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remusclaw posted:Yeah , I was not a fan of the fifth age either. These were not great books in general, but I was young, and I really liked the characters, and if you are going to kill all the characters off and create a miserable status quo I was just not going to keep reading. It's the same reason I fell out of old Star Wars EU stuff around the New Jedi Order. I would be curious to know if any of the Dragonlance books made the NY Times Bestseller list after Fifth Age. It's total anecdote but my friends and I all had fond memories of Dragonlance and then we read 5th age and it tanked the franchise as hard as the end of Mass Effect 3. We simply Did Not Give A poo poo about this new miserable version of Krynn. Now admittedly we were older and (debateably) wiser and perhaps too old for Dragonlance at that point but it wasn't the quality of writing that got us down, it was how absolutely mean-spirited the whole enterprise seemed.
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Jul 25, 2019 00:10
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:...this new miserable version of Krynn. I feel the same way but I'm starting to think that Krynn was always loving miserable and I just didn't notice when I was 12.
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Jul 25, 2019 00:25
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:I feel the same way but I'm starting to think that Krynn was always loving miserable and I just didn't notice when I was 12. There is some truth to that definitely. But, there is something above and beyond to having characters have kids, and then killing off the kids. Dragonlance kinda went out of its way to kill off everyone, I'm assuming because the writers had the right to, where Star Wars had to be picky so only characters who couldn't talk like Chewy, or characters who weren't in the movies at all died, like all of Han and Leia's kids.
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Jul 25, 2019 00:33
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:I feel the same way but I'm starting to think that Krynn was always loving miserable and I just didn't notice when I was 12. Krynn and bear it
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Jul 25, 2019 00:35
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Fifth Age books were when I stopped reading Dragonlance as a kid. Completely making GBS threads on the established setting and setting up a world of competing dragon kingdoms seemed like a bad choice at the time, and appears to have been poorly received in general. It was weird, though, since at the same time I had my mind blown by how awesome I thought the Fifth Age RPG was. The fairly tepid mechanical improvements over AD&D (hand of cards instead of dice, exploding cards for certain suits, and most of all - open ended magic) struck me as revolutionary coming from a background of AD&D and Palladium games.
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Jul 25, 2019 01:56
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:I feel the same way but I'm starting to think that Krynn was always loving miserable and I just didn't notice when I was 12. The whole arc of OG Dragonlance is that they are coming off a miserable near-post-apocalypse into a brighter future. Some of the stuff in Twins is pretty misery-tourism but that's kind of the point, they went back in time to experience this old bad poo poo (or saw the awful consequences of Raistlin's Incel Meltdown) because modern day sure as heck was an improvement. On another note, I can't believe I'm thinking/writing this much about Dragonlance!!!!! homullus posted:Krynn and bear it
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Jul 25, 2019 01:59
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:The whole arc of OG Dragonlance is that they are coming off a miserable near-post-apocalypse into a brighter future. Some of the stuff in Twins is pretty misery-tourism but that's kind of the point, they went back in time to experience this old bad poo poo (or saw the awful consequences of Raistlin's Incel Meltdown) because modern day sure as heck was an improvement. For the Dragonlance newbs in the audience, one of the eras the Twins time-traveled to was 30 years after the Cataclysm when the gods plunged a large nation beneath the waves and withdrew from the world. The Chronicles book series takes place 351 years after the Cataclysm. In the latter case the world was still in shambles, but it had enough time for generations to get used to the loss and for geo-political boundaries to be long-settled.
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Jul 25, 2019 06:01
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:
Hmmm, I wonder if Steven Erikson was also a fan. https://malazan.fandom.com/wiki/Seguleh
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Jul 25, 2019 09:32
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Libertad! posted:For the Dragonlance newbs in the audience, one of the eras the Twins time-traveled to was 30 years after the Cataclysm when the gods plunged a large nation beneath the waves and withdrew from the world. The Chronicles book series takes place 351 years after the Cataclysm. In the latter case the world was still in shambles, but it had enough time for generations to get used to the loss and for geo-political boundaries to be long-settled. Dragons of Autumn Twilight literally opens with a beautiful pstoral forest town with a gorgeous inn in a tree, and that's not an accident. The world is not in shambles, but it is definitely a poorer place than per-Cataclysm (and that's one of the themes of the OG series, is that they're bringing that stuff back into the world).
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Jul 25, 2019 17:05
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Angry Salami posted:Dragonlance's morality is, in general, pretty screwed up - I suspect it's less the Mormon influence as D&D alignment wackiness. It leans very heavily into the idea that Neutrality should be a balance between Good and Evil, and that this is somehow better than everything being Good. Dragonlance Neutrals are what Boogie2988 would look like in a fantasy world.
