A Dragonlance classic - flawed but iconic

The second of the original Dragonlance modules covers the journey from Xak Tsaroth to Pax Tharkas, via the elven homeland of Qualinesti. This is the material covered in the second half of the first Dragonlance novel, "Dragons of Autumn Twilight".

It's hard to not love this in principle if you're at all a fan of Dragonlance. The encounters covered here are iconic, and filled with well-remembered characters like Gilthanas, Laurana, Elistan, Verminaard and more. I'm not a fan of Douglas Niles as an author of novels, but his writing here is evocative and well structured, both in terms of the "boxed text" and the general pacing of events and discoveries. The fortress of Pax Tharkas looks like a confusing mess on a map, but when your players actually get down to playing it, it has a very natural flow, while still offering a lot of options for meaningful player creativity (which is somewhat uncommon among Dragonlance dungeons).

On top of that, there's a real passion for the world and the story. Once again, the module contains sheet music for a song (although my musical friends suggest the notation is somewhat non-standard), and the art and cartography throughout are first-rate (albeit in black and white).

Still, it's a product with sizeable flaws. Infamously, the first half of the module is a railroad, with players shuffled from event to event and asked to listen to long expository monologues. The second half is a dungeon crawl, which fares better, although there's still a large number of rooms that might leave a DM asking, "Why did they even bother to include this?" Most runnings of it will end with the unfortunate D&D trope of two NPCs fighting while players watch, although it's mitigated somewhat by opportunities for players to run that fight themselves either in this module, or in either of the next two.

The Dragonlance addiction to NPCs grows here. On top of a huge roster of actual PCs (which the module once again asks you to draw from its pre-created characters rather than build your own), AND a potential retinue of hirelings and friends acquired in the last module, Dragons of Flame expands out the party's entourage with a significant number of new characters, all of whom it warns you are important to the story later and who therefore need to (a) follow the party constantly and (b) absolutely not die. Significant DM intervention is required to stop them stealing the show, trivialising battle, or turning combats into exercises in small-scale miniature warfare.

Despite all that, this is the Dragonlance that fans love, that built the brand, and if you've got any passion for that world it's difficult to not embrace this module, faults and all.

On DriveThruRPG's version: DriveThruRPG's version is NOT quite as good as the original product, but is generally acceptable. It's based on a fairly lazy low resolution scan of the original module, with some vertical tilt issues. The original text has been deleted and re-entered so as to make it text-searchable - which is nice - and an attempt has been made to match the original fonts and sizes in that process. Do keep an eye out - I've not done a full compare with the original module, but this text conversion process has sometimes resulted in missing text in other DriveThru modules from this era. The maps that originally appeared on the inside cover of the module are included in the PDF in their original aspect ratios and colours without being chopped up, which is great (although it probably would have been nice to have them as separate files to aid printing).