy computer games are CLASSIC!
There's actually two separate Dragonlance trilogies of games in addition to a dragonrider flight simulator and war of the lance strategy game. But your sentiment is spot on!
I remember the dungeon slogs that carried over into ad&d from the early days. In some ways I miss them but the idea of novel like world building brings so much joy. It is like arpg vs MMORPG. Both can be fun.
Yea. I like that DL has some dungeon delving as well.
Dragonlance brought a depth and richness to AD&D that immediately drew me in. It was magical, and my favorite AD&D realm. It was there that I felt most at home - up until the Age of Mortals. That twist completely ruined the entire setting. I still have the annotated Chronicles and Legends, and go back and read or flip through every few years.
I can appreciate that. Fifth Age was a massive change to Dragonlance, not only in game mechanics. Personally I like how it ended with the Dark Disciple Trilogy. A bit of bringing it all back around by Margaret Weis.
Yeah like most campaign settings, there's a point where they evolve past what the "interesting" parts were, and then get artificially stretched out to sell more books.
Agree with you here.
Dragonlance the best novel series ever,been a fan since day one when it was first written 30 odd years ago.Still have the original paperbacks on the shelf i bought in the 80's.
That’s great! Is it falling apart, or has it held up through the years?
@@DLSaga bit of both,but when it came out in the 80's i went straight out and got it on the recommendation of the shop owner who knew when it was being released and i always read the trioligy once a year and have done nver missing a year and always in the autumn lol of course.
Est Sularus Oth Mithas! Dragonlance was the setting that introduced me to AD&D and it will forever hold a dear place in my heart.
I was obsessive about it when I was young, possibly still am, lol.
It's a shame that later editions of D&D didn't keep the DL alignment-tracker thing, since that idea seems pretty cool. Also, the way Tinker Gnomes influenced how all gnomes would be portrayed moving forward is similar to Dak'kon from Planescape Torment who did that, but for the Githzerai.
I was not aware of that. Very interesting. It’s cool how certain characters change a whole race/class dichotomy.
When I started rol games, We got inspired by Dragonlance but I didin't play in Krynn, we created our own world (with the available minis we had) . During the year we played in Krynn but with homebrew rules. DL is another great RPG.
That’s great! It’s interesting how many fans the setting has and how few of them regularly played in the setting.
I loved the dialogue between Riverwind and Tanis where he asks Tanis why was he called 'Half-elven' and not 'Half Man'.
Yea, it gave me a new perspective.
I never knew Dragonlance introduced so much. Was my favorite fantasy series growing up.
It was nearly revolutionary to the game. Thanks for watching!
This was fascinating to learn about. The link seems obvious but I never knew how my favorite book series was so involved with the dungeons and dragons.
Thank you for watching!
I grew up playing first edition, and loved 1.5 as well. My group of friends loved the Dragon Lance books, but didn't care for gaming in DL as much.
That’s fair. I had fun with a lot of ‘prime material’ home brew world gaming as we called it.
While I understand what you are saying, I would say that Unearthed Arcana and the game changes in that book were more effective in breaking AD&D 1.5. Dragonlance added some variety to our games, but we added story elements (including alternate currencies) from Thieves' World and Briarwood early on and later had the majority of campaigns in the Forgotten Realms. Our Dragonlance campaigns, the few we had, were more of a novelty of novelization as every book character was like a celebrity in the campaign. Used by the DM creatively your alignment was just as effective and tracked as the spectrum of Krynn. I can see where playing the campaigns in order and opening up magic and abilities might be fun, but we just had the handbook. Consider how I tend to feel about 5th edition, you are correct in saying that adding a bunch of playable monster races and super special races probably lead to breaking the game. Thanks for this
I appreciate you sharing your thoughts. Thank you for watching!
