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Go to Part 1

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.

Meh.

When Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen was announced, I was really excited about it. So excited, in fact, that I ended up spending most of the summer and beyond doing a deep dive into the Dragonlance Saga. I was excited about the campaign returning to the War of the Lance, the time period of the original Saga (and accompanying Chronicles trilogy). I was excited about Stephen Baker (designer of great mainstream wargames) and Rob Daviau (father of the legacy board game genre) joining forces to design Warriors of Krynn, a companion wargame that was designed to be played in conjunction with the campaign.

What an amazing opportunity to reinvent the bond between wargaming and roleplaying that has been part of D&D’s legacy from the very beginning! And, more than that, an opportunity to triumphantly realize the unfulfilled promises of the original Saga!

Plus it was coming out within mere days of my birthday! What a fun little birthday treat! I didn’t hesitate at all in preordering the Deluxe Edition that bundled the D&D campaign and board game together into one package.

So when the book showed up at the beginning of December I didn’t hesitate for a moment in ripping open the box— (Literally. The Deluxe Edition box is incredibly fragile and basically impossible to open without destroying it. Bizarrely, it’s apparently deliberately designed to be disposable.) —and flipping open the book.

Of course, I was still excited! Just completely engaged with the book. There’s some nifty little player handouts in the first chapter that are designed as missives from various NPCs to the PCs as an introduction to the setting, and I recorded some dramatic readings of those, thinking they’d be cool to send to my players as little teasers.

But then I found myself reading the book less and less. At first I thought it was just the holidays keeping me distracted, but by the end of the month it was clear that Shadow of the Dragon Queen had become a slog for me. It was frustrating and, even worse, it was boring.

And then the OGL crisis hit, with Wizards of the Coast flipping off the entire hobby and promising to detonate a devastating nuclear bomb in the middle of the industry. As I dealt with the professional and personal fallout from that, I wasn’t really in the mood to read any D&D books (and it wouldn’t really have been fair to the book), so I laid it aside. Fortunately, the OGL crisis eventually resolved itself in perhaps the best way anyone could have reasonable hoped for, and so, in February, I eventually picked up Shadow of the Dragon Queen again.

… and it was a still a miserable slog.

To a large extent, the simple fact that I have only just now, at the end of April, managed to drag my carcass to the final page of the book, is a pretty accurate summary of my entire review.

IS THIS BOOK FOR YOU?

The original Dragonlance adventures, published in the 1980’s, sought to bring the power of a true fantasy epic to Dungeons & Dragons. It plunged the players into the world-spanning epic of the War of the Lance, in which the evil draconians of Takhisis, the Dragon Queen, formed the Dragon Armies and invaded the realms of Ansalon, positioning the PCs to change the course of history.

Shadow of the Dragon Queen is set during the earliest days of the war, ostensibly serving as a prequel or sidequel of sorts to the Dragonlance Saga. Part of the appeal of a ‘quel narrative like this, of course, is seeing how the continuity meshes with the existing work. When done well, as in the early issues of Kurt Busiek’s Untold Tales of Spider-Man or Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, you get an exciting bit of frisson whenever you see a character walk off stage left, knowing that they are simultaneously walking on stage right in a different story. Like a great heist movie, there is a kind of puzzle-solving delight in seeing the pieces come together, plus a real opportunity for depth and meaning that resonates beyond the immediate boundaries of what you’re creating.

The problem, though, is that Shadow of the Dragon Queen cares so little for the established continuity of Dragonlance or the War of the Lance that it’s a complete turn-off for any Dragonlance fans who would be interested in that sort of thing.

For example, the fact that several hundred years ago the True Gods abandoned the world of Ansalon during the Cataclysm and have not been heard from since is a really big deal. It’s a central tenet of the Dragonlance setting, a crucial element of the War of the Lance, and something which, in my opinion, is part of what makes the original Dragonlance Saga something special and unique in the annals of D&D. The quest to find the True Gods and restore the divine magic of clerics is, in fact, a really big part of the Saga.

