(D&D 3.0) Dragonlance Campaign Setting

One of the recurring themes of this blog is my ambivalence about "vanilla fantasy," i.e. the stuff that D&D does - vaguely Tolkien, with its elves and dwarves and hobbits, halflings, kender, vaguely swords and sorcery with necromancers and thick-hewed men of action, and vaguely weird fantasy with all of these other elements used with scarcely any thought given to the overall effect ("sure, Cthulhu can be here too, why not?"). It's the genre that got me started with the hobby and there was a time when I eagerly devoured any variation I could find. And then I grew a little older, and I became too cool for it, and I would only touch fantasy that was conspicuously and consciously "not D&D." And then I grew a little older than that and became too cool for too cool, and I resolved to approach the genre with an open mind, in the process discovering a new, adult perspective that allowed me to appreciate "vanilla fantasy" as a sort of ongoing community project, where the very things that seemed so stultifying about it were actually fascinating historical artifacts, fossilized elements of a culture long-passed, preserved in a deep strata of obscure setting lore (for example: gnomes - nobody knows why they should be there, but leave them out and you will hear about it).

And overall, the general arc of my new, grudgingly laid-back approach to vanilla fantasy is towards Being Less of a Dick About It. It's not something I always do well (heck, even just now, my "new perspective on the genre" was about 90% faint praise), but it is something I'm working on.

The Dragonlance Campaign Setting (Margaret Weis, Don Perrin, Jamie Chambers, Christopher Coyle) really threatens to make me backslide.

See, this is a series that I have a great deal of personal nostalgia for. When I talk about young John eagerly devouring vanilla fantasy, this is the exact thing I'm talking about. I must have read the Chronicles series at least three or four times. And Legends at least twice. And when I talk about becoming disillusioned with the genre, well, having read Chronicles and Legends so many times is undeniably part of it.

The funny thing is that I was already done with vanilla fantasy by the time I bought this particular book. Even in 2003, I was buying the Dragonlance Campaign setting purely out of nostalgia. I've had it since it was brand new, more than 20 years, and this is the first time I've ever read it all the way through.

Now I'm left wondering if I ever truly hated vanilla fantasy at all. Maybe I just hated Dragonlance. 

No, "hate" is a strong word. Younger me would have used it shamelessly, but when I invoke it here, I'm doing it as a memory. I used to get far too invested in these things. I used to have passionate opinions about the fantasy genre. I'm not like that anymore.

I am very deliberately trying to not be like that anymore.

I didn't hate this book. There were parts that were dangerously close to hate - the racial alignment sections veered a little eugenics-y ("Half-ogres tend towards a neutral alignment. They have too much ogre blood to be completely good but don't automatically embrace evil."), the "balance between Good, Evil, and Neutrality" is the cringiest fucking thing I've ever read and ZOMG, what the fuck are you even trying to do here, you can say in the DM chapter that "no one ever wakes up in the morning and decides to be evil," but you literally have a big group of guys that get up every day and base their sartorial choices on signaling to the world at large their allegiance to an order of explicitly Evil wizards that gain their powers from the Dark Moon Nuitari, God of Evil Magic and honestly, that's not the worst part of it - it could be potentially the funny sort of cartoon evil - because who the fuck are these "neutral" people who can see the guys who are all "we stand for the use of supernatural power for the degradation and subjugation of all life and we're going to wear a uniform to let you know that it's not an accident" and think, "hey, we gotta make sure to keep some of these guys around."

Okay, let me take a breath here. This is getting a little ranty. . .

And another thing - yeah, no shit people blamed the Cataclysm on the gods. It's literally something that they did. On purpose, knowing what would happen. "Okay, so we dropped a meteor on the most densely-populated city on the planet, killing thousands instantly and many thousands more in the slow agony of climate-change-induced famine, but have you ever considered reflecting on your own faults? There's plenty of blame to go around. Us for doing it. You for making us do it."

I mean, the Kingpriest of Istar was supposed to be this cautionary tale of "good" overreaching and causing harm, thereby validating the setting's insistence on the necessity of cosmic balance, but he was just kind of this racist authoritarian who implemented a program of slavery and genocide. I think the angle here is that his "Proclamation of Manifest Virtue" wasn't so transparently full of shit in the context of the setting. Certain creatures were, in fact, evil by nature. Too much ogre blood even stops the half-ogres from being good. So if fighting an ogre when they are inevitably out and about doing their evil ogre things is good, then wouldn't preemptively stopping them from doing evil ogre things be extra good? But that's just the standard-issue apologia for genocide, so thankfully we've got the Neutral forces around to point out that just because something's Good, that doesn't make it good, and the universe needs a balance where nobody is allowed to commit genocide. But don't just say that the Gods of Good are against genocide. Because sometimes genocide is Good. That's why you need Neutrality.