Just spitballing a theory here: Whatever the setting's sourcebooks and modules influence on the game's mechanics and design, I think the Dragonlance novels were far more impactful to D&D's role in the mass culture. D&D originally comes from this stew of medieval wargaming, pulp fantasy including Conan, Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser, and Moorcock's Eternal Champion stories, Lovecraft, pulp SF and science fantasy, Poul Anderson and Andre Norton's 1960s/70s fantasy stories, and of course Tolkien. But by the early 1980s, the dominant form of fantasy fiction in the mass culture was shifting towards epic fantasy. Less Conan-esque sword & sorcery, 70s trippy surrealist fantasy, or fairy-tale derived fantasy, and more Tolkien-esque grand quests against the Dark Lord in a sprawling secondary world like in Terry Brooks and David & Leigh Eddings novels. For real: the fantasy section of the bookstore from the late 1980s well into the early 2000s was like 90% epic fantasy, until A Song of Ice and Fire and "grimdark" made sword and sorcery and "dark" fantasy more popular and then urban fantasy exploded.
Dragonlance firmly plants the Dungeons & Dragons flag in that epic fantasy subgenre, but still remaining D&D: the characters are a large adventuring party with defined races and classes who behave like D&D characters (Raistlin has to memorize spells that come straight out of the PHB, Tasselhoff picks every pocket he sees, etc.), and Krynn is a distinct secondary world with its own history and flavour. And it helps that the Dragonlance novels were pretty good fantasy novels for their time. Someone reading the Belgariad or Shannara books could look easily move on to Chronicles and Legends and enjoy them and maybe want to see what this Dungeons & Dragons stuff is all about. And if the Dragonlance novels hadn't paved the way and been so successful, would we have had the flood of 90s Forgotten Realms novels and other campaign setting books?
I don't think Dragonlance has much appeal as a game setting: anecdotally, while a lot of other Gen Xers have fond memories of the DL novels, I don't encounter a lot of D&D players who've actually played in a DL game, except maybe a few grognards who maybe played through some of the original modules. While it seems like thousands and thousands of gamers have played in Greyhawk, FR, or Nentir Vale.
Great thoughts, and on point! I have played mostly in DL with my gaming, but I may be a minority. I only tried playing the campaign modules in 3.5ed though. The rest was all our own story, since we were all intimately familiar with the Novels and wanted to be in the setting, not relive the novels. I do thing D&D owes a lot to DL for propelling the game in the early 90's. Thank you for sharing!
For me it has a LOT of appeal as a setting. Nowadays I'm preferring it to the other "standard AD&D fantasy worlds" (i.e. Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms).
I love that it takes bits and pieces from several different sources. It takes the "Dark Lord ascending" global structure of LotR (high fantasy), but has many influences from Conan the Barbarian (low fantasy)... it has less magic (but still more than Tolkien) and a harsher world than FR, more prevalent barbarian figures, etc.
It explains its full cosmological rules, finally giving sense to alignments (Good, Evil and Neutrality are forces akin to gravity, that are even beyond the gods themselves, and have its own rules of interaction). It gives great examples as to how breaking the balance can screw the world (like when the forces of Good triumphed in the last Dragon War, only to give way to the obtuse and fanatical rule of Istar).
Contrary to FR and GH, it has restrictions that give it more personality. It's not kitchen sink, "anything goes", fantasy world. The origin of most sapient species is explained. It's a focused fantasy world... but it can also be used as a sandbox.
There're many places that aren't detailed, or even described (at least, prior to D&D 3.5). The beautiful but chaotic map from Tales of the Lance gives a lot of very evocative names to sites that appear nowhere else, that aren't described.
My buddy had a Deities and Demigods with the Melnibonean mythos + one other I can't recall. My copy did not. He ended up throwing his books out along with my MM1. What a shame.
@@briangregus5225 The other one was the Cthulhu Mythos, with all the weird and wonderful Erol Otus artwork.
@@stevensauer5597 I'm not going to lie - getting a bit nostalgic for AD&D.
I did what any good DM did... used what worked and ignored the rest, incorporating it into my own fantasy world. Having said that, I really did enjoy the novels.
Stated perfectly "What any good DM did"
So cool story. When I was a kid my parents bought some “dragon books” for their fantasy loving kid (me). A couple of the Dragon codexes And the complete Guide to Dragon riding. I loved these books and they molded my expectation w/ fantasy. Then later we found the Dragon lance movie. Fast forward to high school, I saw the dragonlance series at the library but never read any (now I regret it) but it wasn’t till years later when I discovered D&D did I put the two things together! I was exposed to d&d long before I ever played a game! All thanks to Dragonlance!
