The Piazza

Thanks. I've edited my post, to try to avoid further confusion.



I figured that was a way to allow a GM to drop a lot of facts from Greyhawk's past into Sharanger's backstory and use them as plot hooks. I also figures that she might know something about the deserted cities on Kule, Charnelhouse (in the Grinder), Gnibile (before its inhabitants were killed), the earlier history of Ginsel, Borka (when it was an intact world) and other things that might improve the history of the sphere.



I don't see any reason why a civilisation could not rise and fall several times over the centuries. Perhaps there is some sort of period in the past, that might be a logical peak for Blackmoor. All it really needs is a sea port or two.



It doesn't really tie things down for Paul, does it. Like a lot of SJ stuff, it is half facts.



I didn't notice this quote in your other thread. Do you need more info before you add it?

I wonder if there would be any more arch-liches in the ruins of the City of the Gods.



We know that the elves fought to keep the Netherese out of wildspace. Perhaps the Blackmoorian spacefarers were more acceptable. Have you got start and end years for the City of the Gods?



There are regions outside of the Flanaess that might have had spacefarers too. Perhaps the Kara-Tur civilisation could be lined up with a Greyhawk oriental civilisation, so that the early Oriental Adventures stories can be made to apply to both worlds.

Does this mean that the Mystaran Blackmoor and the Greyhawk Blackmoor both existed at different times? Could the Greyhawk version be a reconstruction of a lost city on the homeworld of a colony? Could the Egg of the Coot track down the colonists and launch an attack on the new city?



I agree with you. But Mystara's loss is Greyhawk's gain. Now we have a few bits of information to try to spin something out of.



The Happy Gauntlet is not from Mystara. Do you mean the ship from Expedition to Barrier Peaks? I can imagine that being a colony ship.



If things were different, I think we would have had something like that Mystoerth thing.

Paul. I'm currently reading Finder's Bane and it has strong ties to both Spelljammer and Planescape.

One of the characters is a spacefaring captain (who can fly). She is actually a really interesting character.

Another knows about the SJ universe, and how the god Bane would not be an important god outside Realmspace. (I notice that you mention that Bane is active on the Rock of Bral in your timeline.)

One of the groundling characters is trying to "bring back a dead god" and rituals that take a year to do this are mentioned (plus a way to bypass this). I think these rituals are the same rituals for bringing a new god into a sphere, mentioned in CGR1 Complete Spacefarer's Handbook.

There is also a spelljamming ship flying around the Dalelands. One character claims her god summoned the ship from wildspace. If this is true, then that makes the gods and SJ have a pretty strong connection.

I've not finished the book yet, so I don't want to discuss the plot, but there are several events here that should be mentioned in the timeline.

Anyone who likes Spelljammer novels should buy this book...but let Paul buy his copy first!

WGR2 Treasures of Greyhawk: Neogi Nest is an attempt to found a neogi colony close to the City of Greyhawk on Oerth.

I recall seeing someone tell you to buy WGR2 on Dragonsfoot. That is what made me buy it.

\

Sure, but in this case the City of the Gods culture was swallowed up by glaciers.



Nothing so precise. I have no idea when it began, though I wouldn't think it would have lasted for more than a few centuries.

In this thread (which began with the same research as my Piazza thread), Smillan places the fall of the City of the Gods culture at about -410 CY.

I have Finder's Bane already, I've read it a couple times. It's pretty good, IMO. I keep meaning to read the sequels but for some reason I was never able to find them. I plan to fix that.

I tried to use it for timeline hooks, but at the time, I could find nothing concerning a Planescape timeline, so though we know when the books occurs in the Realms, I didn't know when it occurs in Planescape.

Now that I know about thsi Factol clanader, I might be able to figure that out. The danger, of course, is that it likely won't match up with the other date hooks I've got. I mean, this synchornization stuff matters to me but not to any one at TSR or WotC or Hasbro. Still, need to figire it out an acocunt for it.

I found this in the X1 thread in the Greyhawk forum, and it is a strong possible timehook to use for Mystara. Though I'm seriously thinking of not linking Mystara and just including its space-oriented events in a timeline in an appendix with suggestions for possible linking points.

Planescape slots very neatly into the other worlds' timelines thanks to Die Vecna Die!, which fixes 591 CY with what would be the year 131 in Factol Hashkar's reign, if Factol Hashkar hadn't died in 130, during the Faction War. As it stands, 591 CY equals what Planewalker.com's 3e stuff calls year 1 of the Lady's Edict calendar.

