Dragonlance D&D Game Blog

It's been a while since I did a Tools article, but during the last game session, it struck me how often I rely on this simple, but very handy device for bits of data at my fingertips. When I first started DMing, I only used the screen for it's most common function, to hide the adventure notes and roll dice. Now I find myself relying just as much for the information available on the screen as well. And right now, my favorite screen is the 3.5 DM screen from Goodman Games . What I find more surprising is that while I'm running a Dragonlance Campaign, I rely more on the Goodman Games screen than I do on the official Dragonlance 3.5 Screen . I've even tried the 3.5 screen from a Paizo-produced Dragon magazine. Interestingly, I never tried the office 3.5 screen from WotC, I never liked the idea of the panels being on their side, especially since I usually tilt the darn thing to read what's at the bottom on most screens. I actually wish screens were taller than their cur...

One of the things I really like about the Dragonlance setting is the wealth of detail the various developers put into the setting from it's earliest 1e days, all the way through it's 3.5 days (and for all you 4e players, your PHB3 Minotaur character owes more than a nod to the Dragonlance version going all the back to the 1e Adventures book Weis and Hickman co-authored). Case in point, when TSR created the War of the Lance sourcebox, the definitive 2e document for the Dragonlance setting, they added a lot of seemingly 'fluffy' details that had almost no game value. One thing along that line was a dwarven language called Hammertalk. The idea of Hammertalk is that dwarves, in their mountain cities, can communicate by using their hammers to bang out messages that can be heard over great distances. For me (and I'm sure I'm not alone), the first analogy I thought of was Morse Code . More recently, for my own campaign, I've been thinking of building a treasure map...