TO WAR!
Shadow of the Dragon Queen takes place during the Siege of Kalaman.
No, not the Siege of Kalaman in 352 AC where Laurana is the general and the Dragon Armies deployed their flying citadels for the first time. This is an earlier Siege of Kalaman that takes place in 3-mumble-mumble AC, when a completely different flying citadel showed up for the first time, shredding absolutely everything we know about this continuity.
Ironically, I think Kalaman was chosen for this campaign because so little was established in the Dragonlance Saga about what happened there during the War of the Lance. Across all fourteen of the original modules, there’s only like a dozen paragraphs you would have to keep track of to keep things consistent, so it’s almost impressive in a way that they nevertheless managed to screw it up.
(I’ll stop calling out rotten continuity at this point, for that way lies madness.)
The other reason to set a campaign here is that Kalaman is basically the point closest to the Dragon Armies at the beginning of the War of the Lance which is NOT conquered by them. Go any closer to the draconian homelands and the PCs can’t save the day. Go any farther away and you can’t get away with telling a story of the early days of the war where people are still coming to grips with the true nature of the Dragon Queen’s threat.
The point is that Shadow of the Dragon Queen is set in the heart of a war, and the PCs will be no strangers to the battlefield. Over the course of the campaign, there will be twelve major battles that the PCs will be part of, and you’ll have two options for handling them.
First, as I mentioned, there’s the Warriors of Krynn boardgame, which contains each of those battles as individual scenarios. I’m likely going to do a separate review of the board game and will take a closer look at how it integrates with Shadow of the Dragon Queen there.
But you don’t need to buy Warriors of Krynn to run Shadow of the Dragon Queen. The book includes a system of battlefield encounters which can be run as standard D&D combats. These consist of four parts:
The battlemap. These are gorgeously rendered and are roughly the dimensions you’d expect in any other D&D battlemap.
Notably, however, the battlemaps have a 15-foot rim on all sides referred to as the fray. This is the first way in which these battlefield encounters represent the chaotic melee swirling around the PCs: Each fray has unique properties, generally being difficult terrain and requiring a saving throw to avoid damage if a character enters the area.
There are also the battlefield events, which occur randomly whenever a character enters the fray or at initiative count 0 on each round. These include things like:
- A volley of arrows falls on a random character’s position.
- Low-flying dragonnels flee across the battlefield.
- A draconian dragon rider falls from their mount, plummeting out of the sky and landing on the battlefield.
- An injured member of the PCs’ army crawls onto the battlefield, begging for aid.
Finally, of course, there’s the encounter itself. Sometimes this is a single group of bad guys; in other cases there’ll be a scripted sequence with additional bad guys showing up over time. Either way, when the bad guys are all defeated, the encounter (and the wider battle) come to an end.
This seems like a really simple structure, but conceptually it packs a big punch. There’s a lot you can do with just these few simple tools to bring radically different battlefields to vivid life in your campaign.
The one thing I would like to be able to say is that the outcome of these battlefield encounters have an effect on the outcome of the wider battle. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Which is perhaps unsurprising, because…
ALL ABOARD, FOLKS!
… the campaign is horrendously railroaded.
By which I mean both that the railroading is relentless and all-encompassing, but also that the methods they use to force the railroad down your throat are just hopelessly awful.
Phrases such as “encourage the characters to” and “it’s up to the characters to…” and the like seem to be the book’s favorite ways to signal the DM that the time has come to take the character sheets away from the irresponsible players.
Different people will have different reactions to this kind of stuff, but for me the absolute worst type of railroading is when the DM takes control (directly or indirectly) of what your character says. (Because, honestly, what’s left at that point? We’re literally just sitting at the table watching someone awkwardly talk to themselves.) And Shadow of the Dragon Queen absolutely loves this.
For example, the PCs have been railroaded into a debate with NPC military commanders about what the next logical course of action should be. The NPCs make their arguments, and then the DM is instructed to:
…encourage the characters to make the case that Lord Soth is a threat and the Dragon Army’s plans to the north shouldn’t be taken lightly.
But then the writers think to themselves, “Maybe the players won’t take the hint from the clue-by-four we’ve smashed into their faces. Or maybe the Dungeon Master won’t have the guts to put the gun to their heads and keep them in line.”