That’s great! You took the scenic route to it all :)
@@DLSaga it was fun and now I’m running the new shadow of the dragon queen w/ my friends
The modules are literally amazing in every faucet like art work and content..and unplayable due to the writing and railroading..
That is the crux of it. However, a good DM should be able to make it feel natural as the players are directed.
@@DLSaga not with those modules. Where characters are protected by plot armor and important scenes where the agency is taken away from players. We literally quit buying the modules and just read the books because why play a module when it's a book.
Amazing modules if you ignore the "rules"
nah bruh...you're doing it wrong.
THIS!!!!!
@@Idreallyrathernotthanks so ignore the railroading the parts which say which characters die where ?
That's not playing d&d that's reading a novel
I started to play adyd with 2ed in the 89, never cared about dragonlance world as we played in our homemade world, but now i see that a lot of 2ed things come from thia setting campaign
A fair amount of tropes did. we played a lot of home brew stuff as well. It was better to stretch your creative legs in. Thank you for watching!
I liked AD&D when it was introduced to me, but I saw it for it was at the time, a hack-n-slash game. I perused the Dragonlance source book in the game shop, then found Dragons of Autumn Twilight. From then on it was Dragonlance or nothing. It was a completely different game that did what it intended, I found myself immersed in an exciting world of adventure, exactly what I wanted from AD&D. Friends not into Dragonlance brought me in on Greyhawk or Forgotten Realms a time or two but... it wasn't the same. It was like drinking a soda that had been left in the fridge for a day... flat. I still remember getting in trouble at work because I was reading Dragons of autumn Twilight on a 15-minute break and lost track of time, like 45 minutes of it! Ha ha, yeah... good times, good times. In fact, I'm about to start The War of Lance -- DL1 through DL14 -- starting this Sunday! As DM, boy am I gonna take them for a ride!
That’s fantastic! Best of luck with the game.
I truly believe Dragon Lance, Tracy & Laura Hickman added so much to D&D. My brother went from have little interest inAD&D to massive interest thanks to Ravenloft. My whole group bonded over Krynn and we have being begging WOTC for 5E material. We are all stoked for the new adventure. I also think Dragon Lance emphasis on story over just dungeon delving paved the way for critics role to shine
I tend to agree with you!
"'til then, unknown"
Yeah, not exactly unknown to the fandom. The AD&D fandom of the time were also the fantasy/scifi/horror genre fans, of the time. And fan conventions had been embracing filk singing and such for decades, at that point. And, without knowing the details, I'll bet Hickman was a fan con attendee, back then.
So, really, it was just a strong fan tendency which was brought into "official" light. New to the game, but not to the fandom.
I think you are on point.
Dragonlance brought so many good memories of our group of friends playing That game helped me to practice my English (since Im French Canadian) I played with a group composed of English speaking friends.
Makes me want to read the books
That’s great!
Good vid. But I'm not sure I agree with all the conclusions. The first modules to really start adding new regions to worlds are probably the Basic and Expert modules. B3 (the original, recalled version) introduces a whole region of Glantri. B4 brings us a city lost in the Ylari desert. Then X1, X2, X3 and X4 all give us new parts of what would later be known as Mystara, and they all pre-date the Dragonlance modules. As for prestige classes, they paladin, druid, avenger and knights as presented in the D&D companion set (as opposed to the versions of some of those that appear in AD&D) are distinctly prestige classes. This was published months before DL1 (January as opposed to March). Modules had player handouts from at least the initial publication of X1 in 1981. So... Great video, but you're kind of missing the fact that much of the innovation from TSR at the time was happening in Dungeons and Dragons, NOT in Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. This was a trend that would continue through much of the 1980s.
Thank you for the clarifications! The world building you are speaking to was not part of a cohesive campaign world but the generic prime material. They weren’t focused on a cohesive overarching story that wove together either but short series at best. Prestige classes you mention were not unlockable but selectable at start, correct? The whole evolution of the game is very interesting.
