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Dragonlance Adventures, for instance, was intended to provide a definitive core sourcebook for the setting, with authors Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis compiling a range of material published in a slew of earlier products and filling in the gaps. The end results were decidedly mixed – Unearthed Arcana and the two Survival Guides in particular get a lot of stick – and whilst some books seemed intended to provide an expanded core for AD&D, others were much more setting-specific. In fact, when Gary Gygax returned to TSR HQ from his stint in Hollywood in order to put the house in order, one of the moves he mandated was the release of a stream of new orange-spined hardbacks to set up a continued revenue stream. This was part of the distinctive orange-spined hardbacks that comprised the central pillar of the AD&D line from 1983 (when the previous hardbacks – except for the Fiend Folio – got reissued with new cover art and the orange spine treatment) until the release of 2E. As it happens, I recently scored some old Dragonlance core materials at a steal, so what better time to review it? Dragonlance Adventures If Wizards want to bring Dragonlance back for the 5E treatment, their best bet is probably to look at its presentation during the 1E and 2E eras, during the peak of its popularity. Moreover, Dragonlance as a setting seems to have hit its peak sometime during the 2E period once it was a sufficiently prominent game that it ended up getting a whole game system of its own for Dragonlance: The Fifth Age, but as mentioned during 3E its development was farmed out to Margaret Weis Productions and during the 4E period it laid fallow entirely.
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This may particularly be the case for Dragonlance, since it’s been argued that the particular style of Dragonlance in itself predated some of the stylistic changes that 2E would exhibit.
DRAGONLANCE BOOKS TALADAS TRIOLOGY FULL
Of course, trying to support all those lines at once is part of what buried TSR in the first place, so a full return to that model almost certainly isn’t on the cards, but 2E fans aren’t just fond of the number of settings on offer – lots of fans of the settings in question consider their 2E incarnations to have been their best and most interesting eras. This may be part of the reason why 5E aims to combine its 4E rigour with a 2E feel whenever I see people discussing what they like about their favoured editions of D&D, AD&D 2E‘s supporters tend to make a big deal about the setting material put out during that time period, and with good cause: at no point in the game’s history did the official publisher support such a numerous and broad range of campaign settings. After all, you can retro-clone old editions of D&D as much as you like, but there’s no open licence to go and revive Birthright or Ravenloft if you take a fancy to it. It makes sense that the second prong of their strategy for 5E, after presenting a solid set of rules that brings together the best of all past editions whilst reversing the tendency towards ever-increasing complexity that the 3E and 4E eras saw, is to use those rules to leverage the potential of their various settings as much as possible. The thing is that, in between the safe harbour of the OGL and the fact that IP protection for game rules tends to be quite weak, Wizards must know that they can’t keep 5E ahead of the pack forever solely on the strength of its rules. On top of that, Wizards evidently intend in the long run to explore more settings than just the Sword Coast region of the Forgotten Realms there’s an appendix at the back of the Adventurer’s Guide giving guidelines on using the information in there in Eberron, Dragonlance and Greyhawk, and I can’t believe they’d have gone to that effort solely to to please fans of old settings – particularly considering that two of those haven’t had any official love from Wizards since the 3E days (and they farmed out the development of 3E Dragonlance materials to third parties). So far, Wizards haven’t offered that much in the way of setting material for 5E, but with the release next week (or this week if you happen to be close to one of Wizards’ favoured shops) of the Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide that’s rather changing.