I'm going to copy-paste what I wrote on the FR Wiki:



And, as it happens, this is exactly the same correspondence between FR and Greyhawk that you came up with in your own timeline.

As for Mystara, please ignore what I wrote about the Isle of Dread, since it has nothing to do with actual timeline correspondences. We can fit Mystara's relative timeline pretty closely, as discussed in this thread.



The Planewalker's Handbook, page 33, describes the Alphatian empire as "fallen." The Alphatian empire fell in 1010 AC, Mystaran time, and The Planewalker's Handbook takes place in the year 128 in Factol Hashkar's reign, given the publication date (The Factol's Manifesto was explicitly in 127, and Planescape sourcebooks advanced one year for every real year thereafter until the line ended in 1998; Die Vecna Die! doesn't follow this pattern, evidently taking place only the following year). This means that 128 Hashkar must be after 1010 AC in Mystara. As I said, I'd assume that 1014 AC = 128 Hashkar, but that falls just short of what I can prove (I can't prove that the Mystaran timeline kept advancing after the Poor Wizard Almanacs were cancelled). Still, it's correct within a few years. The Italian Mystara mailing list used 1010 AC = 127 Hashkar, which I think is at least a year off, since they failed to update the "current year" in The Planewalker's Handbook, and failed to at least account for Joshuan's Almanac being the most "current" Mystara product when The Planewalker's Handbook was published.

So I can say with a fair degree of certainty that either 1013 AC = 128 Hashkar (if Mystara's time stopped when the Almanacs stopped being published) or 1014 = 128 Hashkar (if the advancement of the Planescape calendar coincided with the advancement of the calendar on other worlds, as I think is likely).

It should be noted that correspondence between the publishing date and in-world date in Planescape products isn't stated explicitly anywhere, as far as I know, but if you read the Planescape adventures I think it's clear.

I'm frankly shocked! Though the FR = GH correspondance is the most firm, I think, in my old timeline.



That's pretty convincing, and I would go with the 1014 = 128 formulation, I think.

Man, you have saved me a great deal of time and effort. And I must say, damn good research!



I used a similar concept long, long ago on my Kara-tur timeline. It got accept so thoroughly that WotC used it themselves, and i never really got credited for it. (I've always slightly resented the GHotRs as a result...).

ANyone recall what year the whole 5th Age stuff kicked off? I think I'll need to include the year Krynn disappears - or not, dependiong on how the GM wants to handle it.

That's the thing with my timeline, I want to bring it more inline with my sphere guide as a resource for GMs where I make as few decisions as possible. I just provide GMs with a timeline with link points and notes on the issues so they can build their own campaign timelines.

One reason I'm revising it is that I need a reasonably detailed history of Bralsapce for the Sun King storyline my players are currently engaged in.

I was writing about the time line in the 3e Dragonlance Campaign Setting hardback a few years back and a few fans warned me that there are continuity problems with it.

There used to be a fan timeline on the net (Wikipedia perhaps) but someone got it taken down.

Dragonhelm should be able to help.

IIRC, the world vanishes first and then the moons vanish afterwards...

...although some fans may wish to just make the world come back.



Do you think you will have a second Jammers timeline that takes this one and adds in other events?

I have no idea what the continuity problems might be (aren't there always continuity problems?) but the 3e hardback has:

383 AC (0 SC) - The Summer of Chaos. The Second Cataclysm. Krynn is pulled through the Gate of Souls into another crystal sphere.
419 AC (38 SC) - Takhisis is unveiled, the Krynnish gods rediscover and return to their missing world.
420 AC (39 SC) - The present day in the 3e Dragonlance campaign setting.

Not sure I understand. I'm revising my 'official' SJ timeline, which will just have official events, with citations. I'm also doing a timeline for Bralspace, the primary setting for Jammers, which will have lots of 'non-official' events in it, since it is for my campaign. That will definitely be in the Bralspace sourcebook i've been slowly working on - the sourcebook is currently around 300 mircrosoft word pages, but will likely decrease in page count as I edited it down.

All of it would go faster but my real life work is also writing (currently, a history of Marines in the 1990-91 Gulf War) and that plus kids and family & my games can really eat up creativity.



Cool. I only care about the 383 AC date. I think that event sees Krynn drawn into another dimension, rather than just another Prime or Crystal Sphere.

