Wednesday, August 31, 2022

Retrospective: Dragonlance Adventures

Although there are nearly four thousand posts on this blog, one of the most widely read remains "How Dragonlance Ruined Everything," published all the way back in 2008. Though the title is intentionally hyperbolic, I largely stand behind what I wrote then, namely that the release and success of the Dragonlance series of adventure modules was the crowning achievement of the Hickman Revolution and forever changed the trajectory of Dungeons & Dragons. I don't think this is disputable. Since 1984, D&D – and indeed roleplaying games in general – have been slowly evolving into a much more story-driven, character-focused form of entertainment than the by-blow of miniatures wargaming it was in 1974. Whether one views this evolution as good or bad is irrelevant to the truth of it.

Consequently, it should come as no surprise that, as Dragonlance's star rose ever higher, TSR would attempt to use it as a platform to change the game mechanically as well as conceptually. Dragonlance Adventures demonstrates precisely what I mean. Published in 1987, DLA is a 128-page hardcover volume on the model of previous AD&D tomes like the Players Handbook. Though billed as a "source book," its content is not simply setting material; the book contains many new rules that augment or outright replace those of standard AD&D. In fact, many of these new rules, as we'll see, appear to be dry runs for rules that would later be incorporated into Second Edition when it appeared in 1989. 

The most obvious changes in Dragonlance Adventures come in the form of its character classes. Almost every standard AD&D class is either altered or replaced in DLA, the only exceptions being fighter, barbarian, ranger, thief, and thief/acrobat. Consequently, the book provides quite a few new classes, such as three different types of clerics, wizards, and Knights of Solamnia, all of which tie closely into the history and cosmology of the world of Krynn. Also presented is the tinker class for use by the setting's unique take on gnomes. Other nonhuman races are similarly reimagined or, in the case of halflings, replaced entirely (which has the added benefit of severing some of D&D's most direct connections to Tolkien's Middle-earth – there are no orcs on Krynn, for example). 

Though these changes, as I note, are presented in order to bring the rules more into line with the realities of the setting, they also enable Tracy Hickman, who is credited as the book's "designer," to tinker with some of AD&D's rules in ways that, at the time, were genuinely original. For example, the three types of wizards – White, Red, and Black – are distinguished not simply by their alignment, but also by which "spheres" of magic to which they have access. These spheres are simply AD&D's schools of magic (abjuration, conjuration, etc.) renamed. The effect of this change is to differentiate wizards by their background and training, much in the way that Second Edition would do with specialist wizards. Similarly, clerics would have access to different spheres of spells based on the interests of the gods they served.

The mechanical treatment of Krynn's races is quite similar, fiddling as it does with the verities laid down in the Players Handbook. Not only does Hickman shift the ability score ranges, he alters both the availability of classes and, more significantly, their level limits. Silvanesti Elves, for instance, can be paladins and they're unlimited in their advancement, two remarkable deviations from the Gygaxian canon of earlier AD&D. There are also rules for playing minotaurs, who, while brutal, are not inherently evil or unintelligent – another notable shift away from the "facts" of the game as it was known at the time.

From the vantage point of present day D&D, filled as it is with innumerable new character classes, nonhuman species, and nary a level limit to be seen, none of this likely appears worthy of mention, let alone suspicion. Yet, at the time, these tentative steps away from the humanocentric, pulp fantasy picaresque of Golden Age D&D were truly revolutionary, especially coming from TSR, which had previously resisted – and, under Gygax, mocked – any such attempts to upend the game's presentation and focus. A great many people, myself included, welcomed these changes and felt that they presaged a a great sea change in the game. As it turned out, we were more prescient than we realized and Dragonlance Adventures served as the herald of the new age aborning, just as the Dragonlance adventure modules had done several years previously.

There's a lot more that could be said about this book and the role it played in changing the design of AD&D, such as its inclusion of the non-weapon proficiencies of the Dungeoneer's and Wilderness Survival Guides as baseline features of the rules. While I don't want to minimize the significance of their inclusion, even more significant, I think, is the overall presentation of DLA, which offers the reader – more on that in a moment – a coherent setting whose rules are designed to emulate and reinforce its flavor and themes. Krynn is explicitly a setting that "promot[es] the power of truth over injustice, good over evil, and grant[s] good consequences for good acts and bad consequences for evil acts." The Angry Mothers from Heck would be pleased.

