robotnik2004 | Lance Dragon and the Saucy Catgirls of Planet Kitty-R-ah (Reply)

Not a Route 96 post. Much much geekier. Mostly for

head58, though

sneech515 may be amused in spite of themselves.

So ever since Mike linked to that Star Trek reboot, and then started talking about running the old Dragonlance modules, and then news came out of the Dragonlance movie (Lex Luthor as Tanis! Jack Bauer as Raistlin! Xena as Goldmoon!), I've been threatening to write a big post on how one might revamp or reboot the Dragonlance series, scraping off some of the fromage and finding new hotness within. Battlestar Galactica is obviously the touchstone here, Exhibit A in how to resurrect, retool, and reimagine even the mustiest of old geek loves. (But see also many of Grant Morrison's superhero comics, and, if I may be immodest, my Starchildren game in a way).

But then Andy and the Story Games kids came along and stole this terrible, terrible idea right out of my head and made a thread of it, forcing my hand! (And probably saving me from mulling this over for another six months.) So I banged out my ideas in the thread. Here's my contribution (behind the LJ-cut) though if you're nerd enough to have made it this far, the whole thing is worth checking out: Dragonlance Gets Awesome-O-fied.

I said:

I love and hate this thread. I love it because I've been mulling over THIS EXACT TOPIC for a couple of weeks now, with exactly the same inspiration: could one reboot or revamp Dragonlance in the manner of Battlestar Galactica, scraping off the fromage and (re)discovering the coolness? I hate it because that's all I've been doing, mulling, and now I have to actually sit down and type stuff out. Well, "have to" is a little strong, but what geek can resist the siren call of returning to a guilty old pleasure and squeezing new awesomeness out of it? (See also the Star Trek reboot (PDF link) that's been going around.) I curse/kiss you, Andy.

Lots of good stuff here already, but I'm going to take Andy at his word that we can contradict or ignore the statements of ourselves and others. Lemme see:

Start with the modules, not the books.
There’s a lot of content in the modules that is cool but unfamiliar: the cursed tomb of the archlich Fistandantilus in DL3 creeped my players right out - I dare them to deny it. Then there was the underground dwarf kingdom of Thorbardin with its crazy modular map system and floating fortress tombs. And oh my god, DL 12, which was totally psycho – it had about 50 supporting characters all with their own implied subplots, groovy girl assassins and Fewmaster Toede's obese dragon and noble minotaur pirates, and like 15 mini-dungeons, and it all culminated in the heroes getting sucked down to the bottom of the ocean, to the sunken Romanesque city of Istar, with sexy green aquaelves and sahaugin driving underwater freaking chariots, and they fought a giant miniatures battle there against, let’s not mince words, Great Cthulhu. My point? Just that there's a lot of crazy stuff in the modules that is only sort of part of DL canon. If you use those a playground rather than a script, letting the PCs go where they will, wandering the map, you’ll never be wanting for weird shit.

Everyone gets to be Raistlin
What I mean is: nobody is stuck on the plot railroad. Every PC has their baggage and their secrets and their agenda, and they all get to make big choices and the fate of the world is in anyone's hands. Riffing on the BSG reboot, I think I might have each character take just the name of an original hero of the Lance and construct their own whole Kicker from that.

Post-Apocalypso Goodness
I'm with Meg - I'd play up the post-apocalypse angle. It's something the early modules play up that gets forgotten later: Krynn is a post-apocalypse setting. In those early adventures, the Cataclysm was ever present, but its nature hadn't clearly been specified. Xak Tsaroth, the shattered, sunken city in DL1, is full of ghosts, all trapped doing whatever they were doing at the moment the Big One hit. They made me think of those flash-fried Hiroshima shadows. In DL3, I think there’s some implication that the cursed tomb of Fistandantilus is radioactive or something. Or maybe I just made that up. Either way, the Cataclysm and pre-Cataclysm Krynn should be spooky scary shit. The ancients Knew too Much. They angered the gods, who basically roasted civilization. That is hot, and should be front and center in any DL reboot.

So I think I would up the tech level of pre-Cataclysm Krynn and drop the tech level of post-Cataclysm Krynn. Make it less Middle Earth Light, more Hyperborea. Even before the dragons start making trouble, Krynn is a land on whom Night Has Fallen. Our heroes are not sensitive new age elf boys but grim barbarians stalking the wasteland, ekeing out a rough life in the radioactive graveyard of a dead civilization whose infernal engines confuse and frighten them. Our story is to the story chronicled by Hickman and Weis and illustrated by Elmore as the gritty historical Arthur is to Mallory’s romantic Camelot.

I say "radioactive", but I'm just being figurative. I wouldn't make the pre-Cataclysm tech literal modern day atomic stuff. I'm thinking more like the baroque magi-science in China Mieville's Perdido Street Station. So we've got Conan’s Hyperborea in the ruins of Mieville’s New Crobuzon. Places like Xak Tsaroth should be scary as hell. (And yeah, that means No Gully Dwarves.) They should be like the Bad Places in Mike Mignola comics: black science and infernal machines and terrible secrets of the past. When the PCs find a crazy witch woman howling in the wasteland about the Old Gods (ie, Goldmoon), they should be split on whether to join her or burn her at the stake.

Reveals?
Dragonlance is a world with secrets. I respect the old DL series for trying to set up secrets and big reveals, but they almost all misfired in play. Ooh, the Draconians are made from dragon eggs, big shocker. You can’t start a series by saying “this is just like a regular D&D world except there are no dragons and no clerics," and then expect big gasps of surprise when the very first adventure features a dragon and a cleric. So the rebooted Dragonlance ought to have some dark secrets and big reveals, but I don't know what they are yet.

Oh yeah, Dragons!
A couple of people have alluded to this: If you're playing Dragonlance, dragons have to be way cool. Some of you have said, they're ferocious, animalistic, forces of nature - and that's cool - but what if they're like freaky, alien ferocious. In fact, what if they're kind of like the Alien Queen in Aliens - perfect killing machines, all acidic blood and glistening retractable jaws and sinuous psycho-sexual H.R. Giger bodies?

The Old Gods
The Gods destroyed the world, then disappeared. Now they want to come back. Is that such a good thing?

Still More
I got it. It's a CHARNEL GODS game. The characters are Sorcerers, with kickers, that whole deal. Except instead of Fell Weapons as Demons, each "Sorcerer" is bound to a Dragon. Dragons are the Fell Weapons. (This way, every PC gets a dragon, which is awesome. It never seemed fair that almost every single NPC in Krynn had a pet dragon - even the hobgoblin Toede gets one by the end - but the PCs get to take like one ride on a dragon in DL9.) Dragons are the only thing that can stop the return of the Old Gods. But at what cost?