Dragonlance is a Dystopia | DragonLance Saga

Описание: Travel to any age on Krynn and you will find a dystopian landscape, which has always confused me when I hear people claim Dragonlance is a childrens setting or not interesting or challenging enough. If anything, Dragonlance is too challenging for most players!

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Transcript
Dystopia is defined as an imagined state or society in which there is great suffering or injustice, typically one that is totalitarian or post-apocalyptic—In other words… Dragonlance.
Intro
Welcome to another DragonLance Saga episode. My name is Adam and today we are going to talk about the bitter truth of the Dragonlance world of Krynn. I would like to take a moment and thank my collaborator patrons, the Heroes of the Lance, and invite you to consider becoming a patron or member of this channel by visiting the links in the description below. You can even pick up Dragonlance gaming materials using my affiliate link. This episode is informed by the novels and various sourcebooks, as well as my own experience playing the role playing setting throughout the years.
Discussion
When one thinks of Dragonlance, typically the first thing you think of is the War of the Lance, or the Heroes of the Lance. And though that entire war was told primarily from the heroes side, and focused on good overcoming evil, I believe seeing Dragonlance solely from that one event is burying the lead, so to speak. You can look at any point of Krynn’s history and find yourself mired in a dystopian landscape where any beacon of hope is at best buried in sorrow and fleeting.

The first expected reaction from this set up is logically, well isn’t every fantasy story like that? Didn’t they just copy The Lord of the Rings? I would argue that no, Dragonlance is a distinctly dystopian world, different from every other high fantasy setting. First the gods themselves are the ones meddling with the affairs of men. The Gods of evil are actively, not passively, but actively making war on the land. The Gods of Good are bolstering up heroes to battle the evil minions and ultimately, in the moment of need, they abandon them all because they weren’t worthy. Worse yet, they threw a mountain into the planet, changing the very face of Krynn, in all of it’s continents.

Again, you may say, but cataclysms happen in every fantasy world… right? Do they? Was it because of the machinations of the gods themselves meant to punish the people? And what about the collateral damage? We are brought into this world at nearly 350 years of plague, pestilence, famine and war which had killed millions in that time according to the Prologue in Dragons of the Hourglass Mage. After a couple generations, the memory of Dragons and the gods faded to myth. There wasn’t even healing! Magic was shunned at best or magic users were murdered at worst! The Knights of Solamnia, once seen as the protectors of the people, were hunted and thrown off their lands or murdered. And to think we lost our minds about toilet paper scarcity last year.

After the War of the Lance the citizens of the world had what, 30 years of reconstruction, fighting and struggle before, whoops, cataclysm number two in the form of Chaos itself! For some reason chaos was upset after having been imprisoned in the Graystone for well over 9000 years, who would have thought it? It takes the entire pantheon of deities and every fighting aged citizen of the world to stand up against him or risk oblivion. Chaos cuts a canyon through the Solamnic Plains, erupts the Lords of Doom, a trinity of volcanoes, calms the maelstrom in the Blood Sea and boils the ocean. Can you imagine being a farmer in this world? You know nothing but death, destruction and starvation. Looting and murder are tools of survival, not the actions of bad men. Game of thrones has nothing on Dragonlance!

If survival at this point was impossible, it was about to get even worse! Seriously. About a year later, after about 38 years of the return of healing, it’s gone again just like that (snap), but not just healing, all magic! A world that was based on the gods' engagement and gifts to the world is now absolutely over. Worse still, massive dragon overlords start appearing and actively terraform random regions of Krynn, enslaving and murdering its population. And seeming to have learned nothing the citizens of the world begin warring with each other anew, rather than fighting back! Individual families have no chance of peacefully existing and struggle under the weight of the power hungry dragon overlords who themselves are warring...