Larry Elmore's art was attracted me to both.
My first exposure to D&D (aside from the cartoon, which I enjoyed) was the Red Box Basic Set. One look at that Red Dragon fighting that dude with the sword and I was hooked.
The cover to Dragons of Autumn Night intersted me greatly back in '85. My next door neighbor had it and said it was great, so naturally I had to give it a try.
So the next time I was in a mall at a book store, I looked up Dragonlance. There were so many (although nothing like now...there was maybe 20 or so when I started...if even that). But there was these two brand new books called "Preludes." And I though, "Ah...Preludes...that means before...I'll check those out." So I took home Darkness and Light...read it...loved it...and the rest is history.
Within a week I had Statsana Shadowdark, my amnesiac half elven renegade wizard....Gnok Warshenheimer, my gnome cleric of Reorx.....Bramble Tunderfus, my kender handler...and last but certainly not least, Blaze Carrigan my paladin of Paladine. An interesting group of PC's I must say...Ill have to post their adventures (and misadventures!) throughout Ansalon and eventually Taladas here on the board sometime.
After prodding my dad for several weeks to show me how to play, he finally agreed to sit down and play with me. I was the only PC, and we played a typical dungeon crawl adventure (I would abhor that today....but I loved it then). We played a few more times after that, but soon we stopped playing and I'd sit in my room for hours rolling up characters on my wide rule school paper. That was my first introduction to D&D, and I never played again until '89 with some of my friends....my first introduction to AD&D (and more than one PC). Wow....almost 20 years now....that's scary!!!
As for DL, I can blame my father for that too, but only inadvertently. Being an avid reader, my father often took trips to the book store, and I started going along with him. I think it was in '86 when I was looking through the books and came across Dragons of Autumn Twilight. I was 12, so all I was concerned with was the "cool-looking dragon and knight" on the cover (so we can blame Elmore for that one). I read the chronicles trilogy in about a week (if memory still serves me), and soon after that I read the legends trilogy. Either I couldn't find anymore DL books, or that was all there was at the time.
Funny thing is, I didn't even realize that DL and D&D were associated with one another until '89 when I started playing with my friends. I'd never really been in a gaming shop before that, so I never saw all of the DL gaming books/modules (or even AD&D to be honest...being able to choose your race AND level was such a revoltionary idea...lol).
And the rest is history....D&D and DL have been with me for the last 2/3 of my life (yes, I'm almost 30, don't remind me)...
I used to live in massachusetts, and made friends with the only other indian guy around at the time. He was one of the nicest dudes i've ever met =)
Anyway, i used to go to his house to play civilization (best computer game ever) and dragon warrior (best console game ever).One day, when his mom picked us up from school to go hang out, he started reading a book called Dragons of Winter Night. I was like, what is that? the dragon looks way cool!
He said, oh, this is DRAGONLANCE. Have you heard of the chronicLEs?
(happy, cam?)
...
and then it slowly started. first chron. then legends. then one day he pulled out Tales of the Lance and my first character, a red robed wizard was born. then he died. then my gnome tinker was born. then i bought Time of the Dragon. Mind you, every week or so, i'd go to the book store and get a new DL book (it was 1993, so there were a lot out) and plow through it over the weekend.
Then i came back to california, and it all kinda went into hibernation, my love for the three things he introduced. Then in quick succession- DoSF and Civ 2. bam, back to getting everything i could for the setting. I hopped on the DLML in 96 and never looked back =)
I had a lot of time on my hands while out of school bed ridden. I finished the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy for lack of a better thing to do I really got into them so I asked for some more fantasy novels like that, Tony, said local DM suggested Chronicles... so I devoured those too.
That was about 8 years ago now. Although I fell out of gaming for a long time, I kept reading Dragonlance... came back to gaming a few years back.
And that as they say, it that.
--I haven't been disappointed yet NB
I was somewhere in my early teens (13 or 14) and was at the public library doing some research for some stupid school project and came across this cool-looking cover with a really cool looking black robe wizard (it was a Collectors' Edition Book with all 3 Legends books). I read it, and loved it. So naturally I started reading the Chronicles. My only regret was I read the books in the wrong order. :D
Everyone knows that girls love a guy who "really" knows how to roleplay!