The answer, of course, is to cue up a GMPC. So, for example, even after you’ve “encouraged” the players to say their scripted lines, it’s an NPC who swoops in and gets to be the hero of the scene:
Darrett then asks Vendri to let him take the characters and a contingent of troops into the Northern Wastes to investigate whatever the Dragon Army wants there. [Vendri] asks the PCs to leave while she and Darrett discuss details…
I cannot emphasize enough that this is not one or two isolated incidents: It is the entire campaign. Just an endless, mind-numbing litany of blow-by-blow descriptions of how the authors anticipate/demand each scene be played out.
“The NPCs will say. Then the PCs will say. Then the NPC will say. Then the PCs will say.”
This is interspersed liberally with “the PCs can roleplay or they can make a Persuasion/Intimidation/whatever check,” which (a) is just bad praxis (rolls and roleplaying work together; it’s not either-or) and (b) is completely pointless anyway, because the check result never seems to vary how the conversation plays out!
And I just want to take a moment to say something truly from the bottom of my heart:
Fuck Darrett.
This prick gets attached to the PCs like a cancerous mole early in the campaign. He tags along as a sidekick squire, but then, suddenly, he’s the main character: It’s him, not the PCs, who gets promoted based on their adventures together. It’s him, not the PCs, who’s scripted to save Lord Bakaris’ life. Before you know it, he’s the PCs’ boss, ordering them around, making all the important decisions, and continuing to scoop up all the accolades.
So, again: Fuck Darrett.
And there’s basically an endless parade of these jackasses through the entire campaign.
About midway through the book, for example, Darrett says, “See that huge hexmap over there? I’m going to stay here on the boat. Y’all go and explore for a while!” For one glorious moment, the players will rejoice! The fetters have come off! Not only do the PCs finally get to ditch Darrett, they’ll be in control of their own destiny! They’ll get to make their own choices!
Except no. Because the authors are so terrified of the players having the slightest bit of agency that literally eight paragraphs later a brand new GMPC pops up with detailed instructions on EXACTLY THE ORDER IN WHICH YOU WILL CONDUCT YOUR “EXPLORATION!”
There’s even a little scene so that, if the PCs are confused about who their new master is, Darrett will helpfully explain it to them.
The whole thing is so grotesquely pointless that it almost feels as if the authors are being deliberately petty. As if they have some personal grudge against the players.
THE BORING BITS
As I look over my notes for Shadow of the Dragon Queen and flip through the book to refresh my memory, I can see that it’s studded with big, impressive set pieces:
- huge battles,
- dragonriding duels,
- flying cities,
- gnomish siege weapons,
- ruined cities,
and more!
Just looking through this list, it seems as if this campaign should be a thrill-fest from one end to the other.
So why did I find the book so utterly stultifying to read?
Largely because the medium is the message. When I read an adventure book like this, what I’m thinking about is the experience of running it at the table. And the picture Shadow of the Dragon Queen paints of the actual play experience isn’t a pretty one.
Yeah, the set pieces are shiny and cool in an abstract sense. But when I’m reduced to a mute audience either watching somebody else do all the cool stuff or stuck as a helpless puppet unable to have any effect on what’s happening, they lose their luster.
For example, consider the big finale of the campaign:
First, the PCs fight and fight and fight and fight to prevent the bad guys from taking control of the flying citadel!
And it doesn’t matter, because an unskippable cutscene is triggered and they’re forced to just watch while the bad guy activates the flying citadel helm.
But that doesn’t matter, either, because it doesn’t work and the citadel is falling apart all around them!
But that ALSO doesn’t matter, because after the PCs escape from the collapsing citadel, they turn around and see a different bad guy flying off in a completely different citadel!
Whoopsie-doopsie!
You can almost be impressed by the skill it takes to build up so many levels of irrelevancy. (Almost.) But they aren’t even done!
See, the PCs might think to themselves, “We’ve gotta stop the other citadel!” and rush to do that. That’s not the plot, though, so the DM is instructed to use endlessly respawning death dragons “that attack until the characters retreat.” The defenses are too strong! All you can do is watch helplessly while dragonnels ferry troops from the ground into the citadel!
Three pages later, though, after the entire dragon army has transferred itself into the flying citadel and its defenses are even more impregnable? Now it’s time to attack, and so a gaggle of GMPCs show up and give the PCs their marching orders.
