Morten Brattbakk wrote:
> I don't know much about it, but at the end of the post I'm replying
> to now, you seem very bitter that most of the features are gone.
Yes, I am. Mostly because I've been told repeatedly "No, we're not just
throwing them out because we dislike them", when it's been exactly that.
Not to mention the impression by many that because the 4th Age was
"blown up", it's all fine and dandy to 'return the favor' to the 5th Age.
> You seem to
have an unfinished thought here. :)
> Actually, I do seem to recall that Sylvan Veil and Rise of the Titans
> were published in a series, and both of them had concepts/ideas from
> W&H and were intended as set-up for WoS.
Neither were explicitly stated to be setting up WoS. And even then, RotT
had no effect on WoS and Sylvan Veil was rendered useless to the
future by WoS.
> There is one question I have asked you, and other 5A fans, but never
> have gotten an answer to: You seem bitter and angry about the fate of
> the 5th Age, and that most of the elements were removed. In fact you
> seem to imply that it is morally wrong.
Morally wrong? I don't think I would go that far. But this is the same
setting involved with the Lord Soth fiasco, so I suppose I would say
that you can't discount anything.
> What is there, beyond your personal preferences, that makes the 4A
> elements removed by the 5A OK, while 5A elements removed by WoS just
> wrong, immoral?
Dragonlance is supposed to be about dragons, and as I said, the
Overlords were a great concept, badly executed. So, I'm not going to
scream bloody murder about the fact that they attempted to make dragons
completely relevant to the setting again, rather than just a monster to
kill at the end of the dungeon.
That relevance included changes to show how powerful these guys were;
how much of an effect they would have upon the world. I don't have a
problem with that.
When you get down to it, Weis and Hickman gave us a great world, but
DoSF was all about destruction. WoS was all about destruction.
And yet everybody complains about the destruction wrought by those not
named Weis and Hickman.
> (Especially considering that without WoS, thre would've been no more
> DL due to lack of sales.)
The announcement alone of WoS killed SAGA, regardless of sales, so, I
don't think we should jump to that conclusion.
It also killed any chance of the SAGA team cleaning up any of the mess
they helped create, which I've read that they did have some plans to
deal with.
> And one follow-up comment: As bitter as you seem about the demise of
> 5A, you really should understand the bitterness 4A fans felt about the
> 5A.
I was there, too. I understand both sides, and, unlike many, I am a fan
of both sides.
But the HotL long outlived their usefulness in terms of advancing the
setting, and nothing else was advancing the setting either. In the end,
DoSF opened new doors, and when somebody went and walked through those
doors, they were basically thrown back out and told that they wasted
their time getting there. That's the impression I get from all of this.
The 5th Age did not come along completely at the expense of the 4th Age.
Now the 4th Age lives again and we're supposed to forget the 5th Age
ever happened, since every effort has been made to remove or ignore said
elements. Tossing the 5th Age out has been just as contemptible as the
mistakes made during and post-DoSF.
In the end, WotC certainly shares some of the blame. They've wasted so
much time and resources on HotL rehash after HotL-relation rehash, it's
not even funny.
And this doesn't even begin to describe some of the other stuff, like
the Chaos War books, where shadow wights seemed to have wiped out half
the population of Ansalon, or great story threads, like Severus
Stonehand, to this day have been ignored.
Craig J. Ries
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