A to Z Challenge: Krynn (AD&D Games)

 I was never into paper Dungeons & Dragons (and still am not despite all of Michael Offutt's posts about it) but in the early 90s, my brother and I bought some of SSI's Dungeons & Dragons role-playing games.  I think one of the first we played was Champions of Krynn which was from the Dragonlance series.

Like with the physical D&D, you first have to make a party of characters.  There are a bunch of different races:  humans, elves, dwarves, and whatever.  And different classes:  knights, rangers, paladins, mages, clerics, and thieves mostly.  And then you got to make a blocky little character that could be male or female and different colored clothes, skin, hair, and weapons.

Then like probably a lot of the physical games, it starts at a tavern.  You meet Sir Karl, a knight of the realm or whatever.  And eventually you get started on an adventure that takes you around the world of Krynn.  You traverse dungeons and castles and keeps and all that stuff.  Ultimately you go to the flying castle thing on the cover.  Along the way you have to fight parties of bad guys, which gives you better equipment and experience so you can level up.

RIP Squirrel

It was a pretty fun game but to really find your way around it helps to have the "clue book" that was probably $20 or so back then at Waldenbooks or Electronics Boutique.  When I replayed the game a year or so ago after getting it from GOG.com, I found the clue book online in a PDF.  I also needed to get the journal in a PDF and print it out because to log in it would ask you for a word from the journal like, "Page 13, Paragraph 6, Word 1" and then you type the word.  That was I guess to make it harder for people to copy the game's disks to let someone else play because back then it'd be hard to copy the manual unless you had some money--and why not just buy the game yourself then?  It was kinda the early form of trying to stop people from sharing passwords!

The sequel to Champions was Death Knights of Krynn.  It wasn't as good of a game or as deep either.  Basically, Sir Karl, who died in the previous game, is a zombie and he and other zombies or whatever the game calls them are up to no good so you have to stop him.

The annoying thing when I tried to play it a year or so ago was that you can't transfer your team from the previous game like you could with the original disks.  The best you could do was modify a premade team but they wouldn't have the items and skills the same as the end of the previous game.

The final part of this trilogy is The Dark Queen of Krynn.  This one had upgraded graphics and a little different game play.  Unfortunately I still couldn't import my team from any previous games.  What I remember of the original was it had a better story than the second one with more depth and breadth.  

Besides the Krynn series they made a couple of other series.  The first one they made in the late 80s was called Pool of Radiance.  I think at some point we got that one and played it.  Since it was older, it wasn't quite as good as the Krynn ones because it didn't have as good of graphics or as many features.  They made a few sequels to those "Forgotten Realms" ones:  Secret of the Silver Blades, Curse of the Azure Bonds, and Pools of Darkness.

Another newer series was Gateway to the Savage Frontier and its sequel Treasures of the Savage Frontier.  I think those were newer than the first couple of Krynn ones so they had better graphics and features.

The last series they made was the "Dark Sun" series:  Shattered Lands and Wake of the Ravager.  Those had better graphics and some different gameplay.  While they were D&D games I think they were in more of a different world, one where it was largely desert.

They also made a Buck Rogers game that was more based on the comics and stuff than the 70s TV series.  That was a pretty fun game as it had a lot of the same gameplay only with spaceships and lasers and stuff.  That one wasn't in the bundle I got from Gog.com.

I liked those games for the most part.  Though I had some ideas how to make them better and sent the company some annoying letters, though by now I forget about what.  It was like 30 years ago.