Sure, after all that, the dragon-riding duel with Dragon Highmaster Kansaldi Fire-Eyes (complete with pre-scripted conclusion) has a cool illustration, but I honestly find it impossible to get legitimately enthused about it.
When the book goes to such elaborate lengths to scream, “THIS IS ALL POINTLESS AND NOTHING YOU DO MATTERS!” eventually you believe it, no matter how pretty the two-dimensional set painting is.
Grade: D-
Project Lead: F. Wesley Schneider
Writers: Justice Arman, Brian Cortijo, Kelly Digges, Dan Dillon, Ari Levitch, Renee Knipe, Ben Petrisor, Mario Ortegon, Erin Roberts, James L. Sutter
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
Cost: $49.95
Page Count: 224
A guide to grades here at the Alexandrian.
This seems like it was written by people who wanted an awesome military campaign but didn’t know what makes military campaigns fun. That’s a shame.
jesus that sounds horrible. The fray mechanic seems salvagable but that is not really worth the price.
I seem to recall that the original Dragonlance set of adventures was pretty badly railroaded, too, in that the characters needed to accomplish certain things before they could move to the next module.
So really, this is just a return to what made the original modules great, right?
Clearly this is all just an arch meta reference to the original campaign’s reputation for railroading, and you are not suitably impressed by how clever WotC has been. 😉
Rich Baker’s ‘Red Hand of Doom’ 18 years ago showed how to do exactly this, without railroading.
Buried under the railroad (sorry for the mixed metaphor), that does seem like a pretty cool structure for having a fight in the middle of a mass combat.
I’m trying to think about how to generalize it. Perhaps you could have a big map of the battle and have a different “fray” and different battlefield event table depending on where you are. The PCs have to defeat an encounter in one area and then can choose to either stay put on the same battlemap and fight new enemies as they arrive or pick a direction and go to another battlemap. (So you would have a grid or point crawl for the whole battlefield, and each location would have its own battlemap.)
I’m imagining the PCs having to decide things like “Do we charge across the center of the battlefield and face some tough encounters and deadly frays but saving time? Or do we fight many more encounters trying to navigate the edge of the battle?”
Other things to include: Time dependent encounters, encounters that chase you across the battlefield, and stealth encounters.
(Justin, I guess right now I’m just trying to goad you into writing another scenario structure challenge.)
How to have these encounters affect the wider battle: Seems very tough. In the real world, how do individual fight figure into wider battles?
Some ideas:
-The PCs don’t affect the wider battle, they’re just trying to survive or have some other goal.
-The PCs have a specific mission or choice of missions, like assassinate an enemy commander, steal an artifact, or open a gate. They have to navigate across the battlefield, fighting or bypassing a series of encounters based on which path they take, and defeat the final mission critical encounter.
-There are a set of locations that are the “frontlines”. If the PCs win a battle they advance the frontlines for their side. Maybe it’s time dependent, so if they take too long on front, another front will collapse.
@Fungi
In Red Hand of Doom, winning these smaller encounters awarded victory points towards breaking the siege. The idea was that there was a general melee going on between the defenders and the goblin armies, and the PC’s are the “big guns” going after their big-guns – giants, dragons, named enemy NPCs. So you aren’t fighting endless waves of pointless filler, you’re teleporting to the other side of the city to stop their siege-breakers from getting through the wall, then flying over the city to trade blows with a dragonrider, etc.
But since the players had a long run up to the battle where they could recruit allies, they went into the battle with a large number of victory points already, potentially making the siege very lopsided in their favor. And conversely, if they didn’t get enough victory points to break the siege they could still win if they won the final battle with the BBEG, it’s just significantly harder if they don’t manage to recruit enough allies ahead of time.
I don’t know if one PC out of 30 who would hear “why don’t you leave the room while we discussed what you’re going to do” and agree. Maybe just maybe if the character’s a school child and doesn’t wanna get in more trouble with the principal. But it sounds like officer Darrett is begging to get fragged.
There was a 3.5-era book that had a point-goal system that sounds a lot like a generalized version of the Red Hand of Doom system you’re describing.
A glance at Google suggests that Pathfinder has some sort of “Victory Point” system that works similarly. Does anyone have more experience with these?