I've always liked that Krynn was so far into the future of most SJ campaigns, it essentially lets us ignorethe question of what to do when it disappears, since few gamers will ever get that far through normal campaign play. Or maybe i'm just slow. Jammers has been ongoing since 1996 yet we've only completed about one year of game time.

just thought i'd point out, the krynnish gods returning to krynn is likely directly associated (if not the same date) with the disappearance of solinari, lunitari, and nuitari, so you likely care about that too

I should have been more specific. What you are doing with Bralspace sounds like exactly what I mean.



I have less excuses than you, but have been a lot slower. Part of my own problem is that I'm still in the research phase with a lot of bits of D&D.



The problem might have been something to do with the time of the Second Cataclysm. There might have been some sort of accidental shift in the years after that date. I'm not sure. I do know that a lot of people have switched back to using the AC dates for things after the Second Cataclysm.

Dragonhelm's Guide to Krynnspace takes Krynnspace forward to after the Second Cataclysm and the "return of the gods". He has the Moons of Magic (and the Dragonlance gods) vanish from Krynnspace 40 years after the Second Cataclysm.



I'm not a fan of "big world changing events" myself. I think they are far to disruptive and when they invalidate entire sub-settings or break crossover links with Spelljammer, Planescape or Ravenloft they get in the way of my personal preferences (rather than enhance my gaming enjoyment). So I often find them to be counter-productive.

I've not fixed a date I want to use yet, but as a third edition fan that wants to use Krynnspace, Realmspace and Greyspace my absolute maximum is the earliest year of 3e Dragonlance, 3e Forgotten Realms and the 3e elements of Greyhawk in Living Greyhawk Gazeteer and the supporting Living Greyhawk documentation.

As for my minimum, I've got a choice between either going with exactly the same date as the AD&D Adventures in Space boxed set (which seems to be what WotC have done with the 4e Dark Sun upgrade) or the date of the last published SJ product (whatever that might be).

I can see a case for starting with the original SJ timeline point, as that puts you in a pre-Second Unhuman War position and allows you to use all the modules (and suppliments) in the same order as your timeline research suggests. Doing that would follow the canon as closely as possible and make new monsters (like the scro) and new ships pop up in the correct order.

The case for moving beyond that would be to provide a new starting point, where all the canon of SJ (including secondary canon mentioned in other settings) can be made a bit more accessible to PCs. Most players know about the scro, for example but if you run a game set in the era of the first boxed set, you can't allow players to let their PCs have that knowledge.

I'm still thinking, but your timeline is going to make things a lot easier, as people will be able to look for the "most cool stuff" and make sure the PCs of their players get to live through it.

According to Dragonhelm's Guide to Krynnspace, Takhisis found out how to "Steal the World" because the "alien dragons" that came to Krynn from wherever it is that she took the world. This quote from Age of Mortals* may be of interest:



* = After I originally found out that the Second Cataclym meta-plot put Krynn out of reach of multi-sphere SJ campaigns, I was very very very cautious before buying any of the MWP Dragonlance books. Once I worked out what the deal with them was, I ended up buying most of them. The Age of Mortals book is one that I wrote off as "totally useless" to a SJ campaign. Oddly enought it got some fairly awful reviews and that must have caused the sales to be low as I picked one up cheap. I don't think it is that bad, although I see it as a "use with caution" sourcebook, because it contains a lot of "that has not happened yet" stuff.

Wherever these dragons come from, one of them arrived on Krynn long before the Second Cataclysm. Khellendros (also known as Skie) fought in the War of the Lance, and he also had a daughter (he mated with a Krynnish dragon called Nadir) called Zephyr who also fought in the War of the Lance. (I can not find dates of birth for either Skie or Zephyr, but he must have been here for however long it took Zephyr to grow to her size.)

EDIT: I just noticed that Dragonlance Lexicon puts Skie's arrival on Krynn as 240 AC, after a meeting with Takhisis in the ether. That is well before The War of the Lance.

Perhaps a GM might want to put an alien dragon or two onto one or more of the other worlds of Krynnspace.

BTW: It is possible for non-alien dragons to discover how to use "skull totems" and gain power. A sea dragon called Brine became one of the five Dragon Overlords. That is another thing a GM might want to use somewhere else in Krynnspace.

Very good point! Thanks, I do think you are right. I hadn't thought that through, since I generally don't game in Dragonlance.

Making it another crystal sphere seems more useful in a Spelljammer campaign, since then it can be rediscovered and visited, new trade routes opening to a previously unexplored region so that ships can travel between Krynnspace and New Krynnspace.

Maybe, but that goes beyond the purpose of my timeline.

