Arandur
it lead to a combo fourth age/fifth age hybrid with elements taken from that awesome short story "there is another shore you know..."
The moon was the eye of the major villan, and the pcs had to evade it, while trying to ressurect the gods and bring them back to power to fight the giant overlord dragons...
it was the best campaign ever =)
edit- my current campaign is pretty divergent too. The PCs are from claran elian, and their civilization has been cut off from ansalon since the cataclysm. The dark knights start invading (this is chaos war time), so the pcs are basically sent to find and eliminate the source of the problem. There is a ritual to send them to the last place they remember on ansalon, istar. but it misses, and they go to pt. balifor instead, where they are mistaken for backwoods Khur from the mountains...
Originally posted by Arandur
(including the War of the Dark Lance, kudos by the way -loved it)
Thanks!
To be honest, Dark Lance wasn't originally an alternate campaign setting. It was originally run by a friend of mine prior to Second Generation and Summer Flame. The setting evolved as time went on, adding the Knights of Takhisis after I read Second Generation, and with further development after Summer Flame.
So this look back on some of my favorite old games has turned into an alternate setting.
In the future of Dark Lance, you will see some familiar elements from the Age of Mortals, and some other things that have changed.
I don't want to give away too much, but I will say that Takhisis doesn't steal the world in this alternate timeline. There will be use of the unique dragonlance sidebar in the DLCS. Qualinesti lies in ashes, and Icewall Glacier has covered Tarsis. Morgion is on the move as well, using gully dwarves to carry his plagues.
Anyhoo, if time permits this winter, I may work up Dark Lance Adventures.
Adventure 1 - Pre WotL
PC's begin the game in Northern Ergoth. We get involved in the adventure by each hiring on to an archeological dig into Ergoth's past. As the dig goes we have a few fights: tomb raiders, a goblin war party, etc. But throughout the whole thing the main bad guy is a "cleric" in brown robes who follows the main dig coordinator guy around. This was actually a draconian who was spying on the dig, because this city was an important trade and religious site in Pre-Catcyclism Ergoth. He wants to make sure no relics of the old god are found, and none are. To this day I don't know if thats because the DM didn't put any there or if the Draconian actually removed some.
Anyway one of the characters fins is a map room, and my mage (who had hired on as a translator 'Languages - Ancient' Nonweapon Proficiency!) finds Ansalon, but the huge stone mosiac on the wall also showed a second continent far to the West, and though we didn't think we could access it by sea, my mage did think Icewall glacier could possibly connect to it!
So we get on a boat, sail south, and we get onto the glacier. We make friends with the Ice Barbarians and they teach us how to travel safely across the ice, but we run into the White Dragon Army (though we didn't in character know it at the time).
We break into an ancient fortress in the Ice and fight this undead bad guy who completely kicked our butts a few times in a row, but we eventually 'defeated' him by beating him to a teleportation room and fleeing before he could kill us! We counted it as a win
Adventure 2 - A New World
The next adventure took place in this new continent. We were looking for this "Lost Colony of Ergoth." we ran into some seriously messed up cultures, and also met a Copper dragon that described itself as an "original copper dragon." This would be a direct decendent of what would later become green dragons! It was kind of cool.
We found the colony and they had become a theocracy dedicated to Zembiom. but they had some lost relics of the Emperor which we were determined to get. Which we did. We met a few other nations, including a new nation of dwarves, kender, and even small societies of tinker gnomes. They had fought the "Bertogthian Empire" for some time, and decided to help us by showing us how to disguise ourselves as Hill People, a race of humans native to the land whom the Empire traded with.
So we get in, grab the stuff and flee to the harbor where the hill people have a boat waiting for us.
In hindsight this was the stupid part of our plan. Of course Zembiom wakes up when her priests call her and she sends storms etc, so we ended up beached on a long deserted island that had worshiped the Ancient Gods but now had no inhabitents. We wandered there for a while and my character found a bronze staff that was sacred to Luintari, which was cool.
After that we managed to make it back to Ergoth. I can't remember much about the abandoned island. But the false Ergoth empire was basically a corrupt form of the Byzantine Empire facing, rather then german barbarians or arabic armies, a bizare mix Celtic/Egyptian tribal group, and the dwarves were based off of North American civilization. The Kender, of course, were Kender
Lots of other strange creatures. Maybe i'll write up that continent and submit it! who knows, maybe I'll get a source book in my name! LOL
Rosisha