Thread by @hexcrawl

In its own words, DL3 Dragons of Hope "involves leading 800 refugees ... through the wilderness to safety" after the Pax Tharkas prison break at the end of DL2.

When I talk about the #Dragonlance Saga daring to dream big and do stuff you'd never seen before in a D&D adventure...

...this is what I'm talking about.

And, yes, I recognize that "escort the refugee caravan" is bog standard now.

But DL3 nevertheless remains impressive.

We're continuing our Let's Read of the #Dragonlance Saga!

Jump over here if you'd like to begin from the beginning.

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

DL3 includes mechanics for:
- Supply
- Attrition
- Combat (since the refugees are being pursued by a dragonarmy)

Plus a political mini-game with the PCs negotiating/collaborating with the refugee leadership.

It's a very effective way of cranking up the stakes.

Which is impressive, honestly, because the Saga has already done a pretty great job of setting high stakes.

The first adventure was "return the True Gods to the world," after all.

The other way in which the Saga has been establishing its epic sweep is the vast world it traverses.

LOTR, Belgariad, Shannara. The genre is all about touring the world, and DL3 uses the refugee's flight to continue opening up new territory.

The challenge, of course, is prepping this.

And so the landscape here is carefully designed to funnel the PCs and refugees alike towards the ancient dwarven city of Thorbardin, which has been sealed and "lost" for over three centuries.

(Impassable mountains will become a common theme in the Saga.)

You can get a good feel for the scope of this first act of the #Dragonlance Saga by looking at the Lands of Abansynia map.

This map unified the maps found in DL1, DL2, and DL3 into a single poster map. (Which has been completely redrawn for, in some cases, the third time.)

One odd feature of this map is that DL1 (in the north) and DL3 (in the south) used a region-based keying method.

DL2 (in the middle) did not.

So this map includes a bunch of regions in the north that kind of trail off indeterminately into the middle section around Qualinesti.

And then the regions abruptly begin again south of Pax Tharkas.

It's a strange affect. Particularly because this appears to be intended as a player map.

On the plus side, it's A LOT easier to make out the red-bordered regions than when they were indicated using black lines on top of black hexes on top of black terrain in DL1.

Although DL1 and DL3 both use region-keyed hex maps (a technique I don't recall seeing elsewhere), their actual function is very different in Dragons of Hope.

I discuss this in more detail over here, but the short version is that DL3 works much more like what we would now refer to as a pointcrawl.

thealexandrian.net/wordpress/4800…

In region 3, for example, you can clearly see that you're not navigating by hex: You're picking the road or the pass.

And if you follow that to region 5, you get a choice between "several canyons" (north, east, three to the south).

The hexes are becoming a vestigial structure.

In region 13, for example, the glacier breaks away beneath the PCs' feet and they go careening down the chute-like region 14 before getting dumped into Area 18.

This is written as a fast, dramatic moment. But, as you can see, region 14 is actually 8 or 9 miles long.

This becomes an unintentional Moment of Awesome, though, because I'm forced to imagine this entire sequence as a Monty Oum video.

The funnel eventually leads the PCs to Skullcap, an ancient dwarven fortress (i.e., dungeon) that contains a map leading to Thorbardin.

Skullcap is under-hooked: There's a single NPC in a different dungeon that can tell the PCs that Skullcap might have such a map.

If the PCs don't run into that NPC (more than possible), there's no coherent reason for them to jump into Skullcap other than the meta-expectation that you should go into every dungeon.

Once you're in Skullcap, the dungeon looks very good.

Hmm... Verticality.

Jaquaying... yesssssss.

And the dungeon key is steeped with lots of rich, detailed lore.

If your players are anything like mine, they're going to be thrilled to be peeling back the layers on long-lost history; revealing enigmas forgotten to this younger age.

Hickman, as he has so many times before, reveals himself to be an absolute master of the dungeon.

The Let's Read continues over here!

https://twitter.com/hexcrawl/status/1539785845502271488