Arrgh! I'm going in circles. Dragonlance's "morality" system makes my brain run in circles. It's always like this. It's always been like this. It will always be like this. I am drowning in the Discourse.

But I didn't hate this book. Not really. All of those problems are old problems. This particular volume only occasionally flirted with that nonsense (mostly at the beginning and in the history section). It's actually set after the first 100 novels (that is not a joke, that figure is from the introduction) in the Age of Mortals, and it kind of just reads like a world that is burnt out on high concepts. In the past two generations, there have been something like four near-apocalypses and now that it's time for DMs to take over for their home games, you're left with a bunch of Extremely Normal stories to tell.

The parts of the book that were being normal were actually . . . okay. The elves of Silvanesti were driven from their homeland by invading minotaurs. That's a plot. I could do something with that. Maybe some sort of drama with their rivals, the nation of Qualinesti that was founded by elves who were exiled for being less rigidly isolationist. There could be a nice irony in the reversal of roles. Oh, wait, they too were driven from their homeland by an invasion of Dark Knights under the command of the dragon Beryllinthranox?

Maybe 100 books was too many.

But jokes aside, the geography section is pretty useful. Moreso than the 1e version. There is a definite sense of there being more stories to tell, beyond the scope of canon. I'm not sure it ever really makes a case for itself as an alternative to its contemporaries, but if you want a not-quite generic fantasy world (that differs from core D&D largely in providing options for some of the most annoying characters you've ever seen), then the Dragonlance Campaign Setting provides. It could sometimes, particularly in the "Timeline of Krynn" and "Other Eras of Play" sections, have the extremely insular feeling of a long-running series that had accumulated an unmanageable number of deaths, resurrections, time-travel shenanigans, betrayals, villain redemptions, unlikely romances, carbon-copy "new generations" and definitively series-ending threats that needed to one-up the last definitively series-end threat. But I feel like, for a Dragonlance fan, that's perhaps a selling point. The reason you're picking up this book is because you want to play in the world of the novels. . . all the novels.

On a personal level, I spent a large part of the last week and a half thinking about how I could write this post and not come across as needlessly mean. I don't think I succeeded. Which is a shame, because I really am deeply ambivalent about this series. I don't like it, but I remember liking it, and in reading it again, after a 20+ year hiatus, I can see the shapes of what I used to like about it. It's a very . . . digestible setting. The color-coding of its "good" vs evil conflict is bad worldbuilding, sure, but it's easy to self-insert. You could make a buzzfeed-style quiz "Which color Robe would you wear" no problem. Everything has the superficial gloss of something you expect to see in D&D-style fantasy. The Knights of Solamnia are extremely knight-like. The elves are the perfectly memed variety of elves that approach being fey and occult mainly through the expedient of being really snotty and not talking to you. You better believe the dwarves are gruff everyman warriors. And I have to admit, the kenders' deal of constantly stealing shit and telling transparent lies when they're caught is kind of funny. It could sometimes feel like Tolkien after three or four rounds of the telephone game, but that's part of the appeal. It's a world that's easy to vibe with, even if it doesn't always make sense.

Ukss Contribution: Not going to do anything backhanded. There were a number of things that were perfectly trash fantasy - the Knights of the Lily looking extremely goth, the draconians with the fanfic ready healing saliva, the magical bard who "has the ability to recall all the stories of Krynn's past - whether the stories were true or not." And while I would say that I unironically enjoyed them, it was a chaotic trash panda sort of enjoyment. "Nom. Nom. Nom. Shovel that garbage directly into my mouth. I am a mean, cynical adult who wants to redeem the media he enjoyed at 12 years old by making it about the cringe of adolescence."

However, I have to acknowledge that Dragonlance brings out the worst in me. And aside from the eugenics and borderline-offensive theodicy, it hasn't really done anything to deserve it. So I'm going to pick something that I not only enjoyed, but also genuinely thought was cool.

When the Sivak draconians die, they reflexively shapechange into the form of the person that killed them (size and creature type permitting). Unlike the other draconians' death throes, (exploding for AoE damage or becoming a pool of weapon-dissolving acid), this doesn't seem like a particularly good move, tactically. But it is creepy as fuck. There are no rules attached to it, but I can imagine being a soldier fighting the implacable armies of Takhisis and landing a telling blow, only to see my own face stare back at me, dying on my own blade, and that would definitely stick with me for years and years after the battle.