Let me conclude with a brief note about the book's preface, which states that "you can certainly enjoy this book without playing the game." Though Hickman and Weis quickly enjoin the reader to play, I think it's significant that the preface even countenances the idea that one might buy Dragonlance Adventures without wishing to play AD&D. We must remember how popular – and lucrative – the Dragonlance novels were and how many people became fans of the setting and its characters as a result. I'd wager that, while Dragonlance was very profitable for TSR, the number of new players it introduced to playing D&D was not nearly as great. Dragonlance (and, by extension, D&D) was a powerful brand and that's all that mattered. Once again, Dragonlance was a forerunner of what was to come.

12 comments:

  1. This book marks the beginning of my disillusionment with Dragonlance.
    Having played a big part of the modules and read the novels, I was aching for a book like this.
    And yet... the book read as a quick cash-grab with changes in the rules that felt contraddictory with my own experience of Krynn.
    Because no matter the setting changes: steel for gold, schools of magic and the moons, Solamnic knights, etc... the Dragonlance I had read and played was still "vanilla" AD&D, and this book was not.

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    1. That's very interesting. I wonder how many other fans of Dragonlance felt similarly.

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    2. There is--or was--a definite contingent of older DL fans who prefer the more 'vanilla AD&D with some tweaks' of the modules to the more codified and customized DLA. Most fans of the time swore by DLA, though, since it bore the Weis & Hickman names, especially in opposition to the more jumbled Tales of the Lance box produced for 2nd Edition. It was also the closest thing DL had to a standalone setting book until that box, as opposed to piecing things together from the modules, and was able to tie into Weis' love letter to Raistlin ... that is, the Legends trilogy.

      Personally, I always favored the Fifth Age game above anything before or since. :)

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    3. That reminds me of my own disillusionment with Glorantha. The books all said Bronze Age again and again, but my mind never really pictured Bronze Age until the art in one supplement (not sure which, probably Pavis) made it undeniably clear.

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  2. These days i think that the best you can do to play dragonlance with D&D, is use the original modules (or the Wynn Fonstad Atlas) as gazetteers of Krynn for a sandbox game set during the war of the lance.
    I personally do not care for the setting outside of that very specific time-frame and place.
    For me Fifth Age was an interesting experiment in game design, but I dislike the way it rebooted the setting.

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    1. Well, the Fifth Age designers were stuck having to deal with Weis & Hickman's attempt to kill the setting with Dragons of Summer Flame. The novel came first as "the fourth Chronicles book," and the presales on it were strong enough that TSR authorized the relaunch of the game line so long as it was post-DoSF, non-AD&D, and card-based. The game had no impact or influence on the novel's plot or direction.

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    2. Back in 2019, I was toying with doing exactly what artikid suggests: using the modules as inspiration for a sandbox game set on Krynn. At the end of the year I picked up DLA and started reading it. It ruined my enthusiasm to run a game set on Krynn. Not sure why it had the opposite effect, but I don't have much interest in revisiting that game world now.

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  3. You've just casually blown my mind. I've never read a Dragonlance book or played an adventure, but I've been aware of it for all of its 38 years and all this time assumed Tracy and Margaret were sisters!

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  4. It lead right to the Matt Mercer effect and actors doing improvisational storytelling with game rules and players trying to emulate them. Is that a bad thing? It's definitely different than how D&D was played before. There's always been contention between playing the game and the would-be storytellers (DM's) and would-actors (players).

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  5. A long time ago, when I first began to realize that talking publicly about my interest in D&D might not be social suicide (10-15 years ago) I discovered that one of my fellow drivers at work claimed to have read every single Dragonlance novel (I've read six). He'd never played D&D and had no interest in the game. He just liked the worldbuilding.

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  6. A little late but I remember appreciating this book as giving the setting a lot of character through well developed custom classes that would only really work in Krynn. It was a real contrast to the sort of half-ass (underdeveloped would be a nicer way of saying it) specialized mages that made their appearance in 2E or other kit based specialists in the brown books.

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