We’re at a nice natural break in Dragons of Autumn Twilight; a good time for one of our Guest Highlords to leap in and tell us what’s what.
This month, we’re visited by Anne C Perry, Editor at Hodder & Stoughton and the devious editorial mind supporting fantasy authors like Nnedi Okorafor, Lavie Tidhar and Rebecca Levene. Which goes to show that a youth reading about dragons and rolling dice wasn’t wasting time as much as ‘career planning’.
Dragonlance hit my cultural awareness at about the same time Dungeons & Dragons did, and in the same way: I was 13, and boys I was friends with at school loved both. They played D&D together, they read Dragonlance novels, they copied the cover art and submitted it to school-wide art competitions, and they talked about it. They talked about it a lot.
I’d read my Tolkien and my Howard—and anything else I could get my hands on, so long as it featured dragons, dudes with big swords, violence or (preferably) all three. I’d been given a Dragonlance calendar several years earlier, and cut all the pages out to decorate with. I talked about dragons, dreamed about dragons, and doodled dragons in the margins of my school assignments. I was, as far as I could tell, primed to participate in the mysterious world of fantasy role-playing and extensive shared-universe reading.
But, as a girl—even a reasonably cool girl, according to various complicated 13-year-old boy metrics—this was male territory and I was not allowed in. The exclusion rankled, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. They wouldn’t lend me their Dragonlance novels, the local library didn’t have any in circulation, and I didn’t have anyone else to teach me how to play D&D.
It wasn’t much later that we all started high school and got distracted by other, less dragon-oriented pastimes. Between school and homework and band and track and, well, other ways to relate to each other, Dragonlance and D&D didn’t take so much as a back seat as much as they fell totally off the face of the earth.
And yet, I never really lost my interest in dragons. So when the opportunity to finally—finally!—learn how to play D&D presented itself, I went in with very good will, and discovered that I liked it quite a lot. Then I found a copy of the first Dragonlance novels, bound together in a single anthology, and was finally able to scratch that itch. I even sat through the Dragonlance animated film. And the D&D film.
And then: jackpot. Twenty years after I’d first learned about Dragonlance I finally, finally got to discover the thing that started it all: I got to play the Dragonlance roleplaying game. I’ve experienced total party kills. I’ve DM’d sessions where one PC died and was reanimated in the same body as another PC. I’ve blown off my own hand when I failed a safety roll, then blown off my other hand out of sheer cussedness. I’ve made a Flumph out of glow-in-the-dark Fimo. And yet. And yet.
Playing the Dragonlance RPG was, absolutely bar none, the greatest role-playing experience of my entire life.
There are any number of reasons for this ur-session. It was fun: just our regular D&D group, gathered together for a single day to play a single game to celebrate a party member’s birthday. It was a total one-off, so the stakes were minimal. No one cared whether they lived or died, so we all made stupid, hilarious decisions. A few of us hadn’t read any Dragonlance novels and so weren’t steeped in the series’ rich mythology; we only had our DM’s notes to guide our characters’ decisions. And we had chilli and beer, which are always conducive to a great session.
I played Tasslehoff Burrfoot, because he’s short and energetic and impulsive, characteristics which are also occasionally ascribed to me. And I played him hard. Turns out, his character was created with a weirdly specific talent: the ability to pick pockets really well. So I picked the hell out of everyone’s pockets, at every opportunity. Did it add anything to the story? Did my character grow, change, evolve, become a better person? Not remotely. But I did piss off Raistlin when I stole his pocket handkerchief and dropped it in a river, so that was fun. I may also have irritated the DM by interrupting the adventure once in a while to pick pockets, but he got over it.
The greatest thing about our Dragonlance RPG session, however, was this: even though fully half the party had never read the books and had no idea what happens in Dragons of Autumn Twilight, the basis of the game, we fell immediately into character and followed the plot entirely without meaning to. We even made the same stupid mistakes the characters make in the book—we walked straight into a Draconian ambush, because we’re idiots.
Perhaps this happened because our DM did a good job directing us. Perhaps it’s because there weren’t really that many options for us to explore; we had a journey to make and a goal to achieve, and we did it. Perhaps it’s because the tropes themselves were easy to fall into, the characters easy to inhabit, the world easy to understand. Perhaps it was the circumstances surrounding the game: the low stakes, the sense of fun. Perhaps it was the beer. Very likely it was a combination of all of the above.
I’m not sorry that I missed out on Dragonlance and D&D when I was 13; if I’d been more familiar with the series, I wouldn’t have had the same brilliant experience that sunny April afternoon that I did. And I still kind of miss that old Dragonlance calendar…
Anne Perry is an editor at Hodder & Stoughton. She spends much of her free time thinking about monster movies. Follow her on Twitter @TheFingersOfGod.
Guys not wanting to let girls read the Dragonlance novels? Were they insane? I’d have loved to have loaned a girl my novels at that age, just none asked (I’d not be at all surprised now to find out there were some interested, but I had no idea at the time).