The only official statements I can find about where Krynn went aren't entirely clear. The 3e campaign setting (p. 118) mentions an Ethereal Sea, also known (according to that source) as the Deep Ethereal, and says countless other worlds lie beyond it. There's only one Ethereal Sea, touching both Krynn's original home and its new one. Takhisis moved the world to a different part of the Ethereal Sea; I think that means (translating it in to Spelljammer terms) it's still the same Prime Material Plane, just another sphere. In the standard AD&D 2nd edition cosmology, the Deep Ethereal can be used to travel between crystal spheres, with difficulty, but not between "dimensions" (discounting ether gaps, although A Guide to the Ethereal Plane does say (p. 16) there have been ether gaps sighted near where Krynn was). Traveling to another sphere would effectively cut off the Krynnish from their previous gods and afterlife, which is what happened, until new connections were formed.

This is open to interpretation, though (since 3e wasn't written with Spelljammer in mind), and probably the best solution for your timeline is to leave it vague.

I have to admit, if Krynn did pass through an ether gap, it might indeed be in a separate multiverse. Ether gaps are supposed to be the "all that remain of timelines that were negated and abolished by temporal paradoxes caused by ignorant berks mucking about on the Demiplane of Time," though, which suggests that any ether gaps in the vicinity of Krynnspace are the fault of Tasselhoff's and Raistlin's time-traveling adventures, rather than Takhisis and the Gate of Souls. And 3e does say it's in the same Ethereal Sea (if Krynn passed through an ether gap, I think they'd be in a different one), and ether gaps aren't a practical way for giant dragons to travel travel from one world to another (because they're one-way, and the alien dragons have to find a route that gets them to both pre-theft Krynn and post-theft Krynn).

Exactly, 3e threw out the old cosmology. I'm happy there are 3e and later players who find my stuff useful, but my timeline isn't a 3e project. When Krynn disappears, it disappears. What happens after (aside from the moons, which presumably remained in the sphere until they later disappeared) I'm not concerned with. I'm basically stopping at the 'end' of 2e.

That said, I will be including some 3e events. In a lot of settings the 2e/3e break isn't as sudden and definitive as in Dragonlance. Greyhawk, for example, doesn't have a single large '3e is here now' event, as far as i can tell. And the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer is nearly system less, focused on cool world building details. FF's big break seems to happen more with the Spellplague and 4e <puke>So I will likely get that far for FR.

To be honest though, I more interested in the past events i missed than the future ones. :)

Here is a very good Planescape (with a little 3rd edition canon thrown in) timeline. It's not necessarily entirely how I've done things (the equivalencies between campaign worlds are different, Kiaransalee is a bit too late, he had the Athar replace the Zactars instead of the Sign of One), but it's good, and close enough that I'm not quite as anxious about getting my own timelines (which Idran was influenced by, anyway) in order.

I wish people would learn the importance of citations. His timeline would be much, much more useful if the source of each entry were noted. As it is, I'm not certain how useful it is to me. Thanks for pointing it out, though!

Well, the stuff I have up so far has citations. I should go through Idran's timeline and add footnotes and citations and things to it, since I know where everything on it comes from. And make changes, as necessary.

That would be awesome.

I'm going to run my stuff by you if you don't mind, you've got some timeline chops!

I love you timeline, but I will likely include more 'prehistoric' events, I think you folks compress the timeline more than the sources I've seen indicate. The elves who arrive on Toril from Faerie in Evermeet, BTW, are not the first elves to arrive on Toril.

edit: by prehistoric I mean you assign a date to 'mythological' events I think are best left legendary and dateless.

There were some of us calling the new sphere "Takhisispace". It is possibly the sphere that the alien dragons hail from, as that would mean that all the new alien dragons simply migrate across the Wildspace of the new sphere.



Actually 3eDL threw out the Great Wheel cosmology and reverted to the original DL cosmology from Dragonlance Chronicles and Dragonlance Adventures. It is inconvenient but far more in keeping with canon than the 3eFR changes in cosmology.

If you look at the 3e books in that context, I think you will find that they fit in a lot better with the early Dragonlance material.

Even some of the spelling changes are actually to bring the RPG products in line with spellings that were used in the novels (during 2e they had a couple of spelling variations between novels and RPG products).

I actually think that the 3e books work pretty well for retro-players. I'm not happy with everything, but I've met some of the people who gave advise on this and there was a lot of fan input.



Give that the novels show that even the Dragonlance gods could not find the world of Krynn for about 30 years, I would say that the timeline should show Krynn vanishing from Krynnspace. If the gnomes search for it (and we know they would) they are not going to have any success in the intermediate time. I can't see any more need for your timeline to mention Krynnspace (apart from the possible* disappearance of the moons).

