Quote from: jmarso on April 24, 2022, 12:05:57 PM
Hmm. Was that trailer narrated by the Iranian lady who played Avarasala in the Expanse? Sure sounded like her.

It should be called 'Genderlance', since apparently it's a war between men and women.

Won't be touching it with a ten foot pole, not that I play 5E at all these days anyway. I've full on regressed to 2E.

I read the books and enjoyed them back in the 80's when I was a teen, and we bought the setting and played a single campaign in it before running home to Greyhawk. It just didn't translate well to open-world play, it seemed to us, and fell into that trap where it felt like we were 'adventuring in someone else's story,' or a story that had already been told. Overall it was a gigantic 'meh.'

Yes this was the same Actress from Mass Effect and Avasarala in the Expanse, also Lakshmi-16 in Destiny2 I believe.  She's a fantastic voice actress.

Quote from: DefNotAnInsiderNopeNoWay on April 24, 2022, 11:49:58 AM
What exactly would help make this trailer SCREAM Dragonlance?

Elmore, Eisley, and Parkinson?

Anyhow, the scroll work on the one knight type guy does look a bit like stuff done in Dragonlance.  As I said before it's been rebooted and remixed so much as to be pretty nonsensical but the original took a number of turns from the bog standard D&D of the time.

The original Dragonlance was set in the dark ages after the collapse of the Godpriest's empire.  Wizards were rare and feared.  The big main town was up in giant trees for protection.  The holy knightly order of paladin type dudes was self important and lost.  There were no clerics.  In a game where clerical healing is a standard trope there was none.  Steel coinage prevailed and gold was of little value.  Really it did a lot of non-standard stuff.

So what images to employ to convey all that?  Town in the trees?  Flying citadel?  Dragons?  Big eighties hair? To my mind there's really exactly one moment that says Dragonlance more than any other.  Sturm Brightblade on the wall facing Kitiara and her dragon.  Sturm Brightblade dead on the ground afterwards.

There's a tone there too, something about warmth and comfort and ordinary things going on in contrast to a fallen world.  Admittedly it's hard.  Dragonlance was very much TSR's attempt to give D&D a more acceptable and mainstream face.  It's art and tone has a certain generic religious tract blandness to it.

Ugh, it's going to be shit. Weis and Hickman aren't in on it, and it's WOTC garbage. No thank you, I'll stick to SAGA - assuming I want to play Dragonlance in the first place. Great books (when you're a teen), terrible modules.

Yup - apparently "The new Dragonlance books for 5e did not involve Tracy Hickman or Margaret Weis".

https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/uawuft/the_new_dragonlance_books_for_5e_did_not_involve/

Quote from: Ruprecht on April 24, 2022, 12:48:32 AM
I'd be curious how many people truly, honestly, care about Dragonlance. I bet the folks that do are all in a very specific age range.

This is true. I switched to Runequest back before the DL modules (although my game group was aware enough about it to make fun of the color-coded wizards), and didn't come back to D&D until third edition when Dragonlance was MIA.

Looking at the trailer, it appears DragonLance is a setting about a group of evil, powerful, white men who fight women and their allies in a multi-cultural Resistance. Not fighting for victory, kings, or glory (and definitely not fighting for Freedom which is now problematic). But instead fighting for each other, i.e. the marginalized communities.

It looks like the most current year RPG setting possible. Effectively Disney Star Wars with dragons instead of Death Stars, including the idea of "saving what we love" as the main purpose of fighting.

Yeah, terrible. The Dragonlance books weren't horrible (never player the famously railroady modules), but that trailer's generic shit's about as weak as it gets (even ignoring politics).

Quote from: DefNotAnInsiderNopeNoWay on April 24, 2022, 11:49:58 AMThe setting has always been some of the most grounded and vanilla D&D standard-fare fantasy in the entire genre...

Except that it isn't. That would be FR and Greyhawk. Dragonlance has always been the most distinctive of D&D's standard fantasy settings, with Kender, Gully Dwarves, Tinker Gnomes and Draconians, color coded wizards that drew power from the world's three moons, dragon riding knights, griffon riding elves and areal combat.

