In late 2024, I had a huge burst of nostalgia for the D&D of my youth. There were some cracks starting to show in my Pathfinder 2e campaign, but probably more importantly: October meant The Big Five Oh. Some nostalgia can be expected.
One of the things that I found myself fondly remembering was Dragonlance.
The first fantasy book I remember reading, which I borrowed from my father, was the short story collection The Magic of Krynn. From there, I devoured everything I could. The Chronicles, the Tales, the… books which were clearly written by other authors, and oh, the Legends series. I even collected the modules, not that I ever played them.
An Unexpected Treasure
Back in the recent present, my wife and I took a trip to Portland. While there, we visited Powell’s and I found several of the Old School Renaissance books (Old School Essentials, for instance.) And some gamebooks for another TTRPG which I’ve mentioned on BlueSky once or twice.
Anyway. After we were done at Powell’s we visited a nearby antique store. They had just released the Transformers/GI Joe crossover toys, so I was looking to see if some of the classic Joes could be picked up on the cheap. Or some Transformers on the I didn’t really care how much.
Except I discovered that they had a couple of boxes of TTRPG products from before the 2000’s. Including a holy grail: the first collected edition of Dragonlance modules from 1990. With the battle cry of the collector – I don’t know what I’m going to do with this but by God I’m going to buy it – I picked it up (and a beautiful old issue of Dragon Magazine, boasting a “2nd edition preview.” Yes, the best cure for feeling old is to buy something that basically whispers “my God, you’re old.”)
DriveThru RPG would make a good bit of money from me.
Dragonlance Crawl Classics
Now I had all these books, and I needed a ruleset I could play it with. I was thinking of finding some way to make it work with my Solo TTRPG stream, so I wanted to find something that I could play on my VTT, Fantasy Grounds, and…
Dungeon Crawl Classics. It was Dungeon Crawl Classics. Obviously.
Now, one of the complaints I’ve seen with Dragonlance is that it was built so tightly around the Heroes of the Lance as they appeared in the books that it was impossible to play your own characters. So, what if the Heroes of the Lance, when they met that fateful day at the Inn of the Last Hope, were killed?
What if the story wasn’t about the Heroes of the Lance, but the refugees fleeing the Dragon Queen’s army?
The problem was “why.” I could have the Dragonarmies rearrange their leadership, deciding that Solace was a more critical location, but why would they do that?
I ended up distracted and then found XCrawl, and pretty much lost track of anything Dragonlance oriented.
And then, two days ago, I heard a name which I didn’t expect to hear. I had found my why.
Soth.
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