So over time I liked fantasy more and more, and when Junior High rolled around, I actually found some fantasy books worth reading at my school library. The first DL book I picked up was Dragons of a Spring Dawning, and from there I was hooked, though it took me a while to understand what was going on (I only realized I had the third book in a series when I finished it, but they didn't have Autumn Twilight or Winter Night).
The thing I liked most was the Final Fantasy style separation of the wizardly types into White/Red/Black, definitely a cool swing on things. That and I have ALWAYS been a sucker for character development, which is why the only FR books I can stand are the Drizz't books.
Well, basicly, I forgot to give it to him, as he didn't really have a party or anything, and it sat in my room for about a year or so. I am and Avid reader and, being out of books to read, decided to read the book i forgot to give my friend.
I've always loved fantasy, so i was hooked by DL. I quickly bought the Chronicals and legends, and then the remaining War of Souls books.
The funny thing, I later found out that my Friend never read that book, and really dosen't like fantasy, so go figure.
Blaze Carrigan my paladin of Paladine.
I thought I read somewhere in the DLCS that there were no paladins in Ansalon ? Correct me if I'm wrong.
Anyway, I first saw a Dragonlance book back when I started playing 2e under one of the most amazing DM's I have ever known(I still strive to become the Dungeon Master that he was.). He was not running a Dragonlance campaign(He had a home brewed world of his own.) but knew alot about DL and had alot of respect for it(The Dragonlance novels were the only DnD novels that he would buy.). This man had the 3 magic books: The Dragonlance Chronicles!
I read those 3 books and became addicted to stories with Raistlin in them so I searched through his library and found out that he actually had The Legends as well! He also had taken a portion of his world from the mechanics of Krynn(Towers of High Sorcery, Kender typed beings, etc.). I did not purchase my own Dragonlance book until v3.5 came out and the first Dragonlance book that I bought was Dragons of Summer Flame after that I bought the campaign setting for v3.5 and some accessories and novels. The AoM campaign I am starting this weekend will be my first Dragonlance campaign.
***
Er, but lets get back on topic.
Originally posted by DarkMath
I thought I read somewhere in the DLCS that there were no paladins in Ansalon ? Correct me if I'm wrong.
Well....May I clarify...this was a second edition game
strangly enough it was my friend that gave me for my 13 b'day the 3 cron. and the 3 legends books. so i was lucky enough to read the 6 "core" books in a row back to back.
from the very first page with flint resting his weary legs and tanis a half-elf friend of his meeting... well i was in love. every other series of fantasy books i had read always had dwarfs and elves as near mortal enimies.
as i continued to read and was introduced to raistlin (the sickly, yet strangly enigmatic mage) to his twin brother caramon a walking wall of flesh. it intruged me even more. and then in walked two of my favourite characters. Sturm and Riverwind. both strong, proud warriors from very different background it showed to me the differences between the human lands of ansalon.
and the death of sturm in 'dragons of winter night' was harrowing, even though characters had died in other books, for most i hadn't really picked up an attachment to them like i had sturm. it made me stop and think, here is one of the main characters of the story dead (heroicly, without a doubt, but dead) and it was at that point i thought, maybe they don't win?
from there it became a continent and world-wide struggle for control of krynn. with dragons coming alive from stories. red ones, blue ones and more. i'd only ever thought of dragons in the way of monsters, not in the way of "races"
after the cronicles i went straight onto the legends series, and it was during these books, that raistlin and caramon came alive to me, raistlin had become the most powerful mage alive at that time, but he still had ambition, (wow, thats story telling) yet at the same time raistlin learnt to love again, even though it cost him his dream, he loved enough to set it aside. and caramon goes through a real wake up call, for years he thought that raistlin would come back, but part way through he becomes his own man. personally i think it is during the fight with the half ogre bandit chief.
well those 6 books made me fall in love with the dragonlance world and from that point on i avidly searched for any dragonlance books i could find.
oddly enough i have never played a game on krynn yet. i am about to start as a human que-shu ranger (in the veins of Riverwind) i'm really looking forward to it.
personally for me though i love the history of krynn and really enjoy the books during the age of dreams or such. i have never enjoyed any single one of the 5th age books, but i have enough faith in dragonlance that things will get better. i have read the war of souls books and whilst a good series it seemed to miss something.
anywho enough of my warbling.
