Thread by @hexcrawl

Another railroading technique that the #Dragonlance Saga uses is Obscure Death.

For important NPCs and PCs, the DM should arrange - in the unfortunate circumstance of their demise - for them to die a "superhero-style" death: Make sure no body is found so that they can come back.

We're continuing our Let's Read of #Dragonlance. Start over here if you'd like to begin at the beginning.

At the moment we're in the middle of discussing all the different ways that the DL adventures railroad the PCs.

https://twitter.com/hexcrawl/status/1528081088001605634

The Obscure Death technique is introduced as such in DL2, and the "Dungeonmaster Notes" pretty reliably mention it from that point forward.

On the one hand, I understand the challenge they're dealing with: The DL modules are a vast project (bigger than anything previously attempted) and there are only so many variables you can account for when you're thinking in Choose Your Own Adventure terms.

(What's the other option? Check out the Principles of RPG Villainy.)

But I do have a couple quibbles:

1. They never tell you WHICH characters need to be preserved.

I suspect this is partly because they couldn't: When DL1 was being printed, I'm guessing they were still writing later installments and couldn't be sure who they might use.

But what you're left with as a DM is an imprecation to make every named NPC fall off a cliff or vanish in a puff of smoke.

(And it would have been nice for the DLC reprints to have included a comprehensive NPC guide: Useful not only for this, but so much more!)

2. Obscure Death as a backstop against unexpected bad guy deaths? Sure. Not a huge fan, but I can understand it.

But then Obscure Death gets... dumber.

In DL6, the white dragon Sleet is given a clever scripted escape: She flies through a waterfall and uses her breath weapon to freeze it behind her, giving her time to escape before the PCs hack through!

Cool idea!

(Pun intended.)

If she escapes, Sleet later returns and, the module instructs the DM, "This time she fights to the death..."

... and then immediately tells the DM to arrange for an obscure death so that she can reappear a third time in the Epilogue and provide the transition to DL7.

Like... just don't have her fight to the death.

Moving on, I am deeply impressed that DL6 Dragons of Ice managed to introduce me to a type of railroading I've literally never seen before.

(I've been around the block a few times.)

Aaron Tallbow is one of the PCs.

Midway through the adventure, the DM is supposed to abruptly take over this PC, have him spout a bunch of exposition about shit the PCs have never heard of before, and then have him tell the group what they're supposed to do next.

It's surreal.

When all else fails, I guess you just literally start playing the players' characters for them?

Sheesh.

Where this can all get a little sad is when the Saga tries to go for the railroad and... misses.

In DL7 Dragons of Light, the PCs need to find the Tomb of Huma.

The "hook" for this is that:

1. The Tomb has been lost since the Cataclysm.

2. But also it's in the only pass that exists through an otherwise impassable mountain range, so anyone walking through the pass will definitely see it.

(Uh...)

3. The PCs will need to use this one-and-only pass because they've been shipwrecked in elven lands and the elves don't have any ships.

The elves are also hostile, but fortunately the PCs have friends among them because elven refugees from DL2 have recently arrived here ON SHIPS.

(The adventure explains that these ships have all rotted away in the <checks notes> several weeks since the PCs last saw these elves.)

Okay. Ignore all the nonsense in that: The PCs are forced to travel through the one-and-only pass.

Now the adventure can happen.

Except!

Check out the map:

There isn't one-and-only-one pass.

There are three passes through the mountains.

They're all keyed.

And the pass containing Huma's Tomb is <checks notes> the one farthest away from where the PCs got shipwrecked.

The adventure recognizes it has a problem, so it literally just adds landsharks everywhere: Head north? Attacked by landsharks every two days. Head south? Attacked by landsharks every 20 minutes.

Then DLC2 needs to print a larger area map (to support other adventures in the collection), and it turns out you can just walk around the mountains.

So why does this happen?

Well, it's important to remember that no one had ever done anything like this before.

Just integrating 14 modules + a wargame + a setting gazetteer (only the second such gazetteer TSR had ever done, IIRC) was monumental even before...

...other ancillary material got added to the logistical bin (novels, minis, etc.).

But on top of that, you have this core concept of creating an LOTR-style epic.

Look at Shannara. The Belgariad. All the big Del Rey fantasy sagas.

That's what Dragonlance wanted to be.

(And why it was so natural for someone to say, "What if we write our own fantasy trilogy?")

But how do you actually design that for an RPG?

It's mostly terra incognito and the DL team was trying to figure it out.

I recently talked about how YOU can run a classic epic fantasy crisscrossing the world without railroading your players.

But the technique doesn't work for a published adventure.

thealexandrian.net/wordpress/4754…

You can get a sense for how the designers were struggling by looking at DL5 Dragons of Mystery.

DL5 is a weird product. It's kind of like they put together a Dragonlance-themed issue of Dragon Magazine to promote the modules and someone said, "What if we publish it as a book?"

(I don't think that's what actually happened. It just feels like that.)

So there's a bunch of marketing hype for the "books, games, modules, calendars, and even miniature figures." There's some short fiction. There's spotlights on the existing modules. Some errata. Excerpts from the modules. That sort of thing.

The big reasons to pick up DL5 would be the fully illustrated character sheets for the Innfellows (which are also better briefing sheets for the players) + the poster map of the world of Ansalon (without which the series becomes increasingly incoherent).

In any case, about midway through DL5 there's a section where they show the DM how they can break their game into 4 hour sessions.

For example:

And here's the key thing: That's not how DL1 Dragons of Despair works.

Encounters 1-44 are keyed to a hexmap. You can't just run encounters 1-26 in one session and then encounters 27-44j in the next. That's not how it works.

Same thing with the non-linear dungeon.

You can really see how the design team is trying to use existing scenario structures and innovate new ones, but are really struggling to come to grips with how these structures work; how they'll interact with each other; and what the resulting play at the table will look like.

As I discussed in the GAME STRUCTURES series, this is exactly the situation in which GMs (and designers) reach for railroading:

They don't have the structure they need, so they just force it.

thealexandrian.net/wordpress/1512…

To wrap things up for today, DL5 has one of my favorite passages in the whole series.

"Although the text [of DL3 Dragons of Hope] suggests that the Council might elect to leave behind the sick and weak, the Council WILL UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES VOTE TO DO THIS."

(emphasis added)

The modules are fighting with each other to see which railroad is the most powerful.

I've never seen anything like it.

The Let's Read continues over here!

https://twitter.com/hexcrawl/status/1529915323557761033