@@DLSaga No, the prestige classes (as we would call them now) in the Companion set were unlockable. 9th level or above, specific class, alignment and roleplay requirements. There are four of them (Paladin. Knight. Avenger and Druid) there in the Companion set. Add in the two part-formed classes in the Masters set and the approach that the classic game took to character class is more about "these are the ones in the book, but here's how you make your own if you want", and you can either take the material from the Companion set as is and thats all of it, or you can use it as a basis for how to do more.
See, that’s the way we were playing it all along. The whole hack n slash tank, dps, support thing never occurred to our group.
We had a blast.
That is valid. However you like to play, is the right way to play.
Nice video. I've been playing AD&D since it was first released and most of the previous comments have covered anything I wanted to say except for 1 thing. Halflings weren't "completely transformed into Kenders" - It was a decision by the authors to simply not have Halflings on the world of Krynn so the Kenders were created to be similar to, but not actually, Halflings. By the way I, and most of my players, absolutely despise Kenders lol
Kender can be challenging for a party, but we had a member who loved them playing it, so it ended up working for us. Thank you for watching!
I quickly learned to despise kender as well, because of their propensity to ruin games by creating disharmony among the players, and for doing stupid stuff that absolutely destroys the roleplay that other characters are trying to do. And when the player is asked why they're doing that stuff, when they know it's going to be an issue, they always seem to have the same response - "That's how kenders are, I'm just roleplaying my character!"
All of my original DragonLance novels are signed by Margaret Weis. She was very nice offering to do so when I inquired on her site about hard back replacements for the two Dragon’s Gate books I thought I had lost. I have all of their novels where the collaborated. They are a way to connect to the 80’s...
That’s great! Margaret Weiss is good to her fans.
@@DLSaga - No doubt about it!!
Those books defined fantasy for me. The first module blew me away with it's presentation and extra preparation work. Those isometric maps were awesome! Total game changer for me.
Thanks for watching!
"up until then, a very Hack'n'slash game": depends on the group, many modules were and many weren't, e.g. U1-3 Saltmarsh series was distinctly not, for example, D3 was not (if you tried hack'n'slash you'd be dead very quickly), Desert of Desolation was not (though only Oasis of the White Palm had any lengthy roleplay)... Though there were plenty of examples of previous hack'n'slash modules (Tomb of the Lizard King), DL obviously was extremely story oriented.
DL1 was great (but we were bemused by having to play PCs given to us). The rest were more a visual feast than anything else. That art was awesome.
Good point. That is always the bottom line. How is the game played. Not so much how it is presented by the producers. Thanks for watching!
Started playing @ age 8 with my older sister, never just did "hack n slash' we made dungeons with stories. (Yes the first ones were lame, we was young) loved when Lance came out too
That’s great!
I really enjoyed the novels I read - Hickman’s fantasy world creation is top shelf.
But our group loathed the substantive changes it made to AD&D as a game, and we quickly abandoned it.
Preestablishing lore made the system as constraining as MERP or 40K (or a video game for that matter). And for our group, building our own mythos during a campaign a once or twice a year was one of the chief draws.
That's fair. It's definitely not for everyone. Have you tried it in any other game version or system?
@@DLSaga No, we haven’t. I’ve had the same core gaming group since HS - even through college, grad school, kids, etc - and I guess we have always been fogeys.
We mostly stick to the (admittedly sometimes clunky) AD&D 2nd Ed. rules - unless we’re venturing into something else, like Pathfinder, Gloomhaven, etc.
I do have several of the Hickmans audiobooks and enjoy them.
I think AD&D first offpsring was Greyhawk, then Toril, Ravenloft, and Krynn came about. Many of the named spells came from the first characters of Greyhawk. Further offshoots of AD&D came about, such as Dark Sun, Kara-Tur, Al Qadim, Planescape, and many others, including AD&D settings based on various games, such as Diablo 2 (Sanctuary), Magic: The Gathering (Zendikar), and Warcraft (Azeroth). But even then, there were influences that inspired AD&D before it was conceived, such as Middle Earth, Erewhon, The Land, Ghormenghast, and Hyboria. The most recent I have seen incorporating D&D settings has been the SCP foundation based Crimson Chains, which has an almost perpendicular alignment system to Dragonlance, in that order and chaos are important while the concept of good and evil is secondary.