Knights had a very distinctive looking ornate armor, and elves where divided into Kagonesti (Wild Elves) and Silvanesti (High/Gray Elves), which were prominently featured, with their own distinct cultures, as opposed to saying "BTW, this setting technically has wild elves". Draconians are basically Dragonborn, and this setting would be pretty much the only D&D setting where Dragonborn would actually make sense, if they hadn't been shoehorned and plastered all over the place for the past two editions. Yet, for once in D&D's recent history, we didn't see any Dragonborn.

There's a lot of stuff they could have included, with a lot of distinctive, colorful art to draw insight from, to make this look more like Dragonlance, but they didn't. Instead we got this drape, colorless battlefield, with a lot of decontextualized destruction were supposed to care about despite not really knowing WTF is going on. And a few indistinct dragons, which I guess means this must be "Dragonlance", cuz it's not like any other D&D setting has those.

Quote from: hedgehobbit on April 24, 2022, 06:09:13 PM
Looking at the trailer, it appears DragonLance is a setting about a group of evil, powerful, white men who fight women and their allies in a multi-cultural Resistance. Not fighting for victory, kings, or glory (and definitely not fighting for Freedom which is now problematic). But instead fighting for each other, i.e. the marginalized communities.

It looks like the most current year RPG setting possible. Effectively Disney Star Wars with dragons instead of Death Stars, including the idea of "saving what we love" as the main purpose of fighting.

   The irony is that there is a strain in Dragonlance that is very much in alignment with this. The institutions are generally corrupt or short-sighted, diversity is the highest virtue ("What we believe is not important. That we believe is."--a supposedly Good god in one of Weis' later novels), and either the intellectuals (mages) or the nonjudgmental diverse (kender) are the moral and ethical centers of the world.

Quote from: drayakir on April 24, 2022, 02:08:24 PM
Ugh, it's going to be shit. Weis and Hickman aren't in on it, and it's WOTC garbage. No thank you, I'll stick to SAGA - assuming I want to play Dragonlance in the first place. Great books (when you're a teen), terrible modules.

  Weis & Hickman weren't in on SAGA or the Fifth Age, and that was my favorite iteration of Dragonlance. (And I have trouble not reading subtext into "an evil goddess steals the world away from its rightful gods, and everything since is horrid and corrupt" in the War of Souls.) Ravenloft went through three different creative teams (Nesmith & Hayday; Miller, Connors, and Rice; the Kargatane) which were all different and all good. The presence or absence of the creators doesn't necessarily make or break a new iteration--but I'm not seeing anything that gives me any confidence about the new version.

This was from the Gizmodo article about it.

QuoteRay Winninger, Executive Producer for Dungeons & Dragons, confirmed that this will be an accessible, lore-light game that folks who have no familiarity with Dragonlance will be able to play, and will almost "give you a tour of what this setting is like." It's a brand new setting set during the War of the Lance, but it's an entirely new story, not associated with the concurrent stories or lore that were published in the late 80s and early 90s. "It adds edges around the details of those settings," Winninger clarified, "this product takes you to Ancelon, a place that hasn't been covered in other Dragonlance materials."

That, combined with all the other info we've heard, make this sound like a dumpster fire just waiting to happen.

Ancelon?

Ansalon?

The continent on which everything happens hasn't been covered? Or are they just using homonyms to confuse everyone? Either way, it makes no sense.

But it's probably the first, because one of the headings in the article is "Dragons of Stomwreck [sic] Isle Starter Set".

Quote from: Armchair Gamer on April 24, 2022, 08:34:09 PM

Quote from: drayakir on April 24, 2022, 02:08:24 PM
Ugh, it's going to be shit. Weis and Hickman aren't in on it, and it's WOTC garbage. No thank you, I'll stick to SAGA - assuming I want to play Dragonlance in the first place. Great books (when you're a teen), terrible modules.

