The new Dungeons and Dragons “battle” game was announced at D&D Direct on Thursday. It is a fully-fledged, board-based game that Wizards of the Coast says will also include miniatures. Titled Dragonlance: Warriors of Krynn, the board game will function as a standalone experience. But it is also fully integrated into the companion tabletop RPG campaign, titled Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen. Who were the designers of this project? Rob Daviau and Stephen Baker are the only two designers. It’s hard to imagine a more perfect pair for this project.
Wizards also announced a new Spelljammer setting on Thursday, however these Dragonlance products will be very different in tone and feel.
“We focus on the idea that Dragonlance can be described as a war story,” stated Ray Winninger of Wizards’ D&D department. The backdrop for Classic Dragonlance’s history is this huge conflict. These massive military battles form an integral part of Dragonlance. One of the original 12 Dragonlance modules [published by TSR] was a wargame [called Dragons of Glory]. They asked you to stop your role-playing game experience and start playing a wargame for a bit.”
Winninger continued:
In the spirit of that, at the same time we are releasing Shadow of the Dragon Queen, which is the role-playing experience, we are releasing this battle game. [It] allows you to play out sort of massive military battles in the world of Krynn. But one of the interesting things about that game is that it has a lot of narrative elements, just like a role-playing game. It’s a board game, but you’re asked to narrate what’s happening and whatnot. If you choose, while you’re playing the role-playing campaign when major sort of battles break out in the story you can break out the board game and start playing the board game. Your characters from the RPG import into the board game. You keep playing your characters in the board game, and you can learn what amazing, incredible, heroic things they do in these battles. But that experience is entirely optional.
The tabletop role-playing game is completely optional. Winninger will also be added to the board game, as the campaign book includes rules for solving the same battles. Vice versa, players can pick up the board game without diving into the larger role-playing experience. But this is the first time that Wizards is directly integrating its 5th edition TTRPG products and its board game products in this very specific way.
Why are Baker and Daviau such great designers? Well, both have had a lot of experience working in the genre of wargames. For example, they share great design credits for the Risk franchise. Baker, on the other hand, is the designer behind Battle Masters, a sprawling tabletop wargame using 28 mm miniatures and a massive plastic playmat. Daviau is, of course, the inventor of the Legacy System. This system creates new board games every time they are played.
But, Daviau also co-founded Restoration Games. This company specializes in the resurrecting of older games and giving them new lives. Expect him to go back to the original source material to bring forward as much of that excellent TSR design work as possible.
But, why didn’t Hasbro simply assign its hobby board game division, Avalon Hill with this project?
“Avalon Hill was in-house with Wizards of the Coast […] until very recently,” said Winninger. However, the studio has created its own design and production department outside of Wizards. That team has been busy bringing the reboot of HeroQuest to life, and on a spiritual successor to the original Risk Legacy. That left Wizards in need of some outside help.
“Avalon Hill and Hasbro were not really involved in the creation of the board game,” Winninger continued. “We in the D&D studio oversaw the creation of it, but that said the designers of the board game Rob Daviau and Stephen Baker are very well-known board game designers, [they] have worked on a lot of games for Hasbro — most recently, [Return to Dark Tower] was one of their efforts.”
Both Shadow of the Dragon Queen and the Warriors of Krynn board game represent a “whole new story” Winninger said. Also, the events portrayed in both products do take place around the same time as the original Dragonlance novels, a beloved and best-selling series by Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis. He added that Tracy Hickman and Laura, who created Dragonlance, were not directly involved with any products.
A new series of novels by Tracy Hickman & Weis is out in August. It will continue the Dragonlance timeline into future.
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