For that matter, I probably would have loaned them to anybody expressing an interest… in fact, as it turns out, the only person I DID loan them to (aside from friends who already were into that and just needed one of the ancillary books that I had gotten and they hadn’t) was the guy I hated most at my Jr. High (sort of the cool kid/mild bully), because he suddenly needed a book to be reading during one of our English class reading units and didn’t have anything… and of course, I never got it back (nor really interacted with him one way or the other much of the rest of the time we were in school together… maybe he felt guilty or at least somewhat positively disposed towards me since I helped and decided not to bother me).
Anyway, oddly enough, although we did play D&D a lot in my circle (circles, actually, as I somehow had a couple different circles who I gamed with, my school friends, and, occasionally, my older brother’s friends), we only rarely played Dragonlance, and never the modules (because we never managed to get a complete set and something about starting on #3 offended our sensibilities), mostly we created our own homebrew settings (which, true, borrowed liberally) and played there.
I do remember though that a couple of the times we played in the setting, I was also a kender who annoyed everybody. It suddenly comes back to me, I had a character named… I can’t remember the first name (Colin, maybe?), but the last name was Trapspringer, and one of my big ideas for him was that while almost all Kender claimed Uncle Trapspringer as their uncle, Colin believed that it was actually his father (who he never knew, but he believed his mom when she told him) and was always trying to find him.
I am roughly the same age, and we regularly allowed girls into our group.
However, as the first poster said, we almost never played the DragonLance modules. These modules were really designed to be played with the pre-generated characters. They do not work very well with custom characters. They also feature heavy rail-roading to make sure that your actions are in line with the book plot.
Ironically, this choice of module design made the girls in our group hate them. They were very much into interactive storytelling (over combat) and they felt that these modules actively discouraged that.
Compare the DragonLance modules to Ravenloft (by one of the same authors), and see how the latter is a much better approach at interactive storytelling.
The Dragonlance animated movie and the D&D movie? I’m sorry; I’m so very, very sorry.
(Although the Dragonlance movie did have a pretty decent soundtrack.)
I’m kinda sad to see the first statements to Anne’s story of systemic exclusion be ones that question that reality. Yeah, I do not doubt that you all invited girls to participate. I’m certain the guys that excluded women like Anne and I invited some girls. Keyword there is some. You forget though that we are 50% of the freaking population. Even if every group of 5-8 geek guys invited 1 or 2 girls into their group, that still left a lot of us out. Being excluded by our own kind, many of us even take the chance at getting people who aren’t geeks like into the things we like, with typically disastrous results. Yet the worst bullying I ever experience as a child, didn’t come from the brutish jock boys who could at least appreciate my boobs, but from the nerdy geeky guys who deep down suspected that not only was I their equal, in some ways I was their superior, and were terrified by it.
In other words, WORD, Anne.
They were very much into interactive storytelling (over combat)
More proof, IMO, that you were playing with the wrong girls. I enjoy the storytelling part, don’t get me wrong, that’s where the laughs are, but combat, testing the efficiency of your character build against the scenario concocted by the DM, THAT’S where I’m at.
This was the group we played with. I am not the one trying to pick a fight here.
I’m sorry I seemed to be questioning her experiences… I’m not, honestly. I assumed it really did happen. My comic disbelief that anybody WOULD does not actually translate into a disbelief that anybody DID (there’s so many things in this world where I have to maintain that dissonance)… it just seemed to be a good way to jump into talking about my own experiences. But I do realize, in retrospect, that it seems dismissive and I apologize.
And, for the record, I never to my knowledge, actually invited girls, even when there were natural opportunities (I recall a period during recess where I actually played, almost exclusively, with a group of girls, but also, my brother occasionally would do a D&D-related thing and whenever that happened, it was always, “Okay, see you guys later, I’m gonna go play D&D now.” without a thought towards inviting them. There was, at the time, a blindness to the possibility a girl in my peer group might be interested, and certainly my bad on that (though again, I never invited guys to play either, unless they were already seemingly a part of our circle and into geekish things, something unfortunately no girl I knew in person managed… although, I’m sure I did play online with several on local BBSes). It’s possible I also discouraged without really being aware of it, with something along the lines of “oh, you wouldn’t be interested in that” to somebody asking what we were talking about, not being I had a problem with girls in the hobby but because I didn’t want to face embarrassment I expected would almost certainly be coming if I explained that I played make believe games about fighting dragons.
So I don’t doubt there was systemic exclusion, both of the accidental and the deliberate kind… I just don’t understand it.
My favorite parts of Dragonlance is when you can see the bones of an RPG session sticking out of the meat. “Hey, everybody, let’s go mess around in this haunted ruined city…so I can get a new spellbook!” & “guy with a gem in his chest that is obviously important to the DM’s plot? Ignore him!” The frustrating genius of PCs…
What happened to the posts?