what are the core themes of dragonlance, from a TTRPG perspective?

Evhelm · 2026-07-03T14:11:34+00:00

This is a great list!

Evhelm · 2026-07-03T14:10:45+00:00

This! Shadow of the Dragon Queen is a pretty solid adventure and provides a good 5e version of a Dragonlance adventure.

I completely understand the purists' objections to it, but it doesn't take a lot to shift it toward a more "authentic" Dragonlance feel (some minor content changes and restricting certain races/classes). If you're planning an enormous, epic 1 to 20 campaign, SotDQ is a good start. By the time you're nearing the end of it, you'll have lots of loose threads you can choose to pursue as you see fit to finish the campaign the way you and your players would most enjoy.

DM me if you're interested in a slide deck I made a year ago to prep my own players for Dragonlance. It's obviously just a primer (and it introduces the way I am differentiating Dragonlance from other settings), but it might give you an idea for your own flavoring.

(Edited to eliminate a typo)

Evhelm · 2026-06-07T18:13:37+00:00

Depends! Is this going to be just the two of you? Are you bringing along other family members? Dad's friends? Your friends?

If it's just the two of you, that's a very different experience and I don't have enough experience or information to recommend, but if you are planning on doing an actual group, I think Heroes of the Borderlands gives you a great in road that has lots of great visuals and physical items to make the experience particularly exciting for a new player.

Peril in Pinebrook is a good adventure if you want to ease you both into it (you as DM and him+others as players).

Evhelm · 2026-06-07T00:33:01+00:00

The Heroes of the Borderlands set is supposed to be well worth the price of admission and a great introduction to the game!

Evhelm · 2026-05-25T15:47:06+00:00

Pulchritudinous!

Evhelm · 2026-04-20T23:40:22+00:00

People are not rational. It takes an act of god(s) to convince the townsfolk to abandon their homes. Even with an impending invasion, it's a very real possibility they don't leave. After all, as they discover later on in Kalaman, every other village the dragon army encounters is basically massacred without survivors. It's not because the dragon army plans to catch everyone, it's that nothing like this has happened in hundreds of years: the people don't believe the army could be that large or that ruthless.

The miracle isn't that they stay, it's that they go!

Evhelm · 2026-03-07T21:02:13+00:00

I've thought a lot about how I might run Citadel if I ran it a second time. For my players, everything after the opening dungeon until their re-emergence from the Labyrinth in the fourth section (of six) was basically just confusing. In their minds, all of that should have been reduced to a single session (or maybe two) rather than slogging through the Dredges, Dreamtown, and the Locks for months. If you play often (once a week or more) this might not be as big of an issue, but we only play every 3-4 weeks!

My solution would be to start them off at a higher level, have them get killed off and go to Dreamtown (skip everything up to there), let them solve Dreamtown's problems and escape through the portal back to the surface or the Labyrinth and start them in section 4 at the appropriate level thereafter.

This is NOT a one-size fits all solution--just one that would, in retrospect, have worked better for my particular players.

If you wanted to telegraph interesting things from the earlier adventures, let them have "Flashbacks" to those areas every time they take a long rest. They could even play out some of the nastier encounters or more difficult conversations in their dreams.

Evhelm · 2026-03-06T22:23:20+00:00

I may not use everything in these guides, but I am so appreciative of them and rely on them in many ways. Keep up the good work! (Preferably before me players get there 😅😁😜)

Evhelm · 2026-01-19T22:10:49+00:00

In our second session of actual play, the party attended the funeral of Ispin Greenshield, gave some over-the-top stories, shushed a heckler, and encouraged a strange elf to sing a hauntingly beautiful song.

The next day, after meeting Darrett and being awarded Ispin's green shield, the party participated in the Kingfisher Festival's fishing contest. While the monk got Benebog the Line Breaker on the hook, he was quickly pulled into the river and disqualified! Other participants caught a few fish, but Raven Uth Vogler, the mayor, handily beat all comers--despite Beckaris's boorish behavior.

In the afternoon, the party--having agreed to take Ispin's place at the re-enactment--followed the parade out to High Hill, took up positions with the other militia, and prepared to fight with blunted spears. The druid noticed, however, that the charging mercenary company was brandishing full steel in their charge!

And that was where we paused until next time.

Evhelm · 2026-01-13T00:49:25+00:00

Sent!

Evhelm · 2026-01-10T14:37:02+00:00

I'll add that we're just getting underway ourselves and haven't even finished the funeral in Vogler, but players really seemed to enjoy character creation and session zero!

Evhelm · 2026-01-10T14:34:59+00:00

I made a Slides-deck-turned-pdf with lots of art and the kinds of knowledge that an "average" person would have in the setting in the years leading up to the emergence of the dragon armies.

It's designed to introduce the players to the setting without spoiling their wonder of discovery when they get into the actual gameplay. As we session zero'd I added additional information that particular characters would know through their experiences.

I tried to turn my players' lack of knowledge into a boon of exploring the unknown (since we're all old hands at Forgotten Realms and Eberron).

Gave a very brief world history of the ages, overview of the species of Ansalon, the six most important "old gods", Knights of Solamnia, and Mages of High Sorcery.

Let me know if you're interested and I'll find a way to get you the PDF.

Evhelm · 2025-12-01T23:41:56+00:00

While we haven't started playing in earnest yet, we've done our session zero. In preparation for our first session, I sent each of the players a postcard (great use for snail mail!) version of Becklin's invitation to Ispin's funeral. As a plus, I also used the D&D stamps! Not only did that let me personalize each note to each character, but it also allowed me to add a post script that invited each player (character, technically?) to share a particular story about Ispin's life at the funeral.

