[5th Ed] Fixing the Holes in the Dragonlance Adventure Book 

*Thanks for watching!* What are your thoughts? Do you think I've missed something? Let us know in the comments below!

I finished my first read through a few days ago. My initial impression was that of all the published adventures I'd dug into, this one worked the best on its own with no major changes. I can't argue with any of your recommendations though and the connection to Ispin improves the story by a great deal, so I'll likely be adopting some or all of these suggestions when I run it. Kinsaldi's primary manifestation of power is going to be via the dragon, and I'm just not sure how to realistically square the evacuation of Vogler via boat when you've introduced that element.

So much good advice! Thanks! I ran zero level flashbacks during the trip to Vogler for the funeral that depicted their first meeting with Ispen and how they adventures together for years.

This is AMAZING! I am a long time DM who's had a subconscious understanding of these concepts, but you've done such a wonderful job of bringing concrete attention to goals and overall story arc of adventures here. Thank you for putting out such great content. My players will have a more enjoyable campaign because of your putting this out into the world. Thank you!

I just finished reading through the campaign book and am starting a group through it in a couple of weeks. Thanks for the insights. I really like the idea of tying Ispin's shield (or maybe an introduced artifact also gifted to the players) as a hook to the larger adventure as an item sough by the big bad. The story of the recently acquired artifact could be told by Darrett or another NPC at Ispin's wake (perhaps as the story that is rudely interrupted by Bakaris the Younger). Another layer could be to include the surrender of that artifact to the list of demands by the Dragon Army seeking to occupy Vogler, which could create further tension between the players and Bakaris Sr., when Bakaris demands the players surrender the artifact and later blames them for the siege.

I asked for this adventure book for Christmas. I’m looking forward to reading through it with your perspectives in the back of my mind.

Awesome video and great tips for the DM. I can't wait to see your live play take on this campaign. Thank you for your hard work.

Your creativity is always helpful!

This is such a help in identifying flaws of the adventure that can be fixed before I run this! I am looking forward to hearing more. These fixes do these great villains a lot more justice.

This is awesome, and yeah, when yo started to talk about the "final boss" or the "real threat", it reminded me on all the fixes that I had to do with ghost of saltmarsh, make Mr. Dory a menace in the begging who has an alliance with the sahuagin because they have an old ancient relic that it will release the kraken. Also changing the order of the adventures and adding two more cities that appear in the module but they talk very little of them. Adding more adventures to make it feel like it's all tied together and not just side quest. Anyway, being a DM is awesome and sometimes cames with a huge challenge

I love the new format of the video! Keep em coming!

Loved this. I've been watching tons of reviews and you are the first to make any kind of substantive constructive critique of this adventure. I just finished reading it and have found tons of potential but a lot of rewriting needed to fully take advantage of that potential. I'll be especially curious to see how you deal with chapters 4 and 5, which I personally find have the most potential but need the most rewriting. I can't give more specifics without spoilers, so I'll leave it at that (I've posted my thoughts on the r/dragonlance reddit behind a spoiler veil if anyone is curious). Looking forward to your next vids.

Cheers mate, great content, can't wait for next week.

Many thanks for sharing the helpful review with creative ideas! i decided not to use the adventure module part off the book, and your suggestions are superb for different ways to develop. i very much liked the book for the setting, in terms of: a) simplified version of the world history and lore; and b) logical and realistic settlements, including actively used or in ruins. These aspects in my view are way better than trying to use Forgotten Realms

Great ideas! I’m going to incorporate your Fire-eyes suggestion into my game, for sure.

Great input, my digital copy will be there tomorrow morning. I hope to start my PC’s with this Wednesday night. So looking forward to it.

I know you're not running this module anymore, but I would really love to see more videos on fixing the campaign

Thanks for the heads up on the missing story, just git the book today and looking as doing a long campaign to get tiamat at the end and the 9 levels. I love dragons and already have an idea for 5 dragons for the play group . It's will be interesting.

I just ran the Ispin's funeral last night, so next week will be the Festival and perhaps the Battle of High Hill. And I LOVE the idea of connect the Green Shield with Kansaldi's goal!

I'm waiting until February and the board game tie-in - both my players and myself are quite psyched to see how all that fits together (we will be gutted if it sucks, but on principle it sounds like a great way to mix up playing and gaming styles).

You are looking great bro!

Sweet t-shirt, Guy!

Glad I listened to this. I'm about to start the campaign for a group of 4. My initial idea now is to have Kansaldi being the cause of Greenshield's death and he fell defending against one her raids but injured her in the process. Something something she turns up to take his shield as revenge and to spit on his grave as it were something something

I think every prewritten story should be changed at least a little. Just to be tailored to your groups attraction to dnd.

Spoken like someone who encountered Dragonlance for the first time. SotDQ is very much a prelude to very significant events that will happen a few months after the end of this campaign, and is both covered by novels and older edition campaigns. The unseen big bad is the Dragon Queen, a goddess of evil. She has built not one but multiple armies that have already conquered at least half the continent. She has so many subordinates that it's like fighting a hydra. There are multiple heads to cut off, each head is doing it's own part to serve the greater whole. That's why there are five villains, from Kensaldi to Lohezet to Belephaion to Bakaris to Soth. All these flaws are actually misclassified or misunderstood non-issues.

Wouldnt ot be better to have the death dragon goal more about increasing the armies strengh like bolstering the army having soth be constantly making the army bigger and stronger so foiling any his plans would weaken the army

Great advices!

