Dragonlance #1: Playing Dungeons & Dragons Novels | D&D Walkthroughs

In this episode, we explore the first Dungeons & Dragons novel series and the tie-in adventure modules. The modules helped transition D&D to more story-driven narratives but there were some major growing pains.

Chapters
0:00 Opening
0:55 Introduction
8:38 Dragons of Despair
18:28 Xak Tsaroth
27:41 Outro

Random Clips: Loremaster's Daughter, RickHobby Corner, AzeCos,

Dragonlance Game Clips: iPlay Retro, Wasabim, Squakenet, TASVideosChannel, skeletoncrusader, petsasjim1

Video Game Clips: The Winslinator (Cloudy Mountain), feasel0 (Final Fantasy I), RPG Limit Break (Final Fantasy XIII), BlueLizardJello (Dark Souls)

[titanium]

Shout out to Larry Elmore who did most of the fantasy art of this period. I loved his style and he really brought the characters to life in my imagination.

[brunneng]

Dragonlance Chronicles was my “Lord of the Rings” growing up in the 80s

[chesthoIe]

Man, this makes me want to put on Kansas and stay up all night with my friends drinking Mountain Dew.

[razorthecurse]

Not gonna lie, I swore this channel had a lot more views due to the quality it has, and how amazing the production is. I'm gonna try spreading this as much as I can to some pages and AD&D podcasts that I'm sure would appreciate this content. I hope you all post more stuff soon. "Walkthroughs" of all these modules was something I was going to plan on doing, but if you're already doing a stellar job, there probably is no point. I just hope you all keep it up!

[fernandoorozco]

The dragon flew out of the well? That's either a really big well, or a really small dragon.

[rappscallion]

Love the original six Dragonlance books (Chronicles and Times...) and reread them every now and then. They'd make a great television series.

[kmwill]

I still read Chronicles + Legends every couple years

[russelladams]

The fact there is no big budget Dragonlance movie is a crying shame.

[confusedhuman]

3:30
I believe in the Annoted Chronicles, Tracy writes that they wanted Tiamat as a villain, but due mainly in part to the D&D cartoon whete Tiamat served as the main, largely unthreatening villain, and they didnt want their worldshaking goddess to be associated with the version in the cartoon that kinda bumbled around every few episodes. So they used Takhesis instead. Similar enough to what they orginally wanted, but with the name change to keep their villain intimidating.

[caramonmajere]

Everyone always loves Raistlin. Raistlin, Raistlin, Raistlin...but what about ME?

[ryans]

"Gully Dwarves are similar to 90's website developers..." I lost it

[valmarsiglia]

I often wake up with a mysterious staff. Magical too: it always disappears.

[mossthemage]

As someone who only got into Dragonlance in the past couple of years, it makes me really happy to see that people are still talking about it, even though it is an older franchise.

[trenauldo]

First of all, pleased to give this its 1000th like. Second, thanks very much for putting this video together. The Dragonlance novels and other materials were a big part of my early teen years in the early 80s, and I still have many of the published novels and RPG modules. It really stoked my creative juices as a young person and holds a special place in my heart. In fact, after watching this, I think it's time to break out my copy of the Annotated Chronicles and revisit Krynn. It's been a while... thanks again!

Ps: As to RPG video games, I started way back with Adventure on the Atari 2600. Good grief, I'm old... lol.

Pps: Ravenloft was an awesome module back in the day. Always had great fun running groups through it.

[MrDrProfTheKolba]

This video basically made me read the first Dragonlance trilogy lmao.

[Seoulwanderer]

Thanks for this video! I just ran this adventure with my 5e group. I ignored a lot of the Dragonlance specific stuff I didn't like (changed kender back to halflings, got rid of the draconians in favor of human soldiers, for example) and let my players roll up their own characters instead of using the pre-generated characters. It went fairly well.

One thing I do like about this adventure is that there are four different ways to get from the upper levels of Xak Tsaroth to the bottom, allowing some flexibility and sandbox style play. The players can:

1) Find a way to take over the "elevator", probably resulting in some heavy combat.

2) Take the sewer down one level, then climb down the vines to the lower level.

3) Take the sewer down one level, then use the dimension door in the old tax office to get to the lower level.

4) Take the sewer down one level, then take the "water slide" all the way down.

I also liked how it was up to the players to find their way to the dragon's treasure. My group ended up befriending the goblins (I used to replace the gully dwarves) and using the secret passage. I retooled the adventure for a 1st level group as well, so the final boss was a pair of black dragon wyrmlings. It was still a pretty epic fight.

[XX-sptt]

22:45 The fact the gully dwarves are basically treated like garbage is a running theme in the books. The lore mentions that before the King Priest began demonizing demihumans, gully dwarves were considered an EXAMPLE TO EMULATE with their unbreakable faith in their own 'holy objects' that DIDN'T do miracles on command like a remote control.

[thereluctanthireling]

Your videos are the best....I got my start in the hobby from the Dragonlance Chronicles novels as a kid in the late 80's.

[ZombieDish]

An old group I was in got a converted for 3.5 copy of this campaign. Instead of the fabled heroes from the books we just made characters our own characters taking the place of the heroes of the lance.
It was pretty fun.

[robinthrush]

Sturm was my favorite character. Due to the second book mostly and not just the end.