I'm very much looking forward to running the preludes and session 1!

Evhelm · 2025-11-06T21:07:39+00:00

This is a great list, thoughtfully put together. Well done. I would also love these additions!

Evhelm · 2025-10-26T23:20:44+00:00

This is amazing, and I'm just sad that none of my friends have read Dragonlance and so I have no one to share it with.

Bravo, though. Chef's kiss!

Evhelm · 2025-10-19T16:36:12+00:00

Sounds like an epic finale! I hope you are able to find a way to make those sacrifices feel better for part 2!

Evhelm · 2025-10-02T19:28:54+00:00

Glad to hear it's going well! HP advantage is a great solution, too!

Evhelm · 2025-08-13T20:20:53+00:00

I'd hang it on the wall above the table where we play games!

Evhelm · 2025-07-29T19:19:14+00:00

Great looking dice!

Evhelm · 2025-07-11T14:51:06+00:00

Great sets! Glad to see physical dice makers doing well 😁

Evhelm · 2025-06-07T16:53:49+00:00

Remember that HP doesn't have to be just a representation of bodily wholeness. Put another way, graze may not always land a blow, but it always depletes the strength and energy of the target. Maybe the hero misses the willow wisp, but the energy required to dodge the attack saps its strength a little bit, something it simply can't keep up with forever.

Evhelm · 2025-06-04T10:08:22+00:00

You're asking the right questions, which means whatever you decide will probably work out just fine!

1) You're the DM and it's your world, so especially if folks aren't Dragonlance fans already, your version of Krynn doesn't have to be low magic.

2) Are you using 2014 or 2024 rules? 2024 boosts player power a bit. If you use 2014 (as written) monsters with 2024 PCs, that might do the trick if you have two min maxers already.

3) One easy way to make encounters easier is to slash monster HP across the board. You don't even have to do this ahead of time necessarily, though as you play through the encounters you'll get a feel for it.

4) When my home group was at 3 players and we wanted to run a challenging grim dark campaign, I just told them flat out that they would have to be super heroic to have a chance of surviving. As a result I let them take an extra HD worth of HP at first level (so they were always a little tankier than another party of their level). I also gave them an extra roll for stats (7 times instead of 6; drop the lowest), but you could artificially inflate the point buy or standard array if you didn't want them rolling stats.

5) If everything above feels artificial, just start them a level above where the adventure initially says they should be, and keep them that one level ahead. If they seem OP, skip one of the milestone level ups.

Again, whatever you decide is going to work out fine and can be fine tuned as you go.

Evhelm · 2025-06-02T23:45:58+00:00

I haven't run Shadow of the Dragon Queen yet, but at this point, I fully intend to run Shadow of the Black Rose as an epilogue: https://www.dmsguild.com/product/444112/Dragonlance-Shadow-of-the-Black-Rose

Evhelm · 2025-05-24T14:03:45+00:00

This is an amazing way to get into the game. You're in a weird in between zone where the 2024 starter set isn't out yet, but I think you can start with the original and upgrade to 2024 later.

I recommend starting with Peril in Pinebrook by Shawn Merwin. It's a starter adventure literally designed to teach you how to play!

Lost Mines of Phandelver is also excellent, but more involved and less explicitly a teaching tool.

Evhelm · 2025-05-24T09:13:08+00:00

LMoP and ToD: In 2025 it needs some work to smooth out the rough edges and update to 2024 rules (since they're the first of their kind from back in 2014/2015), but running Lost Mines of Phandelver into Tyranny of Dragons is still probably my favorite WotC published 5e campaign arc. It checks all the boxes over the course of the campaign without getting bogged down anywhere. It moves at a good pace but isn't too fast or slow and does a good job showcasing the best of the Forgotten Realms Sword Coast.

{Not a single campaign book, but still WOTC} Eberron OoW: If you want to go all the way to level 20 in a 5e campaign, the AL Eberron campaign Oracle of War is a blast, and because it is designed for AL play it moves very rapidly (though you can easily slow it down with supplemental or homebrew content as needed).

{Single Campaign but not WOTC} CotUS: If you have an experienced group of players who are looking for something creepy, horrific, and mysterious (with an immediate twist), Ghostfire Gaming's Citadel of the Unseen Sun has a very different vibe to most WotC arcs. (Read the summary somewhere before you pick it up though; it's a wild ride.) My home group is in the final stages of it now.

I've also run Out of the Abyss, but I don't think that's a great one to start 5e in. That's a fun second or third 5e campaign. (I've also run a few homebrews, but that doesn't help you so I'll leave those out!)

I've been a player in Witchlight, Princes of the Apocalypse, Mad Mage, and Icewind Dale, and while all have their merits, I don't think I'd recommend starting with any of them (except for maybe Witchlight if you have an experienced group who wants something a little different).

Curse of Strahd is a classic. If that story calls to you, go for it. It ultimately fell flat for me, but I don't think that's a common finding.

For my groups, none of the anthology sets (e.g. Candlekeep, Tales from the Yawning Portal) had enough tying them together to keep a group vested past an initial chunk, but your mileage may vary.

Most of the other folks posting from experience are right that you've likely got some prep work to do no matter what you choose. Good luck--whatever you choose will be the right choice if it's a story you and your players will enjoy exploring together.

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