The latest ‘Unearthed Arcana’ extra content for Dungeons and Dragons includes a bunch of races, subclasses, backgrounds, and feats from the classic fantasy DnD setting Dragonlance. Published on the official D&D website on Tuesday, ‘Heroes of Krynn’ contains work-in-progress rules for the Kender race and Lunar Magic Sorcerer subclass. Two backgrounds – Knight of Solamnia and Mage of High Sorcery – also feature, together with a total of ten different feats associated with them.
Since DnD Unearthed Arcana exists to showcase playtest material that will later filter through in D&D sourcebooks, the news strongly suggests Dragonlance may be one of the two classic DnD settings Wizards of the Coast plans to revive in 2022. It also comes just a day after a new Wizards of the Coast designer dropped online hints the classic Spelljammer setting could return.
Dragonlance is a fantasy setting created for DnD in the 1980s, with the first series of adventure modules, ‘Dragons of Despair’, published in 1984. Alongside the first DnD world of Greyhawk, created by Father of Dungeons and Dragons Gary Gygax himself, it’s among the earliest settings developed for the game. It’s also the first fantasy world deliberately produced to become an RPG supplement, and inspired a ton of tabletop enthusiasts to follow suit.
Dragonlance is a fantasy world dominated by dragons, which may have played a large part in the setting’s success. Supposedly TSR – the game’s original publisher – felt it had the ‘Dungeons’ part of Dungeons and Dragons down, but at the time, DnD did not have enough dragons (now it’s another story, of course, and you need our DnD dragons guide to keep them all straight*).
Over the decades Dragonlance has appeared in numerous fantasy novels, with the most recent book published in 2008, and a new trilogy by the original authors slated for release in August 2022. As a D&D campaign setting, however, Dragonlance has dwindled, with no official content published for Dungeons and Dragons’ fourth or fifth editions. That could be about to change, however. Last year, Wizards said it planned to release content for two classic Dungeons and Dragons settings in 2022. It seems highly likely that Dragonlance could be one of the two.
This comes just as Jason Tondro, a new senior designer for D&D (who previously developed Starfinder for Paizo) dropped a hint about a possible relaunch of Spelljammer, another classic setting that you should keep a keen eye out for this year. There was also a Spelljammer Unearthed Arcana late last year, featuring a ton of races from the space fantasy setting. Could these be the two settings getting re-released by Wizards this year? We wouldn’t put money on it, but only because we’re not big gamblers. It seems pretty damn likely.
As for the actual contents of the Heroes of Krynn Unearthed Arcana, Kender appear much like Halflings, but with the magical ability to pull random knick knacks from thin air. Lunar Magic sorcerers, meanwhile, can summon ‘moon fire’ and cast different spells based on the phases of the moon.
If immense, uncontrollable magical power sounds like your idea of a good time, you may be in need of our Sorcerer class guide. Or if you like a more vanilla flavour of magic-user, check out guide to DnD’s Wizard class.
*Some even subscribe to the view that D&D has too many Dragons…
Source: Wargamer