Time Moved On.
Middle School years, Met a friend who Liked D&D and we started playing with a group of friends. Towards the end of Middle School, and the beginning of High School one of the group read "The Legend of Huma" He let the DM read it(the friend that re-introduced me to D&D). The the DM past the book to me, and I read it, an was hooked. Later the "Chronicles, and Legends" series was past thru the same chain of friends. I being the last, to read, and the slowed of them to read.
Been hooked on the novel, and the World of Krynn ever since.
Side note the DM bought the Taladas gaming supliment before we ever read any of the Novels. We were playing on Taladas for a long time before we even knew about Anaslon.
And on the subject of Paladin's on Krynn. I personally believe Paladins do exsist on Krynn. They are normally recruited into the Ranks of KOS. if they are Human. But make a great class for non Human's like Elves, Dwarves, and Minotaurs. Also in the War of Souls (2nd book) The sword Laurana uses "Lost Star" was made by a elven paladin.
Guessing the general intent of what I wanted to read, he lent me the Xanth series by Piers Anthony (which is sadly awful now - the books are still being produced, but they're little more than excuses for puns and a perverted old man drooling over progressively less and less clothed fictional women. The first twenty or so were great, though). From there, I went to the Discworld, which is really where I got the 'pddisc' from - I needed an email address way back in year 9 (hmm... Paul... nope, someone's got that... Paul Donovan... nope, someone's got that too... ok, pddisc it is), and after reading all of them, I read Robert Rankin (fantastic!). Then he ran out of great fantasy books.
Meanwhile, he had started me on D&D, buying me the basic set of D&D, then going onto AD&D, starting off running dungeon crawls for us, then I took over the DMing... I've barely stopped since.
I started reading all the FR novels, except the Drizzt ones which I couldn't read they were so dull. I finally found the Finder's Bane trilogy, which had a Dragonlance book as the middle one, and a kender (a what?) in the final one in the trilogy. I didn't understand Fistandantilus Reborn *at all*, but decided to investigate this Dragonlance series, having read all the FR ones my library had (bar Drizzt).
As you can see, when I read a good book, I read the entire series. When I started on DL, I didn't realise that there were about 130 books, but unlike FR, all the books had common themes and elements - they were just all better - character, plot, tie ins with important history, rather than the mish-mash of 'cool' things randomly happening in FR. So, over the course of two or three years, I have and have read nearly all the books. Just issing the last ones in Elven and Dwarven Nations, and the last two in the Cloakmaster cycle, which isn't even really DL, just associated. I have the FR books in that long ago trilogy with Fistandantilus Reborn in the middle sitting on my bookcase, with my Dragonlance hat hanging off the top. I have Magestones, which is a phenomenal game if you like to buy anything with the 'Dragonlance' logo on it (d'oh!).
As for playing, when 3rd ed came out, I couldn't find anyone in my area who would play or knew anything about it (damn you Suffolk!), and DL had stopped being D&D for long enough that I could never play 2nd ed with it. I carried on doing dungeon crawls in FR, not realising quite what I was missing out on with RP.
When I came to University, and joined the SF&F society, and found loads and loads of players all looking for games, I was so pleased... maybe I could run an RP game at last! So I did, and it was quite good, until the dungeon of death...