Thank you for sharing the information!
I played 1st Ed. AD&D, we moved on about the time DragonLance appeared. It didn't feel like real D&D. TSR was losing its way a bit, too many different campaign worlds, too many bad quality modules, abandoning its original framework. Too many paperback novels.
Then you missed 2nd edition which was the greatest edition of AD&D and kept TSR alive for 12 years after Gygax and his buddies almost destroyed it.
Thank you for watching the video and sharing your opinion.
I really enjoyed 2ED. Much of its groundwork was apparent in 1.5ED.
@@DLSaga Besides cleric spheres, did anything from Dragonlance Adventures transition over to 2ED?
Maybe kender and tinker gnomes eventually informed core D&D halflings and gnomes somewhat, but I don't think that really takes root until 3E. 2ED halflings and gnomes aren't very different from their 1ED versions. Am I missing anything else?
A great topic and would at least love to see a Xak Tsaroth board game, much like Castle Ravenloft or Legend of Drizzt. I've never played D&D itself but enjoy reading the 5th edition books all the same, and it would be nice to add a Dragonlance book to the collection.
That is a great idea! There are two Dragonlance board games, self titled and Mage Stones, but a game in the style of the Castle Ravenloft game would rule! I have that board game and love it.
@@DLSaga Just checked out those two games and they do look rather splendid. Ravenloft is indeed a lovely game and couldn't help but purchase it with Curse of Strahd for inspiration.
Kryn was an awesome place to escape too. And remains a warm place to return to time after time
Totally agree!
Dragon Lance was also the first time TSR provided a full campaign where characters played and developed entirely within a complete story arc.
Thank you for watching! Yes, they went all out on DL.
Some of the best books ever! The 486 computer game was awesome too!
I play some of them in the Gaming playlist on this channel.
These books are fantastic, and I had no idea people still read them or cared about them. I've been happy to see the rise and proliferation of D&D and similar games like Magic: the Gathering. This kind of imagination use is missing a lot in today's world. Is love to see an Avengers-style movie series for the main books.
Yes, so would I.
I ran the modules back in the day but never had the source book so it had no real effect on us. No special wizard rules, didn't use Minotaurs. Did have a Kenders. It was just a module set for me - one we never finished because my players got tired of "being railroaded" around number 8.
That's fair. I think most any module needs players and a DM willing to see them through, or they are simply roadblocks to the game and storytelling.
Love the setting. Devoured as many Dragonlance books as I could when I was in high school, and am currently in a 20+ year game that has Krynn as the pivotal point for the multiverse/spelljamming world. Our DM has made Krynn into the prison of the primal manifestation of Chaos, and it must remain in balance in order to keep Chaos imprisoned there.
It was one of the reasons the Cataclysm happened; the balance of the world had shifted too much to good, and it had to be rectified before Chaos was released to destroy everything. It's also the reason why higher level characters are so restricted on Krynn and shunted offworld as soon as they become too high level in a way that disrupts the balance.
That makes sense in the framework Krynn was designed in. Thanks for watchign!
I found Dragonlance to defeat the purpose of D&D. The point of D&D was for the players to make their own stories up. Sure... most modules of the time were limited in scope (area, setting, encounters) and fairly linear, but that wasn't the point. You had really open world modules where players could do anything, even if there were set encounters. Even in the large series modules such as Slavers or Against the Giants... players still had choices. And in many settings... I didn't care of my players went completely off the rails and headed north, where I created everything from scratch as a DM, or where the encounters reacted to the players. Yes, there was a story... it was the combined choices and experiences of the players and their characters. If they went even and burned a town down... we have a wanted criminal campaign. If they wanted to start a trading business... sure. Want to deal with the slavers by trickery... go for it. That's your story.
Dragonlance to play was awful. Encounters made no sense unless you played the pre-gens. Nor did you have a tie to the world. Even with pre-gens, you needs a butt-load of them to play. Made no sense with 3 or 4 players unless the DM was running everyone else. The game played like a movie and one the DM had to railroad the heck out of because it wanted really big scenes to play out like a book. It had limited replay. It switched characters starting in other modules. Had so many NPCs it wasn't funny. Took so much time to adapt that it wasn't worth it. It was also darn hard to figure out why encounters needed to play that way and hard for players to figure out what was going on without a lot of backstory -- i.e. read the books. Why is a goblin talking to me in the first scene?
