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Post by Falconer on Aug 3, 2016 11:23:07 GMT -6
Here’s another take on how to salvage Dragonlance. DL’s most differentiated time period is perhaps the Age of Despair prior to the War of the Lance, i.e., in the wake of the Cataclysm that struck Istar. It can be likened to the Hyborian Age after the oceans drank Atlantis—whole cities in ruin or sunk beneath the waves; no shining knighthood (only a rusted and corrupt one); no gods save for hypocritical or corrupt cults (Duerghast the Spider-god, Belzor the Snake-god, Luerkhisis the Volcano-god, Highseeker theocrats, barbarian princess-priestesses…); haughty and hated Melnibonéanesque elvish enclaves; degenerate Theiwar; STEEL is the only thing that MATTERS!; barons with roving war-bands; minotaur slave ships; mysterious draconians=serpentmen; and hither came Riverwind, the Barbarian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of Krynn under his sandalled feet!
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Post by waysoftheearth on Sept 2, 2023 8:32:35 GMT -6
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aramis
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 199 
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Post by aramis on Sept 4, 2023 2:31:05 GMT -6
Howdy folks, I'm tossing around some new ideas for a Swords & Wizardry campaign. And locally I've found that many folks seem to love Dragonlance, at least the first trilogy. Problem is they're not really my cup of tea. I find the modules railroad-y, the names clumsy (Tasselhoff = Hasselhoff) and the good versus evil tone leaves me bored (I'm an Elric fan). It's worth noting that Good vs Evil is the defining element of DragonLance as a setting. It's one of three setting rules of note in the AD&D DL hardcover. It even goes to tracking good vs evil acts on a track. Another is the Level 18 limit. At making the level 19 required XPT, one gains a choice - leave Krynn (to become one of the gods, eventually), or stop gaining XP, and stay 18th level, 1 shy of 19th. The third is the moons effects on Magic. (There are also the different spell lists for the three colleges, and the knight classes. And Tinker Gnomes. The higher knight grades are, functionally, prestige classes.) If you drop the good vs evil aspect, and the partnering with Dragons, you drop what makes DL unique as a D&D setting. Note that the dragon-riders are fully partners with their mounts, not servants of, nor masters of, their mounts... at least in the good side. On the evil side, the dominance games determine who's the toff and who's the boss. What I would like to do is re-imagine a DragonLance sandbox from a Sword & Sorcery perspective rather than a High Fantasy one. So I thought I'd start at the beginning, with Dragons. I'm looking for strong examples of Dragon lore in print or other media before Dragonlance was published, here is what I have so far: Movies: Dragonslayer Excalibur Fiction: The Hobbit, Smaug Alice in Wonderland, The Jabberwock The Nibelungenlied , Fafninr I'm sure I'm missing a ton of stuff, but that'll get me started. Any additions or suggestions? There are a few present in Le Morte d'Artur... I can't get to my copy to give chapter numbers. Wizard of Earthsea is also a great series, but dragons are only slightly important until the third novel. The first three are good reads; the fourth, well, Sparrowhawk is a broken man... the 5th is decent; the short stories are decent. Note that the AD&D MM is also a good source for pre-DragonLance, and is the only source besides Pern I've read to link color to capabilities. Speaking of which... Pern. It's a very different take on Dragons, and anything but Sword and Sorcery (being really Duty and Politics focused, and technically Sci-Fi, a point that becomes important in both of the origination trilogies... Tho' like good S&S, it's quick wittedness which wins the day, not brute force. Dragon Riders Trilogy - Dragonflight, (1968, portions published in 1967)
- Dragonquest (1970)
- The White Dragon (1978)
Harper Hall Trillogy - Dragonsong (1976)
- Dragonsinger (1977)
- Dragondrums (1979)
Either is an excellent introduction to the Pern setting. Do note that it's late Medieval/early Renaissance surviving technology, and only very limited psionics. (There are basically three psionic abilities: the ability to telepathically communicate with one's bonded dragon, the ability to talk with all dragonkind {including the Watchwehrs and fire lizards}, the ability to teleport - and that's dragons and firelizards only. A certain subset of the bond with a linked dragon is to be able to pickture a place to have it teleport to.) I can't be certain, but I suspect that Pern had some influence on DragonLance. |
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aramis
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 199
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Post by aramis on Sept 4, 2023 2:44:17 GMT -6