@Geoff DeWitt: Many years ago, I excitedly read through War of the Burning Sky – a third party adventure path for 3.5 – and faced similar confusion. This was a campaign conceived of as bringing back epic military stories such as Lord of the Rings and Dragonlance. The war was in the title! So why did the text assume that everyone would be satisfied getting sent on random strikeforce missions, usually disconnected from the actual army, with all the real strategic decisions not just handled by NPCs, but usually offscreen and barely even mentioned to the group?
My eventual conclusion was that the writers had mostly played with people who might enjoy the story of an epic war, but didn’t actually enjoy thinking about those logistics at the gaming table (with a side helping of there not being a lot of rules design in core 3.5 to help with actually running it), so they designed adventures where the war is relevant to the setting, but seldom really involved in gameplay.
That seems very strange to me, but at the same time, I can’t decisively say I think it’s the wrong call. I, also, have seen most of the groups I play RPGs with not really interested in taking responsibility for large groups of people. My conclusion has been to focus on smaller stories, but there’s a reason why every fantasy property in the general media consciousness trends inexorably towards war. The audience for “a story with the epic stakes of a fantasy movie, but you still only have to care about your friends and like five NPCs you’ve randomly taken a shine to” must be vast.
None of that excuses the railroad, of course.
Woof. Sounds like a lot of not fun.
I mean, prequels can be tough—absent a massive time jump, you’re stuck with the overall world having a known configuration at the end of the campaign. One can get around that by focusing on something smaller and more personal, or by playing the “hey here’s the crazy backstory nobody ever knew card” but either is a challenge.
Of course, it sounds like the authors didn’t care about continuity so maybe that wasn’t a barrier for them. They just blew it, I guess.
I’m running this campaign right now and it’s a lot of work to give the player’s agency. There are a lot of places where the adventure assumes the characters are going to take certain approaches (like evacuating Vogler), and so I have to decide what an occupation of Vogler looks like.
There are also a lot of places where as a DM I need to invent information in order to give the players the ability to make meaningful decisions. For example, the book doesn’t tell me how big the Vogler Militia is, or how large the Ironclad regiment is, or how big Kalaman’s army is, or how many flying mounts the Red Dragon Army has, etc.
The enemies’ motivations are never clearly explained. And it’s never explained what’s keeping the Red Dragon Army from simply taking Kalaman in the first place (I mean even without a Flying Fortress, they have flying troops that explode when killed and f’ing dragons).
In addition, most of the exploration is through straight-arrow dungeons that desperately need to be jaquayed. I find myself re-designing all of them. And there are plenty of continuity errors and thematic violations within the book itself–let alone when compared to DL cannon.
In my campaign, Darrett –as a Solamnic Knight wannabe–faced derision and spite upon arriving in Kalaman, and ends up hanging with the Vogler refugees. His role as ally is taken by Jeyev (who has actual military experience and makes a lot more sense), and I let the players decide where they want to go or what they want to do while the Red Dragon Army slowly encircles the city.
There are some sweet spots–the first reveal of the Draconians (with some editing on my part) that recalled the first encounter the Heroes of the Lance had in the first trilogy, the draconians dropping from the cliffs to invade Vogler, and a burned and battered party drifting down the Vingaard and seeing the gods’ constellations missing from the night sky. But yeah, those sweet spots come with a lot of work.
Fungi,
This really depends on your matter of scale. If you’re playing something more down to Earth, where the players have the relationship to a larger battle1 that say, an infantry platoon of any kind does, then the impact of the characters on the battle’s resolution is fundamentally nil2, and the battle is more like a complication the group has to survive through on the way to their mission. If you’re playing something where the players are more like a platoon of tanks then they might add up to half of the army’s overall battle modifier to the resolution.
1: “Larger” is doing pretty much all of the work here. Many combats that are named battles in history only have one or two hundred combatants per side, and would basically fit in a Walmart parking lot. Four human scale individuals lose their ability to influence a medieval aesthetic battle somewhere between 100 people on your side and 1000. “Tank scale” characters might still turn a battle directly up until maybe 5000 troops.
