Stolen Ideas from the Krynn Series of Gold Box Games

In the Dragonlance lore, there are 3 moons named Solinari, Lunitari, and Nuitari. They were aligned with Good, Neutral, and Evil, and they share their names with gods. As each moon waxed and waned, a spellcaster aligned with that god gained or lost magical spells.  

The Krynn-based SSI games did an excellent job tracking this. When you have the brain of a machine, such things are trivial. It can become a basic design element for your interface. 

The white, red, and blue orbs note the moons and their phases. The game even allowed bonus magical spells when this happened. I never bothered to figure out when more spells were available, availing myself of the advantage whenever they became available. 

I thought it was a neat system, but unfortunately, bringing it to the tabletop proved intractable. How would one track the changing of phases and rising of moons in a game world? It was too hard. 

For me and my players, there was a strong belief that magic users were squishy, and I always dreamed up new and utterly intractable ways of empowering spell casters. Invariably, most of these ideas were panned by my players and shit-canned by me. But this idea of bonus spells stuck with me. It was already hardcoded for Clerics in AD&D and appeared on our character sheet.  

Having a formal character sheet is very handy, and I was super cool for being able to print a character sheet at will instead of using notebook paper, graph paper, or purchasing a handful of bright orange character sheets. 

The magic system in Krynn is not a great mechanic for an RPG. But it does make an incredibly realistic world. Welcome to Black Monday when you are at 75% while your nemesis is at 150%. And it ain't getting better any time soon enough to matter. That is a very real-world mechanic. 

As neat as it was, presenting this lunar influence in a tabletop game is both impractical and not very fun for a variety of reasons, such as making squishy spell-casters even more squishy. However, what we did do was simplistic and fun. Magic Users and Illusions got bonus spells like Clerics and Druids, except the deciding factor was Intelligence. 

I recall one of my players pointing to the character sheet and mentioning how close the lines for Bonus Spells were to Intelligence. "Wisdom is only one box down. We don't even need to redesign our character sheet!" 

We had no mechanic for losing spells, nor did I track the phases of the moon(s). That made everyone happy. We did discuss it at length, but could come up with no practical way of using it without being a rolling disaster. 

This one change was so ingrained into my mind that I forgot this was even a house rule or where I got it from. It was from the Krynn series of Gold Box games. 

You can check out my character sheet on DrivethruRPG or from my store on Ko-Fi. Or you could pick up all of the e1 modules on DTRPG. 

A Non-review of Champions of Krynn

I was told I would love Baldur's Gate. And from what I have heard and read, it is great. However, I need a new hard drive in my laptop before I can play. Me, being me, I got a copy of the SSI Gold box from Steam while I wait for this hard drive to arrive. 

So, here we are: 

This is nothing like Baldur's Gate. But it does bring back memories. The SSI games were the greatest implementation of the AD&D rules as a tactical game. 10 of 10 for that. It is a very strict version of AD&D, but they did it very well. 

I am not reviewing Champions today, even though I played it when it came out. The issue is time compression. I've got all of the Gold Box games jammed in my head. I remember what happened the last time I was in Krynn, and it didn't go well. 

I got my hands on DL-1 Dragons of Despair, and my player didn't get it. By 1988, I had Champions and tried again. The gang still hated it. The reason is that my normal free-form play is very fairytale-like, complete with voice. That is the opposite of Dragonlance. This was amplified by my getting the setting in my head from the SSI game. I was simply confusing them by not understanding what they failed to understand. 

Hmm. I had to do a mashup of Dragonlance, Fritz Lieber, and Dungeonland before my players would even engage with the wonderful world of Krynn. Click that link to read more. 

Anyway, now that I have both the SSI Gold Box games and paper copies of the Dragonlance modules, I want to revisit and review them all. You can check out copies of Dragonlance here on DTRPG. 

One of the failings of Dragonlace is that it came out as both e1 and second edition, which was a nightmare for DMs and players alike. D&D, AD&D e1, AD&D e1 Unearthed Arcane, and AD&D 2nd edition are wildly different beasts, and having a single setting title hit shelves in this period was a rotten deal.  

My Very Own Appendix N

As my friends and I entered high school, we really diverged in our interests and reading habits. Ryan read Douglas Adams and the Robotech series. Michelle read Doctor Who. I read all of the fantasy stuff like the Dragonlance series. 

This would have been around '84 to 1986. 

Almost every game session started with The Great Book and Mix Tape swap. In that spirit, I'll share a mix for you: The Great '86. This one year was amazing for music. (Editing note: You don't need a Google Music account, you can simply go on Youtube and listen with this link.) 

Anyway, back to the books. In swapping books, I lost more books than I will ever own. I also read more than you can imagine. Many of these books were yellow, pages dogeared and in some cases missing covers. 

I've been feeling nostalgic lately and picked up a Dragonlance book at Barnes and Noble. I am only 100 pages in and it fills me with both wonder and nostalgia. Clearly, I read it nearly 40 years ago. All of the details are gone, but it is strangely familiar.

I think I'll add this series to the review list, Dragons of Autumn Twilight is pretty cool and clearly made an impression on me because I freely stole ideas from it. 

This is the odd part, decades ago things moved with glacial slowness. I had this book from a used bookstore before I ever saw the Dragonlance Modules. I had no idea it was related to D&D until I saw DL-1 in about 1990. Bookstores were wacky like that. 

Since I ran down this memory hole, I've also returned to watching Doctor Who. The whole D&D gang watched the show, the old-school stuff. It was shown out of order, the local PBS station only honored the serial order, so at least you could see a whole story. But we had no idea what was happening in the larger Doctor Who story as they would happily skip from Doctor to Doctor, willy-nilly. 

I didn't care. It sort of matched the way I read the novels. Here is a silly bit. I had to go back to 2017 to pick up where I left off. The Master became Missy and slightly more and less diabolical. I was vaguely aware that Jodie Whittaker took over as The Doctor and I wondered how that would work. 

The transition reminded me of the novels I had read in the 80s. Remember, I mentioned that many of the books I read had no covers? The Doctor Who novels featured the image of The Doctor appearing in the story, so if you are missing the cover and the first couple of pages, you have no idea which Doctor features in the story. 

I thought that Whittaker was pretty great until I reached the episode, "Fugitive of the Judoon". In that story, The Doctor really shines. The series owes its success (and failures) to the author. The Doctor and the actor who brings these stories to the screen has be spot-on in translation from mere words on the page to funny, scary, and amazing stories to life. 

In a strange collision of real life, check out The Other Side Blog. He is doing an A to Z of Doctor. Totally love it.