New viewer! As someone jumping into your videos, they seem really well thought out and informative, but they also seem to assume the viewer is familiar with a lot of jargon that im assumiing you've established in earlier videos. Do you have specific primer videos one should watch before they watch your other videos?

Wonderful points as always. I really want to know what you're doing with Ispin!! My players start this adventure tomorrow night and I'm struggling to make him meaningful to them.

I am not sure if I am completely vibing with the “Player in the cape” character. The transitions seem a bit out of sync? Maybe I just need time to adjust. You may consider reintroducing the character every video. Similar to “Jack the NPC” from another channel. I am sure the character will find its voice in the process. Thanks for the video!

I am planning to run this campaign in future and I thought this video was EXCELLENT. Very keen for more, please, and to see more detailed planning. Be careful though, WOTC might bring you on as a consultant if you are not careful ;)

I asked for more Dragonlance content, and I have received the content. Take my 'like', as you already have my sub.

Go buy the 1e and 2e stuff. Done. J/K, not trying to grognard out. Guy, your videos are quite informative and always offering grand advice my friend 👊

What I would with Dragonlance as a setting (a setting built around the theme of war): Someone has travelled back in time using THAT Device of Time Journeying and changed the timeline. Now the original Heroes of the Lance are no longer the heroes - your game's PC's are. Go defeat Takhisis! Or not!

I have a problem with how to handle Lord Bakaris once he arrives in Kalaman. According to the book he takes a leading role in the city and is even commanding a taskforce. But I can't figure out how to reason this. As he might be a lord (whatever this title really means in Kalaman), he's an exiled one from the west. Enhanced by his incompetence and arrogance, he shouldn't have any political influence in Kalaman. So, how do you make him a leader in Kalaman? My first thought was to make him a Kalaman noble in the first place. Then you only need a reason, why he is in Vogler. Maybe there's his summer residence..... 🙂. But I'm not sure.

Ok I'm confused about Lord Soth. How much more powerful then the party could he be? I belive that the book goes from 1 to 10 soth is a death knight sure maybe a bit more powerful given his history but still a death knight. I had a campaign set in kyrnn Andy party at level 13 destroyed a death knight. Granted he was by him self but I couldn't see Soth a major threat to even a level 15 party let alone a level 20 not with a 18 CR even with minons

I played in a Dragon Heist campaign and when we got our Tavern, I was like "Aw yeah! I'm going to build this ting up!" and so that's exactly what I and one of the other players in the party did. We were playing "Dungeons & Spreadsheets" our GM said. That one other player and I invested money into the tavern, interviewed and hired help, dealt with guilds, competition, small sabotages, and were having a blast. Meanwhile, the other players in the party were apparently playing extra sessions or something, because they were running around following the main questline, which my business-partner-player and I didn't see the clues of, and the other players didn't share their information with us.. And, I don't mind that exactly. What miffs me though, is that one day the GM declared "Alright, that wraps up the campaign!" And the partner-player and I were both like, "What?" And the GM said, "The Dragon Heist campaign is over, the [censor] was [spoiler block]." And again we were like, "Huh?" And he said, "And you two were too busy running your tavern to even know what was going on around you!" - What miffs me is not that we didn't know what happened in the main storyline (I could careless honestly. I clearly wasn't interested in it, and even now am only very mildly curious... about the least curious a person can be without being not curious at all), no; What bothers me is that he declared the campaign was over because he had finished the material in the book. Over? OVER!? I've got a tavern to run! He continued to run D&D after that, but he started up a new campaign, I forget which, I wasn't interested, I want to run my tavern.

❤

1.0a Must Stay!

Story is what happens between the adventures. I had a Fey-Patroned Warlock and role-played a whole conversation between him and his familiar (Mys Terri, who was often in the form of an owl) that ended with him promising to have a helmet made for the owl. Mys Terri eventually stopped showing up when summoned, objecting to being used as a scout, and he ended up summoning Mys Nomer, who was an idiot.

The biggest mistake is not being able to roll up a Minotaur PC.

Big one (Spoiler): The Ironclad regiment is paid off at the start, sure... But where is the money? Must be a substantial amount... but how much? And again, where is the money? I decided it was 5000 Gold and back at the Ironclad regiments camp... but still kinda unclear.

GMing is so difficult this day because GMs have to try to remember all the plots and plans of all these NPCs that the GMs themselves didn't create, make sure that things go according to the adventure well enough that the players can see the story as intended, but also not have the players feel like they're being railroaded as they go along on this ride like a leaf on a river, thinking their choices matter while in the back of their minds knowing they really don't (just like most video games). And on top of all that, after putting all this work in as a GM, you don't get the enjoyment of emergent play. And instead of stories being player driven, they're GM driven, and that's what most of the new players expect from games.

It's time to talk about the fireside chat

I’m just plain fine trying to fix WOTC’s adventures after paying a premium for them. Better systems and adventures out there.

Here is how you fix 5e Dragonlance. Throw it away and do a case by case conversion of the original if you want to run it in 5e.

I thought this was a GOOD product?! Fixing holes isn't generally something one has to do with a GOOD product!!!

Perfect take! 👌

My man, I hate to say this- but the most fun I've ever had with D&D has been with 5th edition over the last few years... ...because this is the first time I've avoided ALL of their campaign books. Railroading quests, eye-rolling 'purse puppy' NPC's, and most of it seems like it was written for a Care Bears cartoon for girls. It's just absolutely awful and every respectable GM I know has not only refused to use them, but *prohibited them from being brought to their table* and I respect this. Here's hoping Hasbro/WotC does some housekeeping. Until then, I'll be playing other games that aren't D&D.