I have been a DM for quite some time (probably around 30+ years). DMed lots of games (The Dark Eye, Renegade Legions, Dragon Warriors, D&D 2E and 3E, GURPS and decided to come back to AD&D 2E recently). When I started DMing AD&D 2E, unfortunately I had settled to play in the Forgotten Realms/Homebrew and since during those teen years you don’t have a lot of money to spend, I decided to stick with a single Campaign World.
Even in my campaign set in the Forgotten Realms, I was always hooked on playing “epics”; multiple quests linked to each one, recurring villains, all leading up to an epic final confrontation. I see a lot of people complaining online about railroading (especially when they talk about the DL modules) but I think it comes down to a matter of taste. If your players willingly don’t want to play the quest you offer them, I feel it’s similar to them wanting to voluntarily derail the game. I always made sure my players had tons of choices in their decisions even though I was expecting them to tackle the dungeons I had prepared for them.
Fast forward quite a few years and we are now playing 3E. Thanks to the internet, I start reading about the Dragonlance campaign setting and modules and I get to see the dungeon maps… I’m a huge sucker for maps and I LOVE DL’s isometric design. Xak Tsaroth, Pax Tharkas, The Tomb of Derkin, these were all amazing maps that I needed my players to go through. Combined with the fact that none of us had read the books (and therefore everything would be new to us) and that it was an epic quest that would feel similar to play The Lord of the Rings in a game, I started pitching them to send the group to Krynn. Reading the modules as a DM was a blast. No orcs and new enemies like draconians was a breath of fresh air. Unfortunately, trying to convert everything in 3E rules turned into my first total party kill… I tried my best to convert Ember with a DC that the group could potentially tackle and I was wrong. Dragons in 3E are insanely stronger than in 1E. So my group fell in the Tomb of Derkin…
Now a few months back, I was longing into gaming again and tackle the DL modules once more. This time, using 2E. But I decided that I wanted to use the actual official miniatures to play my game. That I would try to get and collect all of them, paint them so that I could use them to replay those DL modules ! I was luckily able to buy the Dragonlance Heroes, Villains, Draconians and even Takhisis Queen of Darkness from a single seller for 600$ CAD.
But since I wanted to be able to run the modules with enough draconian miniatures, me and my buddy tried to create proxy replicas just for us to play in our game. We did a TON of trial and error (using silicone molds, milliput in Oyumaru, etc.). We were getting discouraged. Until that last try using Mold Max, putting the original miniatures in them, combined with my friend’s homemade vacuum degassing chamber made out of an old presto and a fridge compressor. We were finally able to create good looking proxies for our game (with minor defaults but still ending up looking good).
So here is where I’m currently at, all the Heroes have been painted (and I tried to gather as much information on their physical description on the net as I could) and the dragon armies are taking form…..
I’m now tackling the Villains and soon (although I already have Lord Soth completed 🙂 ), we shall face the DL modules again !
