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Dragonlance: Law vs Chaos

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Been thinking of Dragonlance again lately. And one thing that strikes me is that the setting works so much better on a classic Moorcockian axis of Law vs Evil than it does "good vs evil", so I thought I'd write to unpack my meditations on this. For one, the whole "i am on the side of EVIL" shtick. Does that even exist? has it ever? There has been plenty of evil in world history, but as near as I can see, even in those cases of self-admitted evil, it has been something accepted as a means to a higher end, never an end in itself. Team Evil simply isn't a coherent position. Law and Chaos however, are very much coherent positions. And it makes a lot of things in Dragonlance coherent quite easily. For one, it gives the black hats a justifiable place in the world. Sure, a lot of Chaos followers may be evil (owing to the ease with which Chaos can be used to deconstruct of moral order), but they are not necessarily so. They are also agents of liberty, change and ren...

Operation Unfathomable: Lazy Review

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 I've had Operation Unfathomable [OU] on the shelf for a number of years. In our last session my players, desperate for cash,  decided the advert of 20k for recovering a "null rod" on behalf of the mad overking (this is greyhawk, wild coast) was the thing to go for.  It was a difficult session to run, since they had come from the previous sandbox across the Solnor (which they had, inadvertently, utterly wrecked), and could in theory end up anywhere. I had sort of tried to funnel them by presenting shipping options: Rel Astra, Irongate, Ratik or the Wild Coast. They went to the hardby and from there starting soaking up rumors, that eventually led them to OU. But that meant I had around a dozen modules in my backpack based on where they might end up, meaning I was going to have to fly by the seat of my pants, even though I was sort of familiar with all of them, from having read or run them in years past and kinda flipped through all of them again before the session. The act...

Threa-Elddim is the fantasy kingdom to end all fantasy kingdoms

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Welcome to the Threa-Elddim, the most quintessential fantasy kingdom ever made. I think I captured lightning in a bottle here and can't wait to run a campaign in it. Here's the quick blurb: Threa-Elddim was a strong and imposing kingdom during the Realm of Man; and before that, home to great elven and dwarven kingdoms in the preceeding age. Although nominally still a Dominion of Law, much of this once proud kingdom was laid to ruin during the Drune Wars that spelled the end of the Realm of Man, from which it has never really recovered. The wild duchies of Rodaire and Noinavohr make up its northern frontier, whilst the plains March of Nahor and the southern royal duchy of Rodnog, are chiefly concerned with the threat of the Chaos-sworn duke of Rodrom to the west, who has gathered a host of orcs, hobgoblins and other evil creatures to his side.