An Ansalonian Gazetteer

What is This?

• What is Dragonlance?
• What is Dungeons & Dragons?
• What is this website about?
• Is this official?
• How free is "free"?
• When will product X be available?
• How are you doing this?
• Any chance for other file formats?
• Do you need any help?
• I don't agree with one of your rules, can I re-write it?
• Core, Expansions & Accessories, what do I need?

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What is Dragonlance?
The Dragonlance saga is a world built on fantasy novels and role playing games. It all started when late TSR (now Wizards of the Coast), publisher of the Dungeons & Dragons role playing game wanted to a series of adventures featuring Dragons. Tracy Hickman devised a couple of modules that pleased TSR and so they put him in charge of creating this new series. The rest, they say, the rest is history. Of course, the setting wouldn't have achieved the status amongst fantasy worlds that it possesses without the trilogy of novels that accompanied the adventure modules and chronicled them. Written by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, the trilogy went on to become one of the most read pieces of pure genious in the world today.

What is Dungeons & Dragons?
To put it bluntly, the most played, recognised and cherished role playing game system. D&D went on to spawn an entire legion of other systems by competing companies but any person that plays a role playing game has heard of D&D, and most have played it as well. After Wizards of the Coast acquired TSR, it begun to prepare the world for a role playing games renaissance with the release of the Third Edition of the game in August 2000.

What is this website about?
This website hopes to fill in the vacum left by Wizards of the Coast when they announced that Dragonlance would not be updated to the Third Edition rules of D&D and, in fact, cancelled further development in the role playing games side of Dragonlance although the setting still lives on through the novels. This website's purpose therefor is to provide Dragonlance players a compreensive, stable and true Third Edition Dragonlance campaign setting.

Is this Official?
No. There are two official Dragonlance websites now: one which is dedicated to the world as seen and described by novels and another which is sanctioned by Wizards of the Coast to continue to produce Dragonlance role playing material.

How Free is "Free"?
Well... free! I couldn't charge or sell anything bearing Dragonlance copyrighted material and/or characters, etc. even if I wanted! So, rest assured that when the sourcebook and future expansions is released, it will cost absolutely nothing... my pleasure. =)

When will product X be available?
When it's done! ;-) Seriously now. It all depends on how fast I can write. Writer's Block doesn't apply here since I won't be inventing anything new. Compiling a sourcebook such as this demands more time than it does talent so as soon as I finish writing it and convert to PDF, uploading it here will be my first priority. How's that for a non-answer? =)

How are you doing this?
Well, first of all, I create a flowchart for the sourcebook. This comes about by reading the official products' table of contents, looseling following the other D&D 3rd Edition campaign settings (Living Greyhawk Gazetteer for the most part), figuring out what is most important and exactly how important.

With this done, I basically laid out my entire Dragonlance role playing products and the ground and started annotating (on a draft paper mind you!) what products could contribute to each particular section of the flowchart. The I scanvanged the D&D core rulebooks and the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer of specific format standards (how Classes, nation information, etc.) is presented.

The third step was filling the flowchart with actual content mostly taken from the official products but sometimes adding my own words to it. While doing this I would convert to 3rd Edition rules and specifc standards. Since I would be writing and converting simultaneous, sometimes the conversions needed revisions so I would go back and tweak them a little. Feedback from the playtesters also allowed for further tweaking.

The final step was building a layout template for the content. I decided to go with the same (almost) layout as the one found on Fifth Age game products. I found it clean and straight forward without sacrificing visual pleasentness.

As for the hard facts, I'm using a number of applications that range from Photoshop to Notepad! A lot of data changes from one application to the next before the work is done and I would probably bore you all to death before long. Finally, however, I used Adobe Acrobat to create the PDFs that you download.

Any chance for other file formats?
Hmm... it could happen if there is enough people asking me. I could certainly provide ASCII text files. It's not for the trouble but I actually decided to release in PDF so that people around the world could end up with two documents exactly alike when they printed it out. I'm (painfully) aware that the file size is a bit too much for modem users and that's why I'm providing the sourcebooks splitted through out several files. That has the added bonus that people can preview the sourcebook right away and decide if it's worth downloading it all. Anyway, if you're interested that sourcebooks be available for download in ASCII text format as well, mail me. Like I said above, I used many applications to get to the final thing so any other formats (Word, etc.) would be very time-consuming.

