What went missing from the Steamwall

In the Dragonlance vision, a quest should feature gods and dragons. That is what the title promises us; not just on Ansalon, but in Taladas too. (The latter's box set was Time of the Dragon for heaven's sake.) Online you can find the Taladas literature as it now stands. There exist comics and books set in this the backstage continent. Today I'd riff on the DLA series of adventure modules.

Spoilers follow.

The players start in one of the more human-friendly corners of the continent, Southern Hosk. Given the three choices (humans are second-class in all three), Deborah Christian went with Highvale in the Minotaur League, adding a barony not yet in the inset map.

Someone is murdering dragons - good and evil, both. Over DLA1 Dragon Dawn, the player characters (PCs) must track the dragonslayers across the wilderlands. Over DLA2 Dragon Knight, which Rick Swan wrote, the PCs must infiltrate the slayers' ranks. (DLA3, also Swan, gets weird and I won't deal with it here.) In structure DLA1 is a linear adventure, and DLA2 opens into a sandbox.

Between the two modules, a good dungeon-master can extract local lore to run all manner of adventures. DLA1 gets you the Huldre homeland in the Deep Forest, expanded from The Guide Book p. 47. DLA2 will guide you to develop small towns with all their little idiosyncrasies - in the "southern Steamwall" badlands.

Earlier I was discussing the grand strategy which would blend superfluous lands into an epic. In DLA1-2 we find another feature of Taladas' lore as intrigues me - low level flaws.

Deborah Christian read in The Guide Book to Taladas p. 76 about Amracar of Kristophan. For context (p. 6) Erestem had released the evil dragons in 210 AC; the Oath binding the good dragons would take effect 287-292, and this chronicle stops at 352. Draconians - allegedly - first appear 342 AC. Amracar, 100 years ago, investigated the ruins in the bakali-occupied swamps. He was already aware of "dragonmen" distinct from them. The Guide Book cited Amracar to support him, particularly that it was lizardmen who built the ruins. It relayed with more skepticism Amracar's theory that the builders were not the same people as the bakali.

(Swan's DLA2 pp. 25-6 discusses Milo Brownbrun of Hurlock (p. 27), apparently the new Amracar of the Steamwall.)

Christian found p. 44 mention of one lizardman race who are not bakali: the hurdu. They went unmentioned pp. 79-83, as did the ogres. And they are evil. From that, and from what she read of the traag draconians in The Guide Book, she sketched out the vital statistics of both the hurdu and a new draconian type - the sesk - to have them live amongst each other. She even had some of each play the main villains of DLA1. Christian went on to make her hurdu a speaker of Thenolian, implying his home was close to that border, which would fall well within the southern edges of the DLA2 map. The box set map leaves little Steamwall south of that DLA2 inset before the range lowers out into the swamp, which as noted isn't hurdu but full bakali.

Christian did fine work collecting the lore scattered around The Guide Book, which was NOT all collected in one convenient spot. I was hoping that hurdu and sesk would feature in Rick Swan's sequel.

For all that I like about DLA2, it does not offer hurdu or sesk (or ogres). This represents a flaw in a dragon-themed adventure, besides the lack of communication between two authors on the same series.

WHY? 5/16 - Overall, the Southern Hosk is too narrow. Also, 'tis arguable that the Hurdu and Sesk belong to an earlier time.