I loved the art work, writing, and story as a DM to read it. But you'd do better with just the book. Playing it... I never got a party past module 3 despite a half-dozen attempt to play. It was boring. Meanwhile, I've run groups through the ToEE, Slavers, Against the Giants... three or four times and they loved it until they died. Something like Ravenloft... dozens and dozens of times. Home campaigns... no problem.
All fair critiques. We usually ended up playing in the world concurrent to the modules rather than playing the modules.
@@DLSaga Tried that. We had the modules a long time before we got the setting book, so it was kind of backward. With Greyhawk, it was an open setting book with modules. DL was always modules with the setting tacked on. Even the setting had issues -- it was still died so closely to timelines, characters, and story they you were essentially tossing 3/4 of the book (and all the modules) out trying your own thing. I started maybe three campaigns in the setting, but they fizzled quickly. You had to localize it heavily to avoid the main plot -- or time set it elsewhere and it all seemed to just be more work for another setting. Meanwhile, we could always pull Greyhawk out, pick a starting hex and easily dream up a starting situation, home campaign plot, etc. easily without butting heads against some major plots going. And you could run players to X level and then toss in a module for a few sessions if you wanted, or start a module and then take it off in a different direction.
Though raistlin will alwahs be my fav character ever, i do remeber shedding more than one tear at Flints death.... And i am anxious to see what the upcoming trilogy has in store for krynn
Flints death was brutal. I’m excited for it as well.
I am running the DL modules currently. The party is about to find Skullcap in DL3. We are using the BX rules, however, so spells based on robe colors, spells based on god, etc. are not a thing in our game. So far the players are having a ball. They most certainly are using their own characters and most of them are on their 2nd character as several have died.
Brutal, lol. I think that's great! There is nothing wrong with customizing the setting for the DM or players. It's all about having fun.
The biggest shift was the introduction of heroic immunity to death. Suddenly story trumped rules for the first time. Later editions of D&D have shifted more and more towards making it harder for PC's to die, as they are the heroes of the story. This definitely has pros and cons!
Very True! Trying to maintain consequences for actions will always be important but not quite as important as having a good time.
Sturm enters chat
I feel story is important, pointless character death is annoying... however, heroic meaningful death.... (Btw i was a heavy b/x and 1e player)
@@trebormills I think for an epic plot like Dragonlance they had to do this. In other games though I like to let the dice fall where they may. That creates its own drama.
It was another option....Nothing more. The first few books were incredible. The modules were fun, I had no trouble running them at all. As far as AD&D being nothing more than just a "hack & slash" game in those days, that is entirely false. The game was what you made it. In fact, you had more freedom for character interaction and role playing than you do now......not do many rules. This is a fine video! Keep up the good work! 🙂
That is very true. The modules were presented as dungeon crawlers so it’s up to the dm and players to insert narrative.
I definitely agree with you about the state of the game pre-DL. I was in gaming groups with fans of the fantasy genre, and world-building was a big deal for the DMs of the group. While we did focus on going on various quests, module-style, they were within detailed game worlds, and as part of an overarching storyline, where as the characters leveled up and gained reputation and prominence, the scope of the game expanded as well. And, as you said, the rules were there to support the game, not to force you to buy a never-ending succession of overpriced books. All you really needed was a DMG, a PH, and whatever monster books caught your fancy, plus after a certain point and then only sometimes Unearthed Arcana (don't get me started on cavalier-paladins), and off you went.
FYI, Dragonlance Adventures wasn't the last, Greyhawk Adventures came after. And I'm pretty sure the Greyhawk Adventures novels came out before DL Chronicles. I'm not sure about the publisher, but the Gord the Rogue books by Gary Gygax definitely came earlier, and they were set mostly in the city of Greyhawk. But all in all, a good video highlighting an underrated gaming world.
There is a lot of kickback from Greyhawk fans about this. I am not trying to pit Dl and GH against each other or say one was better than the other, but Greyhawk wasn't set up with the same epic storytelling world and history that DL was from the start. It was instead built on piece by piece. That is the biggest difference. You are right about the sourcebook. GH was 88, DL was 87. My source was off by a year.