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Jul 25, 2019 23:48
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Things I know about this setting. It's supposedly supposed to be Epic Fantasy in tone, and that there are no orcs cause they got genocided by that Priest King guy who caused the Cataclysm.
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Jul 26, 2019 03:26
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MonsterEnvy posted:Things I know about this setting. It's supposedly supposed to be Epic Fantasy in tone, and that there are no orcs cause they got genocided by that Priest King guy who caused the Cataclysm. I dont remember that about Orcs. Generally all the species in Dragonlance are of the the few base ones, a few progenitors, and those hosed up by the chaos gem. It is far more limited in monsters than most settings, though a few do sneak in that aren't supposed to be there on occasion.
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Jul 26, 2019 03:34
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I remember loving the first 6 books as a young teen, and reading some other books here and there, getting distracted by other DnD stuff like the Drizzt books and some Ravenloft stuff. I got all this stuff from my local library, and then I moved and sorta forgot about Dragonlance for a while. Then in college I saw a then-new Dragonlance book for sale on the rack at a bodega, and I picked it up on a whim. It was set in the very distant past of the setting, and it was basically about this one soldier dude rescuing and then being horribly betrayed by a wizard, and everything was grim and miserable and there was barely anything fantastic in the setting. It was also shittily-written. I remember wondering who the hell would enjoy reading about the near-prehistoric beginnings of such an established setting, and concluded that they must've completely mined out the other interesting time periods and were just grasping at straws. Years later I found out that I had guessed exactly right. Megaman's Jockstrap posted:Dragons of Autumn Twilight literally opens with a beautiful pstoral forest town with a gorgeous inn in a tree, and that's not an accident. The world is not in shambles, but it is definitely a poorer place than per-Cataclysm (and that's one of the themes of the OG series, is that they're bringing that stuff back into the world). Yeah and then all the later books are about that new better world being destroyed by an incessant series of new bad guys.
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Jul 26, 2019 03:41
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remusclaw posted:I dont remember that about Orcs. Generally all the species in Dragonlance are of the the few base ones, a few progenitors, and those hosed up by the chaos gem. It is far more limited in monsters than most settings, though a few do sneak in that aren't supposed to be there on occasion. Just what I heard, I know very little about Dragonlance.
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Jul 26, 2019 04:18
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Lurdiak posted:Yeah and then all the later books are about that new better world being destroyed by an incessant series of new bad guys. That's just not true for the first decade+ of the series' life, it's Chronicles, then Legends which is basically stopping Raistlin in the past (no new better world being destroyed here, just protected) , then Heroes which is various backstory stuff but none of it is the new world being ruined, then Preludes which again takes place in the past, then Tales which is an anthology series and again nothing is ruined, and then the disastrous 5th Age poo poo which is exactly what you described and when (anecdotally) most of the old fans stop reading and the series never again makes the NYT Best Seller List.
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Jul 26, 2019 17:19
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I guess that I shouldn't be surprised that this thread is full of "It's generic Tolkein-esque fantasy with elves and therefore crap" snarkiness. I still enjoy those early core books even decades later. I realise that the setting isn't pushing any boundaries, but the characters carry it for me and the Legends trilogy is one of my favourites of the genre. I will say that I probably have read more "really bad fantasy" then most people here, so perhaps that raises mediocre to solid in my eyes, but that's as may be. I I reread some of the prominent books a few months ago and it was nice to find out that something for which I was nostalgic was still enjoyable - that often doesn't happen. That said, the original Dangermouse is the best British cartoon ever and I will punch you so hard if you don't agree. If anyone wants an example of a truly awful fantasy novel, I literally have one that I think is the nadir outside of maybe erotic fantasy. It's Realms, but by a fairly unknown author. The fact that I've read so many novels and that that one still hits at the nadir really reminds me how bad it was. I do miss Elaine Cunningham, though... I really enjoyed her work with one exception. My favourite fantasy author remains Feist, though. Silhouette posted:He's a drunken dwarf with a gambling problem Literally how he lost the Graygem. That comes up in a story where he goes after the stone with Caramon's three sons and the point where he admits to it is one of the funniest things that I have ever read in an otherwise dramatic novel. Megaman's Jockstrap posted:I remember getting the 5th age book and it opened with two of Caramon's (that had been in the Tales and were likeable enough dudes) sons dead and I was just like "nope" and that's what turned me off Dragonlance forever. I was a hell of a loyal reader before then. Dragonlance writers have seemingly always been very quick to kill off important characters. Sturm and Tanin were perhaps the most egregious examples of that. Perhaps the fact that some settings keep the same characters around too long makes it seem more egregious. I am also with you, MJ, in that the setting really died hard starting in the 5th age. Dragonlance was always a more serious, gritty setting, but the new age was where it went down the S-bend. It became a caricature of itself, in my opinion. Mina came across as contrived, but I'm planning to reread the War of Souls trilogy at some point because I didn't really understand how Tas's time travelling had anything to do with anything and perhaps the second time will make sense. I'm glad that someone remembered where that story came from. I remembered the story, but not where I read it. I might still own a paper copy of that book, come to think of it.
