Warning: D&D’s new Dragonlance campaign is a tough one for DMs

Dragonlance – Shadow of the Dragon Queen is the latest campaign for Dungeons & Dragons. Your digital copy will be available tomorrow if you have pre-ordered from Wizards of the Coast. It’s a historic moment — the first time that a D&D campaign has offered digital early access to its biggest fans. Polygon received a copy earlier in the month and put it through its paces with an experienced team. We’re still working our way through the material, but we wanted to give you a heads up on a few pain points that cropped up early on.

Prepare for Dungeon Masters

While some past adventures — Curse Of Strahd, Out of The Abyss, The Wild Beyond the Witchlight — are over 250 pages long, Shadow of the Dragon QueenIt measures in at just 224 pages. This makes it a bit shorter than official campaign books. But that’s not a ding against it by any means, considering that the range of levels it covers — from 1 to 11 — is pretty average. But know that things move fast out of the gate: If you don’t pull your punches as indicated in the text, Shadow of the Dragon Queen Before you make it to your first settlement, things can quickly turn deadly.

Image by Ralph Horsley/Wizards of the Coast

You don’t want to leave the first act without reaching level 4, that’s for sure. But feel free to linger in those early levels, especially within the three “preludes” that proceed the actual first chapter of the adventure. They are listed as optional, but all three contain good backstory — especially for the setting’s unique organizations like the Mages of High Sorcery. You can find out more about that here. Shadow of the Dragon QueenCharacter advancement is done using milestones and not raw experience points. Once the players trigger a certain event in the storyline, they gain a level, which is great — no accounting to be done, and everyone stays at the same ability level.

However, these moments can be easy to miss — especially the early notification to move players on to level 2, which is somewhat hidden on the bottom of a two-page art spread. Dungeon Masters will want to make sure that they scan the book ahead of time and carefully make note of every opportunity to gain a level so players aren’t unprepared when they face a big foe. A highlighter is arguably the most useful accessory you can buy for a DM.

Leveling up can be a time-consuming process in D&D, especially for inexperienced players. Your players should bring a plan for getting their character from level 1 up to level 3. If you’re providing pre-generated characters, all that work will instead fall to you.

The board game

This is the big deal Shadow of the Dragon QueenThe best part about it is the companion board game “The Board Game” Dragonlance: Warriors Of Krynn. The majority of people should start receiving the boards game around December 6. If you’re getting the campaign on Nov. 22, that could create some lag time between when your group gets started with the RPG portion of the campaign and when you’re first able to transition into the board game. DMs, factor in that you’ll need two or three sessions of the RPG — about six to eight hours of play — before you get anywhere near the board game. So again, go slow and build the tension leading up to that first big battle — especially if you’re using Warriors of Krynn.

Image: Wizards of the Coast

Unfortunately, this isn’t your typical board game. It’s not even your average wargame. I found the manual very, very difficult to digest — and I read a lot of board game manuals. Worse still, the graphic design of the manual is such that you can’t perfectly understand how to set up the table or use all of the components without laying everything out in front of you. You should expect to run at least one demo game before the remainder of the group moves on to the part with the boardgames.

Couldn’t you just hand over the board game to one of the players and let them sort it out, leaving you to run the campaign? I wouldn’t recommend it. The punchboard on top of the cardboard box’s stack will ruin a portion of the RPG. The box also contains narrative elements which relate to RPG. While they’re a bit garbled and out of order, they’re written in the back of the rulebook rather than inside the scenario book. That means if you hand one of your players the rules to get acclimated, you’ve also handed them some secrets of the story that you’re trying to tell.

The Dungeon Master has a lot of things on his plate. They’re teachers, storytellers, rule lawyers, and babysitters all at the same time. The new Dragonlance campaign is more complex than ever. If you’re new to the game or working with a group that has a bunch of newbie players, you should, at the very least, consider holding off on using the board game at first. Without the campaign book, you can’t move the story along.

Be patient. The narrative is the most important thing. Get everyone to understand the rules and how they work. Leveling is the key. You should make connections with all the non-player characters you meet early. Once you’re both ready, you can then dip in to the board game with the rest of the group.