  Weis & Hickman weren't in on SAGA or the Fifth Age, and that was my favorite iteration of Dragonlance. (And I have trouble not reading subtext into "an evil goddess steals the world away from its rightful gods, and everything since is horrid and corrupt" in the War of Souls.) Ravenloft went through three different creative teams (Nesmith & Hayday; Miller, Connors, and Rice; the Kargatane) which were all different and all good. The presence or absence of the creators doesn't necessarily make or break a new iteration--but I'm not seeing anything that gives me any confidence about the new version.

Oh don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that the presence of Weis and Hickeman makes or breaks Dragonlance. Yeah, props to them for creating it, and I've certainly enjoyed Chronicles and Legends (and that's it). I'm saying that given how utter dogshit WotC has become, the only way I could get excited about a new Dragonlance is if the OG team was in on it.

Somewhere within the DNA of Dragonlance is potential for a kickass modern update with really cool art, great adventures, stories, and characters.

Take some of the cheese out, inject some harder edges, stay away from anything that has even the whiff of wokeness, and you could have a great updated setting.

This ain't it.

Quote from: VisionStorm on April 24, 2022, 07:17:48 PM

Quote from: DefNotAnInsiderNopeNoWay on April 24, 2022, 11:49:58 AMThe setting has always been some of the most grounded and vanilla D&D standard-fare fantasy in the entire genre...

Except that it isn't. That would be FR and Greyhawk. Dragonlance has always been the most distinctive of D&D's standard fantasy settings, with Kender, Gully Dwarves, Tinker Gnomes and Draconians, color coded wizards that drew power from the world's three moons, dragon riding knights, griffon riding elves and areal combat.

Knights had a very distinctive looking ornate armor, and elves where divided into Kagonesti (Wild Elves) and Silvanesti (High/Gray Elves), which were prominently featured, with their own distinct cultures, as opposed to saying "BTW, this setting technically has wild elves". Draconians are basically Dragonborn, and this setting would be pretty much the only D&D setting where Dragonborn would actually make sense, if they hadn't been shoehorned and plastered all over the place for the past two editions. Yet, for once in D&D's recent history, we didn't see any Dragonborn.

Dragonlance was distinctive more for what was omitted or changed.
The big one being no clerics, But in module 1 there was also
- No gold coin. Every region had its own coinage. (No mention yet of Steel - which comes up in DL2)
- Only one type of elf (qualinesti)
- halflings were replaced with Kender who "look like wizened 14-year olds", had a taunt ability and were immune to fear. (no mention yet of them being kleptos)
- Dragons have not been seen in 1000 years.
- Draconians are the mystery minions of the Dragonlords.
- Hill Dwarves seem to be the only PC dwarven race left and appear to live on the surface. (Gully Dwarves are not yet the comedy relief of the books.)

And alot of little touches.

But in layout initially from just the module Dragonlance was no different from say AD&D Conan which had its own distinctive omissions. You had to dig through the module to glean bits of information. And even that was very little. Based just on the first module Dragonlance is surprisingly generic a setting.

What does stand out from re-reading DL1 is that it lacks all the annoyances of the books and campaign setting book.

Quote from: rgalex on April 24, 2022, 11:12:58 PM
This was from the Gizmodo article about it.

QuoteRay Winninger, Executive Producer for Dungeons & Dragons, confirmed that this will be an accessible, lore-light game that folks who have no familiarity with Dragonlance will be able to play, and will almost "give you a tour of what this setting is like." It's a brand new setting set during the War of the Lance, but it's an entirely new story, not associated with the concurrent stories or lore that were published in the late 80s and early 90s. "It adds edges around the details of those settings," Winninger clarified, "this product takes you to Ancelon, a place that hasn't been covered in other Dragonlance materials."

That, combined with all the other info we've heard, make this sound like a dumpster fire just waiting to happen.

They apparently didn't even tell Hickman and Weis, and just went through the link posted by Eric Diaz and their pushing the concocted BS narrative that the old books include themes not suitable for "modern audiences" (i.e. not in accordance with woke social constructionist ideology). D&D's current audience has been thoroughly brainwashed. This new setting is going to be shit and they'll savor every bit of it..