* = I'm still not entirely convinced of how this would work. Moving one world back would seem to be easier than reinventing the sphere around it.



I'm more interested in past events too. I think you can find some of those in 3e products.

This isn't exactly true. The 3e Dragonlance cosmology isn't any closer to Dragonlance Adventures than Planescape's On Hallowed Ground is. Which is to say, both differ substantially from the most literal reading of the book, but fit equally well with a generous reading. Dragonlance Adventures mentioned four divine realms, but never claimed they were planes in their own right, nor did it claim those were the only three divine realms there were. The 3rd edition campaign setting mentions only three outer planes, demoting one realm (Zhan) to lesser status, plus rather gratuitously adding a bunch of planes (the Astral Plane, the Plane of Shadow, the elemental planes) necessary to smoothly use 3rd edition mechanics, despite neither Dragonlance Adventures nor the original novels mentioning them. Which is equivalent to a 4e Dragonlance adding the Elemental Chaos, Shadowfell, Feywild, and Far Realm to its cosmology and claiming the resulting mix is "the original DL cosmology." On Hallowed Ground uses all four of the Dragonlance Adventures named realms, distributing them among the 17 standard outer planes, and adding additional realms for other gods. Which is a perfectly fair interpretation, and one Tales of the Lance used as well. Since that was the first published elaboration of Dragonlance Adventures' bare-bones list of names, I think it has the best claim as Dragonlance's "original" cosmology. In addition, the 1st edition Manual of the Planes (by Spelljammer guru Jeff Grubb) was published the same year as Dragonlance Adventures and explicitly placed Takhisis in the Nine Hells. Sure, the novels put her in "the Abyss," but I see nothing wrong with 2e's qualification that the Krynnish use the term "the Abyss" to describe a wide variety of planes. It's a bit of a retcon, but no more than the 3e cosmology was.

And the first published Dragonlance story was "A Stone's Throw Away" by Roger E. Moore, which pretty clearly put Krynn in the same multiverse as the 1st edition Monster Manual. Nothing in any of the novels that I've read mandates a specific cosmology, or requires that Takhsis's realm in "the Abyss" can't be part of what people in other worlds call the Hells.

There are many reason a Dragonlance fan may wish to distance Krynn from the rest of the D&D worlds and cosmology, and as far as I'm concerned they're welcome to do so, but there's no fair case to be made that the 3rd edition wasn't a revision. Dragonlance was assumed to be part of the greater D&D multiverse for most of its history, and both the novels and Dragonlance Adventures read cogently with that assumption. I know Weis and Hickman have their own preferences, and that's fine, but Dragonlance was a committee-designed, corporate-owned product from the get-go, so I don't find their opinions more persuasive than the 1st and 2nd edition sources that plainly state that (and can't be read intelligibly unless) Krynn is part of the same planar framework as Oerth and Toril. 3rd edition claimed otherwise 20 years too late to claim "original" status. I think the 3e Dragonlance Campaign Setting is a fine book, but I read its cosmology section as "this is how the sages of Krynn view the multiverse, but it isn't necessarily totally correct." The Planescape view isn't necessarily 100% correct either; the planes are infinite and unknowable, after all.



Only if your definition of "canon" excludes "A Stone's Throw Away," Manual of the Planes, Tales of the Lance, and the entire Planescape line, which is a narrower definition of canon than I'm comfortable with. If you include all published canon, not just an arbitrarily defined piece of it, it's every bit as extreme as the 3e Forgotten Realms changes.

I have no real problem with the 3e books, and I think mainly you're just saying, "Hey, give them a chance, they're not so bad." Which I agree with. But even granted (and I do grant) that the MWP authors were well in their rights to define what "canon" meant for those books, they can't really define what canon for Spelljammer is. That's outside their jurisdiction, and the needs of a cross-world campaign are different than the needs of a single-world campaign. I think that, even if no planar travel happens, it's still better to make cross-planar connections between spheres so that more themes can be carried over throughout the campaign.



Sure, but this is Spelljammer! Which has its own breed of retro-player.



After Takhisis moved Krynn through the Gate of Souls, she was left exhausted and powerless for decades. It might well be easier to use the matter already in the sphere to create simulacrums of the original moons than to move all of that matter from one sphere to another.

Which might mean that the "old moons" people see in the sky after the War of Souls are really new moons that just look like the old moons, and the real old moons are still in Krynnspace.

The gods seem to be able to move the stars around without expending much effort. They wouldn't necessarily bother to touch the other planets in Takhisisspace.