I think that Shadow of the Dragon Queen accomplishes that threading of the needle. And you want the characters to feel important, but without disrupting the established story of the War of the Lance.
You want the characters to feel epic, but without them being able to do something like kill off Lord Soth (he’s featured on the covers and, yes, he shows up in the story). You want there to be some familiar faces, but this needs to be the characters’ story. Shadow of the Dragon Queen then goes on to navigate between Scylla and Charybdis for the entire adventure. Rather than trying to capture the entire spectacle of the war or have the characters replace the Companions, Shadow of the Dragon Queen has the characters tackling a more narrow objective – the attack of a division of the Red Dragon Armies (they are now “Dragon Armies” instead of “Dragonarmies”) on the city of Kalaman (for those of you keeping score at home, that makes the leader of this army a subordinate of Dragon High Lord Verminaard, who is the primary villain of Dragons of Autumn Twilight). Thankfully (from my perspective) they just went ahead and set the adventure during the War of the Lance. If it’s set in the War of the Lance, how does it distinguish itself from the existing story? If it isn’t set during the War of the Lance, can it capture the magic of Dragonlance? So going into Shadow of the Dragon Queen a big question on my mind was how this adventure module was going to relate to that story. (You can pick up the whole trilogy on Steam for $10).
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The fantastic SSI Gold Box series of video games ( Champions of Krynn, Death Knight of Krynn, and Dark Queen of Krynn) was set immediately after the War of the Lance but hit a lot of the same story beats (evil armies try to restore Takhisis, Soth must be dealt with, final confrontation to stop Takhisis from being re-embodied on Krynn).
The most popular Dragonlance D&D modules were standing in the shoes of the Companions and mostly work through the plot of the novels. So much of what’s known and loved about Dragonlance is specifically these characters and these events. The glories of Chronicles has also, to some extent, been a limitation for Dragonlance.
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All of these characters got their own prequel (and sometimes sequel) novels. The Companions herald the return of divine magic, create new versions of the eponymous Dragonlances, restore the pride of the Solamnic Knights, free the elven realm of Silvanesti, and ride the returned metallic dragons to victory. It featured epic villains as well, from Kitiara Uth Matar to the epic death knight Lord Soth (and, of course, Takhisis herself). The Fizban of Fizban’s Treasury of Dragons is from Chronicles as well. The Companions – Tanis Half-Elven, Sturm Brightblade, Caramon and Raistlin Majere, Flint Fireforge, Goldmoon, Riverwind, and the kender Tasselhoff Burrfoot. The original novelization in the Chronicles trilogy (Dragons of Autumn Twilight, Dragons of Winter Night, and Dragons of Spring Dawning) is, in the humble opinion of your reviewer, the most impactful piece of Dungeons & Dragons fiction ever. Salavore’s Drizzt books have outsold Weis and Hickman’s Dragonlance novels).
The story of the War of the Lance is one of the best-known in the history of Dungeons & Dragons (only R.A. And five armies spread across the world to conquer in her name. Sinister draconians have appeared to carry out her bidding (sorry, dragonborn, but you weren’t the original draconic humanoids).
Evil dragons have been seen in the world again. But the evil god Takhisis – head of the dark pantheon and goddess of the chromatic dragons – has devised a scheme to return to the Krynn. It is a world where honorable orders of knights are viewed with scorn because they couldn’t prevent the Cataclysm, where there has been no divine magic for hundreds of years, and where the learning of arcane magic has been largely reduced to a single Tower of High Sorcery. It has never really recovered from the Cataclysm, an event several hundred years ago where the gods destroyed the height of civilization for its hubris … and then left. During this Age of Despair, Krynn (or, more specifically, the continent of Ansalon) is something of a wreck. Although the setting has an extensively detailed past and future as well, the heart of the setting has always been the War of the Lance and the years immediately before and after it. Nothing could possibly be as exciting to me as the upcoming Planescape book, but Dragonlance – first appearing in 1984 – is also a favorite of mine. With Shadow of the Dragon Queen it looks like the next stop on the 5E grand tour of Dungeons & Dragons settings is Krynn, the world of the Dragonlance Saga.
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