@@DLSaga To be honest, I vastly prefer Dragonlance as a fantasy world over Greyhawk. But for gaming, Ill take Forgotten Realms. Yes, it's a badly-cobbled-together mess of Earth cultures and pantheons, but it's got anything you could want in a game world (except maybe coherence.)
Absolutely was a change for the betterment of the game!
I don't like the discourse around " Post Dragonlance made PCs into un-killable heroes"
DL just introduced a new, more immersive, thematic and story rich version of DND gameplay, it certainly didn't force people to stop playing the old way.
Fast forward 40 years and the vast majority of people are playing the game way closer to the Dragonlance version than the ODND version.
Dragonlance for the win!
Hehe great point
I was just telling some folks on Quora about the alignment tracker from Dragonlance. Nice Vid.
It was an interesting part of the campaign setting. Thank you for watching!
I loved the Dragonlance Novels. Memorable characters, great storyline, extensive world building. The modules on the other hand were absolutely terrible, and took railroading the party to unheard of heights. The setting itself is fabulous (as long as you ignore the stupid gold is worthless and a sword can be bought for less than it's weight in steel pieces economics), and who hasn't tried their hand at cooking Otik's Spiced Potatoes?
The big problem with the setting is it's actually constrained by the epic nature of the novels. To let the party have any real agency with respect to big storylines you have to pick an unexplored timeframe. It's hard to have a meaningful campaign in the shadows of the storyline.
You are certainly not alone in your perspective. I ran DL games for year concurrent to the War of the Lance and in the Age of Mortals and had a great time. I never played the original modules. I use them for source information.
Yeah Forgotten Realms definitely got the corporate focus. FR was more of a sandbox & collaboration between many writers and fans b/c it was new and tsr's own world. That's one reason there were so many terrible FR novels. It was a come one come all offer to writers to populate sections of the FR map with their novels and most of the module writers were given the green light to write novels also (which wasn't where their talents lied).
Very interestin* topic and well presented. I never played Dragon Lance so I can’t comment on that, but I like this video.
Glad you enjoyed it!
Can't speak for DnD as I never played but from a story-telling perspective it was gigantic. I read it over 20 years ago and it consumed me and then spread to the spin-offs with the Twin series and the other one where Tasselhoff saves the world. I've forgotten a lot of it, not sure I want to read it again knowing what happens to Flint and Sturm but that's part of the gigantic story telling. Weiss and Hickman's creation is quite epic in every sense of the word.
Absolutely! Thank you for watching.
Played D&D since 1983. Hasn't changed all that much over the years. If you're a rule nazi, you'll get bogged down in rules. If you're a play as feel type and use a consistent set of basic rules, things will cruise along nicely.
It is interesting to see how others play the same game. Thank you for watching!
I missed 2e because I changed over to Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. One direction was high fantasy and the other was dark, gritty, and grounded.
I enjoyed every edition I’ve played for the most part, but AD&D 1E will always be my favorite.
I actually bought my copy of Warhammer Fantasy RP from Tracy Hickman.
I would like to make a note that while DL definitely popularized the concept of Tinker Gnomes, BECMI's Mystara already had Gnomes mostly going in that direction. I don't know if they fully committed to the full on 'tinker gnome' concept before DL was a thing or if it was afterwards, but they definitely had a crafting focus to them established within the BECMI setting. But of course that was very little known, so DL definitely is primarily responsible for solidifying that concept in the minds of many.
I’m not familiar with Mystara. I’ll have to check it out.
Please please make a modern version of the Gold Box games, especially Champions, Death Knights, and Dark Queen of Krynn!
I would love that!
When I came into D&D I was a huge fan of DragonLance. It basically was D&D to me. I just assumed that things like the tower of high sorcery was the default. To this day my current campaign has gods inspired by Paladine and Tahkisis, major international orders of holy and unholy knights and orders of sorcery. Though I switched things up when my players just started killing anyone in a black robe lol.
lol, leave it to players to force a DM to think on their feet! But that's part of what we love about the game.