2: In pretty much every battle the direct experience of individuals is that you’re really fighting your own tiny personal battle of maybe 20 to 100 people depending on terrain, and there also happen to be two other groups of 20 to 100 people just about within screaming distance in the same situation, with each of them having another group on their other side. If your one group wins and the other four groups all lose, then your army lost the battle.
But …
A horrible railroad was exactly my experience of the original DragonLance and was a large part of the reason why I shelved the hobby for 10 years or so (marriage and kids were, perhaps, bigger reasons). Every damn module ended with some unbeatable boss or unavoidable outcome as far as I recall – I checked out after the third one, maybe they got better.
So, at least its true to the original in that sense.
my fav example of the railroading is this sequence:
‘[Mayor Raven]’s eager to hear advice from the characters and others about how to address this potential threat.
Allow the characters, in consultation with the village leaders, to determine how Vogler should respond to the mysterious army.
Allow the characters to guide the decisions of Vogler’s leaders, who will largely support any plan that doesn’t involve a preemptive strike or bringing battle into the village.
However the characters choose to respond to the army near Vogler, their plans are derailed by unexpected visitors.’
I have been running this adventure and the players have reached 6th level and about to travel to the Northern Wastes. We have been enjoying it very much, but to be fair I did advise them that the campaign was somewhat linear and its best to make characters that want to be epic heroes! In that sense this adventure does not disappoint. If the players know what campaign they are walking into it is a fun module.
@Savage Wombat – Pathfinder 2e has a Victory Point subsystem described in the Gamemastery Guide (p148). It’s very loosely defined, but works more or less like the one on Red Hand of Doom. Players get Victory Points for accomplishing goals, with some guidelines for adapting that to the “Degrees of Success” system that Pathfinder uses (basically, you crit-succeed if you beat the target by 10 and crit-fail if you miss by 10).
I believe the Kingmaker adventure path may use that system, but I’ve never run it.
@Dale – having kids means having guaranteed players if you’re willing to DM. My dad got me into the hobby back in the 90’s with the old The Fantasy Trip system (precursor to GURPS). I really credit it for my good intuitive math skills with small numbers and my love of complex systems.
I sympathize with the review. I had to struggle to finish reading the book, and I have no intention of running it at all. It was my last attempt at salvaging 5e, hoping to find at least a redeeming campaign.
I have been a Dragonlance fan since its inception. I have all the gaming material for all the editions. It has been my go-to AD&D setting since the start.
And reading SotDQ has been like drinking bleach: the authors have no idea about what makes Dragonlance, DRAGONLANCE. From the Lunar Sorcerer which is thematically completely wrong (associating the phases of a generic “moon” with specific Moons?!), to brushing under the carpet some of the core tenets of the campaign: from the ORDEAL to bring back the Gods to the World (rather than through a LAME dream), to the epochal change to a rigid and monolithic Order of Knights composed ONLY of HUMANS and MALES, by the defying actions of Laurana, a FEMALE and ELF (rather than a “free for all”). SotDQ is a frigging train wreck, from start to finish.
The first two or three scenarios of the original DL series were somewhat railroady; but the railroad spots could be identified easily, and playing in a more freeform way (even without the pregens) was definitely possible with just a few alterations, as I have done many, many times in the last 35 years. The series itself didn’t assume that the PCs would win; in fact, different endings were possible depending on the actions of the PCs. The PCs were not prohibited from action; it’s just that the enemy was in most cases drastically superior, so open confrontation would easily result in TPKs (AD&D characters were fragile compared to 5e ones, and magic was a scarce resource.) The mass combat scenarios weren’t scripted: the players could very well fail (e.g. winning the Siege of the High Clerist Tower was damned hard.)
And some of the key NPCs weren’t always required to play the same roles; they could be changed, and this affected the final outcomes.
One of the most memorable ending when I ran the campaign, was when the PCs failed to stop Takhisis, and the war was lost. But that was just the start of a new campaign where Ansalon was under the heel of the Dragonarmies.
In another re-run, the PCs managed to stop Takhisis, but they all died: EPIC.
@Antonio: And I deeply sympathize with you.
I didn’t even touch on the mechanical/lore issues your talk about, but it’s definitely another significant issue with the book. The Lunar sorcerer is a significant one, as you say. There’s also the hilariously bad execution of kender under the new rules for races, where the book (presumably accidentally) defaults to having kender PCs NOT know kenderspeak.