So when it became clear to me that Shadow of the Dragon Queen was set in a time period before the True Gods returned to Ansalon, I was really curious: How were the designers going to deal with the fact that clerics canonically (pun intended) don’t have their spells?

And the designers’ provided a truly epic answer:

“Eh… fuck it.”

The book provides a short dream sequence. If a player creates a cleric, the DM basically says, “A god appears to you in your sleep! So I guess all that stuff that happens over in the Saga was completely pointless! Woo-hoo!”

The fact that the designers really couldn’t give a fig about this is really underlined by the fact that the FIRST TRUE CLERIC TO BE SEEN IN CENTURIES is just… kind of irrelevant? There’s one oblique reference to an NPC being impressed if the PCs have healing magic and that’s it.

Okay, so existing Dragonlance fans aren’t the target audience here. None of that continuity crap matters because this campaign is being written for new fans! Shadow of the Dragon Queen is their introduction to the wonderful world of Dragonlance, and it’s fine if stuff doesn’t match up perfectly up with the old stuff.

… except Shadow of the Dragon Queen kinda sucks as an introduction to Dragonlance.

The setting “gazetteer” (if you’re willing to call it that) is just fifteen pages long, and six of those are dedicated to short descriptions of every god. There’s an absolutely stunning poster map of Ansalon by Francesca Baerald, but most of the locations listed on it are not given even the briefest of descriptions.

From a player’s perspective it’s probably a slightly better experience, but I honestly don’t know how any DM would be expected to run the setting with confidence based on the information (or, more accurately, the lack of information) given here.

So if the book shows a careless disregard for the old fans and is completely inadequate for the new fans… who is it for, exactly?

Go to Part 2: All Aboard

Go to Part 1

There are literally thousands of RPGs. I, personally, own hundreds of them. So, obviously, I’m not going to attempt to catalogue every single stat block that has ever existed, but I think it might be useful to take a step back from D&D’s paradigm and look at how other games have approached this problem.

Sufficiently simple games, of course, can largely sidestep it entirely. It’s not unusual to find an RPG where NPCs are entirely defined by just two or three numbers. In some player-facing systems, many NPCs may not have any stats at all!

Although it can be somewhat obfuscated, the 1974 edition of D&D more or less fell into this paradigm. Most combat stats were derived from Hit Dice, and so for most monsters the only relevant stats were:

• Armor Class
• Move
• Hit Dice

Even in Monsters & Treasure (the 1974 version of the Monster Manual), this allowed monsters to be presented in purely tabular format:

In practice, special abilities and exceptions in each monster’s description complicate the placid simplicity projected by this table for many creatures, but this is an approach which has been more coherently synthesized in recent games.

In Over the Edge 3rd Edition, for example, Jonathan Tweet, another co-designer of D&D 3^rd Edition, created a system in which NPCs can be given a complete stat block with a single number:

• Sub-Par (0)
• Competent (1)
• Expert (2)
• Elite (3)
• World Class (4)
• Superhuman (5)

Important NPCs, however, can be given additional specialties and abilities that operate at a higher tier:

MADELINE VORE

Business Leader, Elite (3^rd): Madeline has an easy and firm grasp on how to create and leverage brand for maximum profit and how to run the enterprise that does so.

Energy Vampirism, Expert (2^nd): With a touch, Madeline can drain the life energy of a human and save it for herself, extending her life and restoring vigor.

DEFAULT, COMPETENT (1^st)

Monte Cook’s Numenera is another game that takes this approach, with stat blocks like this:

Warlord: level 4

Reugar Darkglow: level 3, tasks related to metalworking as level 5

Nieten: level 4, attacks with stronglass sword as level 5; health 20; Armor 1

Dread Rider: level 4, Might defense as level 6; health 15; damage 6 (4 blade, 2 electricity); Armor 3
Lightning Storm: Immune to electricity and +2 electricity damage. Others in immediate range suffer 1 damage per round.
Recall: Teleport to nearest dread destroyer.
Summon: Summon dread destroyer (arrives within a few hours).
Death Trigger: If slain, dread destroyer is summoned.

I refer to these as fractal NPCs: A simple default, but with the ability to add as much complexity, specificity, and crunch as desired when the occasion calls for it.

