Knights & Knaves Alehouse

I am sure that I could run the Forgotten Realms or Dragonlance the same way that I run Greyhawk, there is just not much point.

So, I enjoyed the Dragonlance books when I first read them in the sixth grade and I have a soft spot for them in my heart, but it’s nothing I can really envision using as a setting. Some things I liked, such as the black, red and white schools of magic and the Knights of Solamnia, but there’s way, way too much more that would have to be excised, like kender, tinker gnomes and gully dwarves among many other things. I can more easily replicate the stuff I like in my homebrew setting than start with Krynn and remove the stuff I don’t.

Chainsaw wrote:So, I enjoyed the Dragonlance books when I first read them in the sixth grade and I have a soft spot for them in my heart

Yeah, but you're not there thinking you want to plow through those things again now that you're a grown man are you? That's the sad thing about a lot of fantasy fiction written in the past 30 years. Very little of it holds up. I'm not sure why, but so much of it comes off as just not fantastic. Maybe it's because the people who write it are just not very interesting but somehow convinced that they are. Say what you will but Robert E. Howard, JRR Tolkien, HP Lovecraft and Lord Dunsany all had deeply fantastic personalities.

Chainsaw wrote:....there’s way, way too much more that would have to be excised, like kender, tinker gnomes and gully dwarves among many other things. I can more easily replicate the stuff I like in my homebrew setting than start with Krynn and remove the stuff I don’t.

In nearly every case an rpg writer tries to inject something humorous into a setting, it falls completely flat. I can only speak for myself, but I find all of those "lighthearted" DL demi-human races to be just dumb. The same goes for Hackmaster. I don't think any of it is really funny in a laugh out loud way - at best it's a little clever, but that gets old really fast (like within 30 seconds fast). I get that some people really love that stuff, but some people really think Gallagher and Carrot Top are hilarious too.

It reminds me of something I read in an interview with the game designer James Wallis once. He said something along the lines of 'I can't do game mechanics or serious adventures but I can do funny". My first thought on reading that was - no, no you can't. If you could, you would be writing novels under the name Terry Pratchett instead of crappy filler pieces for White Dwarf.

Kellri wrote:

Chainsaw wrote:So, I enjoyed the Dragonlance books when I first read them in the sixth grade and I have a soft spot for them in my heart

Yeah, but you're not there thinking you want to plow through those things again now that you're a grown man are you? That's the sad thing about a lot of fantasy fiction written in the past 30 years. Very little of it holds up. I'm not sure why, but so much of it comes off as just not fantastic.

No, I have not had the urge to re-read the gamer fan-fic, as it would very likely read way worse now that I have been exposed to better fantasy writing. Best to let it be a fond childhood memory.

Kellri wrote:In nearly every case an rpg writer tries to inject something humorous into a setting, it falls completely flat. I can only speak for myself, but I find all of those "lighthearted" DL demi-human races to be just dumb.

Agreed. Let my group make the jokes as we play.

I did recently reread the DL Chronicles...or, rather, I tried to. They were bad-enough I gave up mid-way through Autumn Twilight. My oldest made his way through the Chronicles and was nonplussed. He wasn't inspired to read the Legends trilogy that followed nor to hunt down DL gaming material. Apparently, he has better taste at 14 than I did.

Flambeaux wrote:Apparently, he has better taste at 14 than I did.

Raising him right!

Allan.