I have blogged several times about Dragonlance in the past. The broad theme I've struck up is that it gets unfairly judged on the railroad nature of its eponymous modules and the straightjacketing nature of its novel series, around which the world seems to revolve. To me, i's a distinct and worthwhile brand of fantasy once you open up the world and look smaller than the grand themes of wars and stopping gods. It was never really the Heroes of the Lance, or even the War of the Lance, that drew me to the world. It was the more earthy stuff, such as the  coming-of-age sandbox  in the Tales of the Lance  boxed set that enchanted me. Today it dawned on me why Dragonlance had such a strong pull on me as an adolescent and still tugs at my heartstrings today: Outside the epic tales that steals the headlines, Dragonlance represents a distinct and different kind of gaming fantasy than the rest of D&D - What I am here calling "Journey Fantasy". What I mean by this term ...

 I've blogged about Dragonlance and the 5th Age before. The post-War of the Lance world was meant to be an open-ended one, but struggled to escape the confines of what was once Dragonlance's biggest asset: The saga of the Heroes on the Lance, which by then had become its most confining burden.  It seemed impossible to tell new stories of new heroes in a meaningful way - Even the fastforward of 25 years didn't really do much and left the world sort of aimless and floundering in what it wanted to be.  Dragons of Summer Flame changed all that. It definitively closed the book on the Heroes of the Lance and left a new world, upheavaled by change - Dark knights, a world scarred by warfare and chaos, and of course the departure of the gods heralding the last, longest and eventually brightest age of the world: The long foretold Age of Mortals. This I felt was actually the kind of open-ended world Dragonlance deserved to be. I thought the introduction of Mysticism was an eminent...

One of the blog entries I find myself returning to is the one I wrote about  Dragonlance being a unique sandbox setting . I ran it as a kid and it's a campaign I'd love to run again as an adult. Here are my thoughts on where it all went wrong for Dragonlance and how to fix it to run a proper campaign that feels  like a dragonlance campaign. My main frustration with Dragonlance as a setting is how unrealised its gaming potential is.  There's the issue of the novels, obviously, and the iffiness of how to set them aside in a way that makes the world more open to player characters.  And how the original adventure that mirror the novels kind of ends up being the only story worth telling in the setting. It's not of course, but the setting has continuously struggled with its identity as a gaming  world in light of this. How to escape the novels and make the setting itself greater than the original adventure path? They've tried, but the attempts have bee...

Dragonlance has a bad rep in some old school circles . For me, it has always been one of my favourite settings. It certainly has its flaws, but it had a brand of fantasy that mixed coming-of-age stories,  faerie tales,  romantic sagas and plain D&D in a way that spoke very viscerally to my sense of wonder and... well, fantasy. The novels helped create a sense of immersion and of an intertwined and living world with its own mysteries and concerns. Not the Chronicles/Legends (or their spinoff railroads) mind, though I read and enjoyed them (they now figure prominently on my 'not sure I want to ruin childhood/teen memories by re-reading in my 30s' list). That story was too big really to be about anything other than the heroes it featured. It was never really what Dragonlance as a world was about for me. It was all the other ones, the small tales, that grabbed me and pulled me deeper into the setting. And of course Tales of the Lance,  the boxed set: Some people h...

For links to all instalments in this series, go here . Next up is another map many will know but few have praised - The map of Ansalon from the 2nd edition Dragonlance boxed set "Tales of the Lance". First Impressions: My initial impression is not as favourable as the preceeding ones, but there are still some interesting things going on here: The gulf of the new sea tells a story about how kingdoms shape up in central ansalon. Southern Ergoth looks like a kickass island of adventure. And I want to know more about that southwestern strip of the mainland bordering Southern Ergoth. I'd also like to know more about those island kingdoms up in the northeast corner. And what's going on around the Bay of Balifor? Besides that, the north and south just sort of... end, with wastelands at each end (plains of dust/Icewall, Northern Wastes/Nordmaar). The bloodsea puts a downer on what could have been an eastern Ansalon full of vitality. And the centre of the mainland ...