The original DL Saga has a lot of railroading, but most of the time it’s because the authors were trying to do something completely unprecedented and were struggling to find the right tools to make it work (and not always succeeding). It was daring and willing to take big risks. SotDQ isn’t daring at all. It’s generic mush.
It wasn’t that long ago that I finished running some friends through the 3.5e versions of the Dragonlance Chronicles. There were some serious railroading issues that came about in just how different AD&D and 3.5 were when it came to leveling characters, such as when the spellcasters learn Sending (thus completely breaking the tension after Tarsis when the two parties are not supposed to know that the other is still alive) and TELEPORT (which just breaks the campaign, period), among other things. But overall, it still gave the characters a lot of agency. We had some hilarious moments when the PCs just.. didn’t do what the books expected and thus the entire story had to be changed (IE the PCs just completely failed to save Laurana at in Pax Tharkas and she ended up being brainwashed into being the new Red Dragonarmy Highlord), and some other moments like the party completely winning Eben over and causing him to reconsider his betrayal directly to Verminaard’s face. Oh, and the Druid threatening Derek to within an inch of his life because Derek was an asshole, thus changing the entirety of Derek’s “Final Ride” during the Battle at the High Clerist Tower.
SotDQ doesn’t let you do stuff like that. It flat out says ‘do this if the party tries to do something unexpected in order to keep the train on the rails’ and that is absolutely unacceptable.
I don’t know any of the writers save Schneider and Sutter who are old PAIZO Crew and shoild have known better.
Astonishing, that with thst much Talent an creativity around WOC produces this crap.
Thanks for writing these reviews.
I like the “fray” concept for a battlemap as part of a larger battle. I am about to (last session tomorrow) wrap up a big 40-session 2-year hexcrawl high level campaign (I read your hexcrawl articles too). The party started at level 13 and are now level 20, taking on the avatar of a god (plus forces) atop his temple in the middle of an enemy city of 100,000+. There are 5,000+ enemy troops in the city, all flying (Aarakocra). The players brought a Kraken and about 100 giants, plus a thousand or more yuan-ti attacking around the outskirts of the city… and an artifact weapon designed to kill this god.
The whole rest of the battle is the sideshow… if the party fails, there’s a deific avatar throwing 9th level spells every round, plus a bunch of enemies. If they succeed, the enemy god’s avatar is dead, his casters lose spellcasting for a couple of minutes, and their artifact drains some of his power and becomes a baby god (again) and does a bunch of poison damage to all the enemies within a mile, wiping out most of the enemy army. Not that the players know that yet!
I originally had a concept for victory points and tracking “war power” and such, but ended up throwing it out because there’s just too many options at high level. Once they got a Helm of Teleportation, they were able to blip across the map pretty fast to put together the final assault, and it became “OK, what’s your timing and placement?” followed by me looking at flight times/distances to see how the enemy would react. “UJse your judgement” is good DM advice, but doesn’t necessarily work as a resolution method for a book that’s selling 50,000 copies.
Overall, I went the opposite of railroading. Nothing on the map HAD to be visited except the final boss: “The enemy is sacrificing people to gather power and will eventually have the power to fully manifest as a god on the Material Plane. That would be very bad.” The artifact is optional but helpful, and there are instructions for how the DM can point them to it. They skimped and skipped entire areas, and spent a lot of time on others. It worked out very well structurally, and once I had all the content written, I had no prep time needed between sessions… just “Where did we leave off, and what are you doing next?”
However, I don’t expect WOTC to do that.
A) I think a “players make the plot” campaign is a harder sell because there is no coherent storyline, especially in terms of making it suitable for AL.
B) Letting the players teleport all over the place and do what they want in any order with high level abilities is scary for some DMs… and I’ll admit, they have rolled over most challenges – except the one time at level 20 where they decided to let a huge enemy search force englobe them, lost initiative, and then ate 18 fireballs at once (18th level Samurai ability + Helm of Teleportation let them escape).
C) High level combat is slower. 8 casters, 2 iron golems, reinforcing lesser golems, etc. is a lot to keep track of. Prismatic Spray really slows the game down, and I no longer like it when 5 enemies have it. I am kind of looking forwards to a bit of low level play.