Yes, indeed. Dragonlance is my guilty pleasure. I’ve never actually run (or played in) a Dragonlance game*, but I have long thought it would be possible to adapt it to enjoy the best of DL in a pre-DL style game (removing the plot, expanding the dungeons). The Matter of Theology really brings it alive as an OD&D world to me. Anyway, at one point I considered myself somewhat of a DL guru, so feel free to pick my brain on any subject (what products are good starting points, what products are worthless, etc.). * - [edit] That’s actually not quite true; I have done a lot of online gaming relating to DL, and I have run SOME tabletop DL before, and definitely played DL-themed PCs in generic AD&D, but the majority of my tabletop gaming has been non-DL. I've run DL in both AD&D 1E and in DL5A... When I moved to Oregon without my stuff, DL5A I mailed to myself... The official adventures are, well, literally a port from whichever super-hero game the authors were using into D&D. DL was played, THEN written, THEN adapted to D&D. Which is why pretty much none of the PCs are good fits to AD&D. And why none of the story lines in the early volumes use D&D magic. DL5A does massive violence to the setting, specifically since it's covering the time the Gods of Krynn have withdrawn... and the Dragons of Evil pretty much roflstomp the whole of civilization. Even the Kender learn to fear. (And they don't like it.) Mechanically, DL5A is the card driven player facing mechanics, and uses a very different magic system, build on the fly. Basically, DL5A, the Evil side won, most of the good dragons are dead or hiding, the Gods don't answer, and even the heroes of the War of the Lance are hunted beings. I'll note that I didn't read past that point in the novels; I no longer had a roommate with them to borrow from. If you want an evil dragons only version of the setting, the DL5A game has the setting - totally non-D&D mechanics, but lots of pure setting info, too. |
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aramis
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 199
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Post by aramis on Sept 4, 2023 3:19:18 GMT -6
However, one of the features of "old school" style gaming is the open sandbox approach. Players of old school games might therefore be more inclined to expect to be able to go off the rails and do anything at all. Funny, but I didn't enounter the sandbox until 1985 with Twilight:2000. Seriously. No one I new in the early 80's was doing sandboxes, either. Mid 80's, I heard from schoolmates about their sandbox games, but wasn't in their games. Every adventure I played was very much either "Go clear dungeon X" with the travel being merely a means of spending and/or gaining resources, or "Go to X, do Y, come back to A, get paid." Even the supposedly less linear modules we had, such as G1-3, were treated as showing up on the hill outside in cutscene fashion, then infiltrating. I only ever bought a handful of D&D/AD&D adventures before 3E: G1-3 Against the Giants, D1-2 Drow, D3 Vault of the Drow, EX1 Dungeonland, S1 Tomb of Horrors, S2 White Plume Mountain. I was given Q1 Queen of the Demonweb Pits and I-6 Ravenloft. I "inherited" a bunch of 2E stuff, most of which I never read, save the GDQ-1 Queen of Spiders. I didn't get the DL modules until the late 1990s... in the DL Classics volume, and then I ran that in DL5A. I started running D&D with Moldvay, in 1981. I'd been playing a month or two. The overland was, well... totally «bleep»ing absent from play in my early campaigns... because I didn't (and couldn't, due to release date) get Cook Expert until the following summer. ANd when using it, the overland was just a "how bad off are you when you arrive at the mission location" mode, rather than a major part of play. Until I was running T2K 1E, I'd never just let players go and do. It just hadn't been part of Traveller nor D&D for me. Most of my friends hadn't experienced it either. Keep in mind that what was done in the 70's and early 80's wasn't always learned by word of mouth nor playing with experienced players - a lot was, "This looks interesting, let's get it" at the game store, followed by doing whatever style of play they grasped from the rules, and that came in several major strains - for some, it was a pure tactical wargame; for others, more of a mission-based game with some story; others still, Sandbox; and others still, a press your luck dungeon of the week with literally nothing outside the dungeons. I tended to the latter in D&D until the 90's. Not just because that's all that was covered in Moldvay, but also because that's how Andrew ran the game. And what little I heard of Tod's game was much the same, tho' I was hearing about that from his little sister... I'll note that when he & I became friends, a almost a decade later, he confirmed he had been playing mission-oriented as well in the early 80's, but had migrated to a more varied style. TLDR: Sandbox was NOT the only old-school play-style. |
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Post by DungeonDevil on Sept 4, 2023 14:43:12 GMT -6
I can't honestly remember if I commented here, so here goes...
i) the myth of Indra slaying Vrtra from the Rg Veda (ancient Hinduism).
ii) the Lambton Wyrm (old English folklore).
iii) The Midgard Serpent and Thor's attempt to kill it.
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Post by tdenmark on Sept 5, 2023 11:15:21 GMT -6
Fafnir
St. George and the Dragon
Lindworm
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Deleted
Deleted Member
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Post by Deleted on Sept 5, 2023 12:20:10 GMT -6
Dragon Magic by Andre Norton (1972) features stories of four different dragons and influenced my gaming group. When I envisioned a dragon, this book and the hobbit were first course.
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