Dragonlance Pitch Dragonlance to new players

[ScaleyBob]

It's got Dragons. Lots and lots of Dragons.

It's got no Gods. They all left due to some sort of hissy fit involving a flaming mountain or something. But there's Dragons.

Its got some dumbass hour glass eyed, golden skinned idiot of a wizard that a lot of people seemed to like for some reason. And Dragons.

There's really, really annoying Hobbit types and even more annoying really, really stupid dwarves, and possibly more annoying, really twee gnomes. And Dragons.

There's lots of cheesecake, chocolate box fantasy pictures on all the modules. A lot including scantily clad adventurers. And Dragons.

There's an over-arcing, all important, world saving plot that railroads you into doing it as written, or just read the first 3 books, or 6 books, if you like the Hour Glass Eyed, Golden Skinned idiot from above. They involve Dragons, and Gods, and the really annoying Halfling equivalents. And more Dragons.

In summary, it's a bit crap, but there's Dragons, and for a game named Dungeons and Dragons, there's often a lack of Dragons. Dragonlance did go a long way fixing this.

 

[MostlyHarmless42]

So I shall be the one to bring up the needed points of that while the original trilogy are a classic novel series and decent module for those who which to run heroic characters, they should NEVER be run any other way than the party REPLACING the cannon heroes, and they pretty much necessitate that the party wishes to play heroes rather than murderhobos. To be honest, rather than converting all the modules face value I would take the lore locations and adapt them to the module of Rise of Tiamat mechanically speaking. To be blunt, it's the same story to the point where one questions why they didn't just release a OG Dragonlance conversion.

There is also a number of issues if you wish to stick "to the lore" in that sorcerers, warlocks, bards, and a number of other classes wouldn't exist in the setting during the war of the lance.

In truth, the best time to run games is set during the Age of Mortals, post War of Souls, as much of the "cannon" after becomes minor regional conflicts that are more easily adapted to campaigns, and it fixes the above magic issues via wild magic existing in the setting. Unfortunately many will claim that to acknowledge the mere existence of the Age of Mortals is "blaphemous" to the original setting. These people are wrong.

Frankly it was the best thing for the series in terms of updating it to modern D&D games, and adds a bunch of potential conflicts to use as source material, rather than the same freaking war over and over. Most modern gamers would look at the War of the Lance and make fun of it as being cheesy as hell, which it is frankly. It was one of the novel series that CREATED such cheese. Amazingly influential books and a must read, but still outdated by modern standards.

To it's credit, with the right DM it is by far my favorite setting. If you want heroic fantasy or settings with knights and high magic it's got it. Likewise I've always found the smaller scale than Faerun to be a stength. The gods and kingdoms are fewer in number and far easier to keep track of and there is much less fear of players feeling like they rolled a character that doesn't fit (as long as they roll heroes), or the DM being suprised by some obscure god/country a player has heard off but they have not.

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

I think the tables trying to run a Dragonlance setting should use it a la Eberron: a frozen timeline set at the start, in the middle or at the end of the War of the Lance, in a world ravaged by war. Its a setting with a clear moral scale, good vs evil. Many people will tell you that this require the player to play real good character, but I see the setting as having 2 major teams and let DM choose if his campaign will be played from the side of the good or for team evil.

It also require the DM to be ok with the removal of some PHB material. No playable dark elves, no cleric, paladin, monk, warlock, bard. I'd also use the special rules from Adventure in Middle Earth for non-magic classes, Journey, Audience and Fellowship, since they're all huge part of the setting: a small band of adventurers in a world about to end with no gods or other high powers ask to for help.

 

[jasper]

There is no better Dragonlance pitch than reading the Dragonlance Chronicles. Full stop.

...

DOH!. The pitcher threw a bean ball right into my ear. I'm taking my base. Dragonlance Cartoon A-Team Heroes fight EVILLL. And look you can play a cute happy go lucky steal Stealy thief race who gets away with every thing because they so gosh darn cute and loveable. In this campaign your pc never dies unless you want to.

 

[Caliban]

I have a hard time pitching Dragonlance as a setting to play in. I've read all the novels (or most of them, I got burned out after a certain point).

You think Forgotten Realms is too crowded? It's got nothing on Dragonlance. So many novels, many of them retreading the same ground, but from the viewpoints of minor characters.

To me, Dragonlance feels like all the big stuff has been done, leaving nothing significant for the PC's to do.

And just in case you might want to go back and deal with some of the "adventures behind the scenes" that the main Dragonlance character didn't do? To late, they did that in later books. After the nth time I learned that the destruction of the world had been narrowly avoided without the main characters even being aware of it (retroactively making the original novels kind of pointless), I kind of lost interest.

 

[Ath-kethin]

Ok, I'll bite.

There's a whole continent where the dominant consists of Roman Empire-esqe minotaurs, where all dragons are potentially neutral so you can't just hunt and kill by color code, where xenophobic elves hide in their forest kingdom and typically kill those who discover them, where savage tribes roam the plains and wastes eking out what living they can, where a meteor strike come 300 years ago radically reshaped the landmass, and where essentially all the major cultures follow gods that "enlightened" folk would call Evil.

TL;DR: sell them on Taladas and leave Ansalon for the novels.