Adventure Introduction The Cataclysm & The War of the Lance The current year for our Dragonlance campaign is set during 351 AC "After Cataclysm". Inspired By Trampas Whiteman

A shadow has fallen across the world of Krynn, a long-lingering twilight that stretches into its third century. It is the Age of Despair, and a deep sense of wrongness poisons the air, a malaise of the soul that seeps into the very soil. This is the legacy of the Cataclysm, the day the gods turned their backs on the world.

Over three hundred years ago, the Kingpriest of Istar, in his boundless arrogance, demanded the power of the gods to purge the world of all things evil—and all who disagreed with his rigid, self-serving piety. Warnings were sent, omens of divine displeasure, but the Kingpriest saw them not as warnings, but as attacks from the very darkness he sought to vanquish. So, the gods responded. A fiery mountain was hurled from the sky, a meteor of divine wrath that consumed Istar and tore the continent of Ansalon asunder. In its place now lies the Blood Sea, a perpetually churning maelstrom, a wound on the world that bleeds scarlet and never heals. The reverberations of that day still ripple across the land, a bitter aftertaste in everyone's mouth.

In the years that followed, the gods fell silent. Hope, once a tangible force, became a fable told to children. The holy cities were drowned, the great empires shattered, and the Knights of Solamnia, once a beacon of honor, fell into disrepute. Into this spiritual void stepped the Seekers, a false religion built on greed and opportunism, claiming to find new gods, but offering only hollow platitudes.

Now, whispers creep through the darkened taverns and across the cracked plains, whispers of war brewing in the east. An army unlike any seen since the last age is said to be on the march, led by cruel warlords and their fanatical followers. But the most chilling stories speak of another presence, a terror long thought to be myth: dragons.

These aren't the wise, benevolent creatures of old, but the chromatic fiends of darkness, with their scaled masters astride them, eager to claim the world for their forgotten, "Queen of Darkness—Takhisis".

Ansalon is now a patchwork of isolated communities and mistrustful survivors. In the Plains of Abanasinia, where the land once flowed verdant and fertile, the Cataclysm shifted coastlines and altered the climate. The nomadic tribes, ever resilient, turned to ancestral worship and totems to fill the void left by the absent gods. Towns like Solace cling to survival, rebuilt in the sturdy branches of vallenwood trees, a defiant symbol against the encroaching darkness.

Fear and uncertainty permeate daily life. The cheerful tavern gossip is replaced with hushed, anxious talk of the coming war and the sinister tidings arriving on every passing merchant's tongue. The simple farmer double-checks the lock on his door, fearing not only brigands but a deeper, more profound malevolence. Even the jovial kender, usually immune to the world's sorrows, have had their wanderlust tempered by a newfound caution. The end of summer, once a time of harvest celebrations, now carries a grim premonition of the winter that will be remembered in sorrow.

Our story, however, begins along a dusty, roughly maintained stretch of road that leads north out of the city of New Ports. The chill of dawn's last moments clings to the air. To the south, the path winds away, back towards the trouble and the triumphs that brought our companions together. But now, their faces are turned north, toward the homeland they haven't seen in too long, Ravenvale. The road ahead is long, but the promise of home, of familiar hearths and faces, pulls at their weary hearts.

As the sun peeks over the horizon, it paints the world in strokes of soft gold and rose. The dew on the tall grasses shimmers like a thousand tiny diamonds, and a gentle mist rises from the wooded riverbed to their west. A cool, crisp breeze stirs from the north, carrying the clean, earthy scent of pine and damp soil. The distant call of a hunting hawk echoes in the open air, a lonesome counterpoint to the rustling of leaves and the creak of your bedrolls.

It is a morning of quiet hope and weary determination, with the road ahead of you holding its own mysteries and promises. The companions weary bones ache for a warm fire, a full belly, and the simple rest that comes after a job well done. The journey back is a quiet one, filled with the promise of respite. But a promise, like hope itself, is a fragile thing in these dark times . . .