Senior Game Designer Wes Schneider said at a recent press conference regarding its return to "Dungeons & Dragons" that Dragonlance is "the very setting of D&D's war. While the Dragonlance story has varied throughout the stage's history, the fifth edition focuses on its most iconic conflict, the War of the Lance." [From the mid-1980s through the 1990s, Dragonlance became popular as the central setting for Dungeons & Dragons, thanks to a best-selling series of novels that emphasized the epic, Tolkienesque aspects of D&D and included fights and romance. Its heroes, the Heroes of the Lance, were a cross between the Lord of the Rings and the X-Men.

The first truly multimedia D&D setting, Dragonlance was adapted for several gold-box CRPGs and a less well-made animated film starring Kiefer Sutherland and Lucy Lawless. The legal disagreement between Wizards of the Coast, Inc. and the creators of Dragonlance has been resolved, and the game will be revived on December 6 in the form of a D&D adventure called Shadow of the Dragon Queen and a board game called Warriors of Kling.

Shadow of the Dragon Queen has rules for playing kender and a new background covering Knights of Solamnia and High Sorcery mages. You can take on the role of someone like Taslehoff, Sturm, or Raistlin, but the idea is to play a new character who experiences the War of the Lance from a fresh perspective, unlike the original adventure, which was designed with a common protagonist in mind with the book. The adventure begins in the peaceful town of Vogler in eastern Solamnia, with a somber introduction involving a fishing tournament, but it is not long before the war begins and you get to help organize a defensive battle.

This is where the board game comes in: you can shift play to Warriors of Krynn, run through scenarios representing the ongoing battles in the adventure, and then return to the RPG. Wizards of the Coast explains that this is only an option and that it is possible to play both the adventure and the board game independently. Nevertheless, it is certainly tempting to tie the two together. From Weathertop to the Battle of Pelennor Field, every role-player would love to play a campaign that scales up from a small battle to a full-scale war at least once. The problem is that combat rules designed for four to six heroes can be slow-moving when applied to an entire army. Under normal circumstances, one might switch to a wargame ruleset such as Warhammer or Chainmail, or to the official hexgrid wargame rules from the 1986 Dragonlance supplement "Dragons of Glory" published for Dragonlance. [But "Warriors of Krynn" is not a wargame, but, as Schneider puts it, "a strategy game with D&D at its core. While tokens representing units line up facing each other, heroes move dynamically across tiles that represent not only the battlefield but also their immediate surroundings. They may return to the command tent to call for reinforcements, boost the morale of an upset NPC, or stop by a tomb to find a useful magic item.

The rules were designed by Rob Daviau, codesigner of Risk Legacy and creator of the entire concept of the Legacy game, and Steven Baker, designer of Hero Quest, Battle Masters, and Risk: Lord of the Rings. We are inspired by role-playing games. My code designer, Steve Baker, has played and designed many tabletop miniatures games, so we draw inspiration from both. And it's all about keeping table space down.

Player characters are transferred to this more abstracted board game by cards representing each of the three levels of classes: recruit, veteran, and legendary. Those cards indicate which abilities are important to that class and what special powers they have. For example, the ranger's "grab the vine" can be used against enemies on the wilderness tile. Heroes bounce around on the board rather than plunging into melee and staying there, which is easy to imagine as in a fictional fantasy battle. One moment he might be leading a sortie to see off artillery, the next he might be preventing an assassin from attacking his commander.

As someone who found the Dragonlance books a bit too pieced together and gimmicky in their deviations from the generality of the setting (such as using steel instead of gold for currency), Warriors of Krynn feels like it gives Dragonlance a reason to exist again. While other stages like Eberron deal with postwar developments, rewinding the hands of the Dragonlance clock back to the beginning of the War of the Lance fills a niche that other stages have avoided.

Furthermore, I am more interested in a new board game co-developed by the people behind the excellent "Betrayal Legacy" and the nostalgic "HeroQuest" than what I had hoped for in "Warriors of Krynn."

In fact, "Warriors of Krynn" doesn't even use D20. Its roots are in D&D. It started out as a 20-sider and some D&D stuff, and while it has some D&D in common, it's not a legacy game either." There is a certain amount of progression and permanence, with evaluation cards acquired in one scenario carrying over to the next, and packs of new cards that can only be opened once the appropriate tier is reached.

Inspiration was actually in another direction, Daviau said. The Legacy Game is heavily inspired by D&D. If you've killed a monster, you're still dead, and if you have an item, it's still there."

The game is also inspired by D&D.

Shadow of the Dragon Queen and Warriors of Krynn will be available individually or in bundles starting December 6; starting November 22, a version of the adventure with early access to the digital version will be available at D&D Beyond (opens in new tab) Pre-order (opens in new tab).