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Jul 27, 2019 03:35
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 Picked this up in Japan. Don’t know anything about Dragonlance, but I figured it’d be an interesting dive, though I haven’t gotten around to it yet.
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Aug 1, 2019 13:57
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Lurdiak posted:Tinker gnomes are a series of endless unfunny jokes about over-engineering that only engineers like. And they directly inspired World of Warcraft's gnomes, which are the same tired joke, but more of it. Even putting aside the obnoxiousness, both in play and in the books, of the gnomes that make weird useless devices that don't work right and are constantly speaking in technobabble, I would always prefer a magical forest gnome to one that just does steampunk inventing in a setting that poorly accommodates it. WoW Gnomes aren't anything like that at all, though. They're largely more technologically advanced and smaller dwarves. They've never had any 'their tech doesn't work'. Maybe they inspired WoW goblins, but I really don't see it either as the joke with their tech is that somehow their crazy low-tech stuff matches up with advanced Gnome stuff despite being slapped together. EDIT: Aw poo poo, I didn't notice this thread had already fallen by the wayside. Um, hope things get better so you can post more, OP! Kchama fucked around with this message at 05:29 on Aug 7, 2019 |
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Aug 7, 2019 05:17
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Kchama posted:EDIT: Aw poo poo, I didn't notice this thread had already fallen by the wayside. Um, hope things get better so you can post more, OP! I was at GenCon. Where A GOON WHO SHALL NOT BE NAMED hunted me down, in person, to tell me to post more Dragonlance. I'll be back at work tomorrow and posting lovely fantasy stories, I promise.
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Aug 7, 2019 05:43
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Toshimo posted:I was at GenCon. Where A GOON WHO SHALL NOT BE NAMED hunted me down, in person, to tell me to post more Dragonlance. Were they angry about your posting rate, or just wanted to geek out with a fellow Krynnologist?
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Aug 7, 2019 07:33
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Kchama posted:Maybe they inspired WoW goblins, but I really don't see it either as the joke with their tech is that somehow their crazy low-tech stuff matches up with advanced Gnome stuff despite being slapped together. WoW goblins are basically Warhammer 40k ork technologists meets Ferengi with some extra mafia emphasis. Not too surprising considering Warcraft's roots in Warhammer.
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Aug 7, 2019 12:28
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Kchama posted:WoW Gnomes aren't anything like that at all, though. They're largely more technologically advanced and smaller dwarves. They've never had any 'their tech doesn't work'. In general when not played for laughs gnomish vs goblin engineering is how much it looks like it was built on purpose. Gnome stuff has crackles of electricity and chrome while goblin is coalpunk. When it's the punchline (or player-made) gnomish engineering is "It'll do something, but it may not do what you wanted" while goblin is "it blows up every time, but half the time the proper target is what blows up."
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Aug 7, 2019 15:43
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I read almost all the DL books as a kid. Of the 100+ books I seriously may have read like 80 or so. I still have nostalgia for them, which is why I have both the Annotated Chronicles and Annotated Legends. But yeah if you read them as an adult you’ll find they are the epitome of “eh, whatever.”
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Aug 7, 2019 19:16
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darnon posted:WoW goblins are basically Warhammer 40k ork technologists meets Ferengi with some extra mafia emphasis. Not too surprising considering Warcraft's roots in Warhammer. Bruceski posted:In general when not played for laughs gnomish vs goblin engineering is how much it looks like it was built on purpose. Gnome stuff has crackles of electricity and chrome while goblin is coalpunk. Yeah, you both are correct on this. I guess the biggest difference is that they can actually be played not for laughs and be serious threats. Toshimo posted:I was at GenCon. Where A GOON WHO SHALL NOT BE NAMED hunted me down, in person, to tell me to post more Dragonlance. That's good to hear! I had totally forgot GenCon had happened, my bad.
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Aug 7, 2019 20:44
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Toshimo posted:I was at GenCon. Where A GOON WHO SHALL NOT BE NAMED hunted me down, in person, to tell me to post more Dragonlance. It was me. I did it post you coward
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Aug 19, 2019 07:21
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I was excited about this. Now I am sad.
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Aug 22, 2019 03:19
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Modulo16 posted:I was excited about this. Now I am sad. The story of all goon projects.
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Aug 23, 2019 02:19
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