At the other end of the spectrum, of course, we have crunchier systems where NPCs have a ton of detail baked in by default. There are a lot of reasons why a system might want (and benefit from) this crunch, but a very common are systems where NPCs and PCs are built using the same rules. (And, therefore, all the complexity of creating a PC is inherited by the NPC stats.)

Like D&D, it’s not unusual for these crunchier systems to simply give up on the idea of a concise stat block. In The Succubus Club, for example, Vampire: The Masquerade just threw its hands up and printed the NPCs using full-blown PC character sheets:

It’s more typical, however, for crunchier systems to still try to achieve some degree of compactness, as seen in this stat block from GURPS Fantasy Adventures:

This relative compactness is often achieved by relying on some degree of system mastery: The spells, advantages, and disadvantages are all simple lists, requiring the GM to look up the rules for each individual feature. This is incredibly effective if the GM is familiar enough with the rules to know what, for example, Magery 2 means without looking it up, but brutally punishing to a new GM who has to look up a dozen or more abilities just to figure out what the NPC’s options are.

To square the difference, the designer can attempt to anticipate which abilities the GM is least likely to be familiar with and/or which abilities are relevant to the current encounter and provide a more detailed reference only for those abilities. For example, Literacy, Charisma +2, Compulsive Liar, and Greedy are probably all relatively self-explanatory, so maybe we can just focus on explaining what Voice and Magery 2 mean.

This is what I refer to as a hierarchy of reference. If you’re a GM doing this for yourself, it can be time-consuming but relatively straightforward (and very useful!). After all, you know exactly what information you do and don’t know. If you’re doing it for a published book, on the other hand, it’s often far trickier. You can’t even really target a specific level of system mastery, because every GM will learn different parts of the system in different ways and at different times. It can even be deceptive. (Compulsive Liar and Greedy look like roleplaying prompts, particularly if no further explanation is given. Did you remember to make the Will rolls they require?)

The other technique, of course, is to find ways to condense the presentation of the information. We saw variations of this earlier with the AD&D and BECMI D&D stat blocks. When Wizards of the Coast redesigned the D&D 3^rd Edition stat block in 2006, I thought their utility-based division was nifty, but the specific execution too large, so I revised the stat block into a short form that required a fraction of the space:

NAME (CR #) – [Gender] [Race] – [Class] [Level] – [Alignment] [Size] [Type]
DETECTION – [special], Listen +#, Spot +#; Init +#; Aura …; Languages [list], [special]
DEFENSES – AC #, touch #, flat-footed #; hp # (HD); Miss #%; DR #; Immune …; Resist …; Weakness …
ACTIONS – Spd # ft.; Melee attack +# (damage); Ranged attack +# (damage); Space # ft.; Reach # ft.; Base Atk +#; Grapple +#; Atk Options …; SA …; Combat Feats …; Combat Gear …
SQ …
STR #, DEX #, CON #, INT #, WIS #, CHA #
FORT +#, REF +#, WILL +#;
FEATS:
SKILLS:
POSSESSIONS:

Which could be combined with short references for pertinent abilities (and, when in doubt, page references for quickly looking up for the full rules when necessary).

This approach of condensation also requires a certain degree of mastery, but this time only of how the relatively dense stat block is designed to be read. (As opposed to every unique ability in the entire game.)

And, of course, these two techniques for dealing with crunchy stat blocks can also be used in combination — both compacting the information and also making decisions about which abilities need to be fully described.

IN CONCLUSION

So when it comes to stat blocks, there are broadly two approaches you can take.

First, you can choose to design your system to make the presentation of adventure stat blocks more compact, which often also has the effect of making them easier for GMs to create, particularly on-the-fly when something unexpected happens in the middle of a session.

Or you can try to figure out some way to condense the presentation of information, often relying (to at least some extent) on the GM’s system mastery to help carry the load.

Or you can just give up and tell people to look it up. If you’re feeling really apathetic, you can do that without even the common courtesy of a page reference.

This article is a revision and expansion of an older article. The original version can be found here.