Do you need any help?
I'm _always_ in need of help! =) Anyway, if you have something you'd like to share to the community, what better way of doing it by presenting it as an expansion or accessory to this stable base of operations? So what do you do? Well, it's simple, really! All you have to do is mail me with a brief description of your work followed by an estimate on how long it will take you to finish it. That's it. Also, your work remains yours.

I don't agree with one of your rules, can I re-write it?
The short answer to this question is "no". The long answer is "yes". I'll explain. I'm trying to come up with a _stable_ base from which new tales and aventures can be written without authors having to worry about converting everything themselves or point the players to the various versions of the same rules present today on the web. If I start changing my own rules on a regular (and even irregular) basis, I'm going against my own objective for this website.

There can be as many versions and variants of the conversions as there are Dragonlance fans. Everyone has a particular taste and way of doing things even if they support and use another person's conversions. So, if you sent me a revised rule and I released it, while satisfying your vision I may be alienating someone else's. That's is the explanation for the short answer.

Of course, if a hundred people mailed me saying that a particular rule doesn't work, it's too unbalacing, whatever. I would be forced to agree that my rule didn't work even if it did work for me and my playtesters but like I said, everyone has a vision and mine is no different from all others, except in one detail: that it is presented as a whole and condensed in the same place. If you have a problem with a rule, mail me. My most likely reply will be that I'll be taking it into consideration. Don't think that I'm ignoring you. I'm just waiting to see if anyone else has that same problem with that same rule. That is the explanation for the long answer.

As a final thought, although I don't claim my conversions to be full-proof or the best, a combinations of factors make them diffent:

These rules have been continuously written and re-written for three months. This isn't something I came up on a weekend when I had nothing to do and decided to post it on the web for the sake of doing it. Some parts of the rules went through some heavy re-writing and others (like the Wizards of High Sorcery and Holy Orders of the Stars) saw more than three comple-from-scratch re-writes.

These rules have been playtested both in a real ongoing campaign and in a controled environment where I pitched, for instance, two parties duking it out. The feedback from these playtesting sessions were analised with other sessions, compared and finally, tweaks and re-writes were made where neccessary. Then these re-writes were tested again!

When information of the setting contradicted itself I used most of the times (but not always) the old material (Dragonlance Adventures for instance). When information from the same product contradicted itself (it happened believe me!) or when the old material was not clear I used Novels to break ties and decide the arguments. Thus, this set of rules will appeal more to fans of the "old setting" and the novels rather than AD&D 2nd Edition and SAGA players.

The rules are expected to work together. If you start picking your favourite conversions and combining with external ones don't be surprised to find that these either are too powerful or too weak. These rules are self-contained and interactive. While I won't say that exchanging one conversion for an external one or combine conversions automatically ruins your play, I must caution you that it will probably do so. Just like tampering with the Core Rules is potentially dangerous to play balance, so is tampering these core rules.

Core, Expansions & Accessories, what do I need?
Well, the Core sourcebook is essential. All expansions and accessories draw on it for consistency, whether you're talking rules or content. The Core is the base to build onto and it's to be considered "canon", even if it is unofficial canon =).

Expansions, like the name implies, expand the Core and so the canon. Expansions are not essential and you don't need them to play, on the other hand they are expansions for the Core and thus, they become Core themselves in regards to future products. For instance, Solamnia is described in detail in the Core but someone may write a "Traveller's Guide to Solamnia" expansion. Even though you don't need it to play, it has become canon where Solamnia is concerned. If someone wants to write an article about the deadly disease that's spreading throughout Solamnia, they better be know about information present in the Core and any relevant expansions. This isn't saying only authors need expansions, far from it, but they are specially important to them.

Accessories are things you can do without. You can be sure no other product will draw upon them. Accessories are basically conversions to Dragonlance of 3rd Edition material that is not present in the core rulebooks. For instance, Dragon Magazine articles, Dungeon Magazine adventure modules, Sword & Fist, Hero Builder's Guide, etc. A product may occasionally refer to an entry on an accessory but it is mostly a negligible thing and that can be ignored without making the product unusable.

So, basically you need the Core, it is recommended you also get the Expansions and pick & choose between the accessories.

Dungeons & Dragons®, D&D®, Dragonlance®, and the D&D logo are registered trademarks owned by Wizards of the Coast, Inc. All D&D and Dragonlance characters, character names, and the distinctive likenesses thereof are trademarks owned by Wizards of the Coast, Inc. The author has no intention of disputing Wizards of the Coast' ownership of the respective trademarks. © 2001 Wizards of the Coast, Inc. All rights reserved. If you have any comments or suggestions about this website, mail me.