D) It’s a LOT of work to go plotless/railroad-less. By the time everything was finished and ready to publish on the DM’s Guild, the entire campaign package was 295 pages long across over 20 PDFs (or, when printed, about 8 folders to keep track of things). It fundamentally would not work well as a printed book, because you have to be looking at the map, the “what’s in the hex” entries, and the random encounter tables all at once, and then if they find a dungeon, jump over to the “long-form dungeon entry” section.
B & C can be overcome, but A and D are, I think, why WOTC will never publish a non-linear concept like this. It doesn’t work as a bound book, and there’s so much possible variance between each story that it won’t get through whatever creative approval process. “We’re going to make a bunch of high-level content and turn the players loose to do whatever they want. Eventually they’ll make it to a few areas that most campaigns will probably visit.”
But what do I know, I’ve never actually read or played a WOTC-published campaign in 5e, aside from just now (finally) experiencing RHOD via play-by-post (5e). I think that may be a good thing in terms of not feeling locked into a format.
We have just played through this campaign and this review is SPOT ON.
The entire party HATED Darrett, and no matter how much the DM tried to make him seem like the good guy, his pre-scripted actions starting in the Northern Wastes were at best incompetent and at worse made him look like an entitled malicious asshole.
While the railroading was unpleasant, the way the campaign forces Darrett down the PCs throats was even worse – and finally the PCs created a compelling argument as to why Darrett Highwater was actually the bad guy working for Lord Bakaris (which makes way too much sense if you consider the pre-scripted saving Bakaris scene and what a useless liability he is in the Northern Wastes) and pushed it so hard the DM said ‘ok, we’ll run with that.’
Setting: good.
Campaign: frustrating.
NPCs: infuriating.
This is on my shelf and I stopped reading after chapter 1. The setting and novels meant a lot to me as a young teenager, and I felt the writer’s inability to play by the setting’s conceits frustrating as well.
I wonder if part of that frustration is that I’m still thinking of the events of the originals modules/novels as canon. Could this adventure be salvaged if we started from a position of “this is a new canon” and looped in threads for a potential Cleric to be the one to rediscover the gods, for the fighter to be the one to become the beacon that restores the knighthood, etc? These could be the new heroes of the lance and this is just the first part of that journey?
Or is the thing too closed off to even thread those things in?
Regarding Darrett–the character is badly thought out in so many ways, but it’s an easy enough fix giving his role as military-attache to Jeyev, the surviving member of the Ironclad regiment who
a) actually has military experience
b) has actually fought the Dragonarmy by the time the characters were done in Vogler
c) doesn’t aspire to be a Solamnic knight (who the book goes out of the way to tell you are untrusted–even in their native country)
d) isn’t a child
In our campaign, Darrett was a more-or-less sympathetic figure who, after the loss of his mentor, dedicated himself to protecting the remaining villagers (and mainly stayed out of the way). He helped out in a couple of early fights, then faded into the background once the party had surpassed him.
My pet theory is that they designed this campaign to happen in the Forgotten Realms, near the Anauroch desert, where the remains of the flying cities of the Netherese empire are.
At the last moment, someone at WoTC remembered there was no fan-made Dragonlance products on DM’s Guild, so they moved the campaign there, unsure how to integrate their own personal headcanon in an established franchise.
Takhisis, the Queen of Darkness, became the Dragon Queen, because it had to be tied to Tiamat the lame pet of Asmodeus. They added the rules for a “Moon Sorcerer” that actually works better with one-moon settings than three-moons settings.
In the end, it was a product done by people who didn’t know Dragonlance, barely did their homework by reading and following the 1st edition Dragonlance Advendures book, ignoring everything done after that, and perusing the Dragonlance wiki, once in a while.
So, in the end, there are only two positive sides to this product:
1 – The art, which is gorgeous
2 – The fact that since its publication, we are now inundated in DM’s Guild with “cheap dragonlance products” whose only virtue is to have a “Dragonlance” sticker somewhere on the cover.
@Hanswurst The fray boundary thing was probably inspired by KibblesTasty’s battle system, which not only knocks this out of the park in terms of battle><skirmish inter-relevance, but also includes an overarching “deckbuilder” of sorts, making the battle the culmination of the players’ choices leading up to the action. Exactly the opposite of what this module does.