It fell apart so badly then (because of poor DMing, poor players, and OOC problems between players) that I stopped DMing for about a year, playing in as many other games as I possibly could, to learn from a players perspective what a DM should be like. I was blessed with a couple of fantastic DMs, a fairly good one, and a couple of downright poor ones. I started off having difficulty making actual characters, just rolling dice and assigning the stats, and making a fairly unplayable thing. I went through playing the half-celestial half-fiendish half-weregoat Trogdor, I went through playing the barbarian/wizard spellsword with a rod of lesser maximization built into the handle of my falchion (and a ferret familiar attaching with a touch spell on him - we killed a dragon :D). Then I played a monk. Currently, I'm playing a gnome rogue/illusionist, who does nothing in combat (finds it distasteful, disgusting, and scary... pity she has the second highest hp in the group. Damn that Con of 20 and the DM making me reroll 1s for hp).
I'm DMing two games, a DL one (that is cursed with more than half the party wanting to dungeon crawl
) and a 'homebrew' one (it's set in a Ravenloft domain, but I've not told the players that, and they've not worked it out. Probably won't do either - I've had to do the RL elements of it subtle enough that they didn't catch on immediately. But I have one of them addicted to a dangerous narcotic, one of them has a cursed familiar, and another belongs to the holy church of Eme - Ravenloft gods are fun, as are modified paladins for said gods).When we finished i told the DM that it was a lot of fun and that I could enjoy D&D. He then pulled a book out of his backpack and said "Well if you enjoyed that, read this." It was "Dragons of Autumn Twilight." I read throgh the book and became hooked to DL.
So I have the same friend to thank for gettign me into D&D and DL.
My DM loves Dragonlance, so our last two campaigns have taken place there...
So, D&D, an aunt and and uncle both played D&D, my aunt a halfling theif, who apparently had had contact with kender and thought them to be weird, and my uncle, who was usually a paladin or a cleric. He like to make up his own spells. His favorite? Oozing groin. They told me their stories, and for years I wanted to play, and just fairly recently, 3 years ago, I found the 3rd Edition D&D Adventure Game, and then I got the core books over the next two Christmases(yes...it took me a year to finally get the MM). And the rest, is history.
Originally posted by lorac75
bump
Please don't bump your own threads. Contribute to them if you want to, but if a thread's dropping off the bottom of the page because of a lack of posts, don't resurrect it without adding to it.
Cheers,
Cam
He also told me about this old wizard, who was actually a god, who almost fried everybody in a cage. Plus he told me about how Raistlin's apprentice talked to the wizardly council about his master's amibitions. And about some green dragon Raistlin has under his control.
As you can see, the guy likes wizards. Especially Raistlin.
A year after that, when I moved to a place with convenient access to a library, I decided to check out this "Dragonlance" thing my friend always talked about.
So I read the Chronicles. And the Legends. Then a year after that, last autumn, I read Dragons of Summer Flame and the War of Souls trilogy.
The novels never really got me. I was more interested in the RPG side of things, having recognized just about every spell Raistlin cast in the Chronicles as spells from the PHB.
The Chronicles appealed to me the most, mostly due to the rag-tag band of adventurers that were the main characters. They were kinda like a D&D party.
I have been reading fantasy stories since I was about 8 years old. When I was young we used to have a military airbase nearby. A lot of Americans were stationed there. So I got to know some american kids when I was around 13 or 14 years old. All almost all of them were roleplayers. I took one look at the game and I knew it was for me.
I started playing a lot of D&D, Marvel and Top Secret. And in the time since then I have played about twenty different game systems. A few years later I wanted to try DM'ing. I loved D&D, but wanted to do something different from the other DM in our group. So I found Dragonlance and I started to DM that. Never regretted it. In that time (late eighties, early nineties) I also read a lot of the novels.
I have not played any RPG's from about the age of 23 till 28, but I have kept an interest (I also played some CRPG's in that time). When 3e came out I started buying all the books and I have found a new group to DM for. Nowadays I DM in a v3.5 homebrew setting, but I have bought the new DLCS and try to keep up to date on it.
I am 30 now and I hope to keep my game going as long as possible.
Loved the novel. Continued through various books with the logo, eventually reading Chronicles and Dragons of Summer Flame back to back. Skipped Legends and never realized what it was until recently, this past X-Mas, when I picked up the hard cover.
Never actually played the game, kind of stuck to the novels for the past couple years. Might remedy that this summer. ;)
The depth behind Dragonlance in big way is why I got into it.