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I read a ton of Dragonlance in my youth (it's what got me into all three of fantasy, D&D and tabletop gaming) and I still reread some of it pretty much every year. And every time I do, I find something new to say "I thought I liked that, but it's not good" about. I'm probably on the defender side, nonetheless. Chronicles is a mediocre telling of a railroaded campaign, but I still genuinely like Legends. And for all Weis and Hickman's flaws, they had a bunch of ideas that were legitimately interesting. The gods are fuckups, and even when we learn what they're up to, the mortals who were/are calling them out frequently aren't wrong. The Kingpriest is an unusual antagonist for the time. Sometimes the hero is a dick, and not in a cool way, in a selfish or cowardly way. Seldom Posts posted:There was a series of D&D video games from SSI in the late 80s (pool of radiance etc) and the one set in Dragonlance was great. One of the things it did was have the three moons waxing and waning across the top of the screen all the time and your wizards power would wax and wane automatically with them. The SSI Dragonlance games were the best of the Gold Box games, absolutely. dwarf74 posted:It's a thing which flew in the 80's but probably wouldn't today. I hope. I feel like they thought they were doing an interesting "literacy and math aren't the only ways to be intelligent" thing with the gully dwarves, but the way they actually wrote it, it came out way more "fantasy white man's burden."
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Jul 20, 2019 23:32
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Yeah, the gods of magic were always seen as separate/other despite definitely being part of the pantheon (since people always distrust magic), and even a lot of non-mages who knew that still didn't think of the connection with the moons as more than symbolic, so even though the moons were still there after the Cataclysm, nobody outside of the wizards bothered putting two and two together.
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Jul 22, 2019 14:04
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Evil Mastermind posted:I'm hoping people get into this as we go, because I hear it all the time but I don't know anything about Mormon beliefs so I don't know specifically what things in the books are being called out. I know I'm the one who pointed out "mortals calling the gods out aren't always wrong" as a plus, but Tracy Hickman's intent was indeed that the mortals were always wrong in that situation. That's why every true believer comes around to "the mortals abandoned the gods, the gods didn't abandon us," no matter how much time they spend pointing out that the gods were cruel for spending 350 years ignoring the world because the people begging for help weren't doing it right/needed to learn a lesson. There's also the appendix to Dragons of a Vanished Moon, which claims that all the gods were created by the High God (the Abrahamic one, in all but name; he even speaks in "ye"s and "thou"s), and Chaos wasn't actually the "father of all and nothing," he was just the most esteemed of the created gods until he rebelled and was cast out, and Reorx had a mental breakdown during Summer Flame and all the times he implied and outright stated that Chaos was somehow the highest of all were just what he believed in his delusions. This one got slapped with the non-canon label so quickly that I don't even think it made it into the softcover release (it helps that Weis had no part in it; it was Hickman and Matthew L. Martin, who's noted even in comparison to Hickman for really, really wanting Dragonlance to be Christian).
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Jul 22, 2019 15:15
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Razorwired posted:In one of the later books a chapter introduces Gully Dwarves by saying their traditional math system had two numbers, 1 and 2. Gully Dwarves revere the genius that invented their third number "a whole bunch". I love this example so much because you can clearly see the inspiration (the partly-oversimplified reports of Australian aboriginal peoples with "1, 2, many" counting systems), and instead of going with "here's a culture in our fantasy world that also works like that and is no worse off for it," the end result was "look at these stupid fuckers! they're all too dumb to learn how to count!" sigh
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Jul 23, 2019 16:00
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