The point is that Shadow of the Dragon Queen is set in the heart of a war, and the PCs will be no strangers to the battlefield. Go any farther away and you can’t get away with telling a story of the early days of the war where people are still coming to grips with the true nature of the Dragon Queen’s threat. Go any closer to the draconian homelands and the PCs can’t save the day. The other reason to set a campaign here is that Kalaman is basically the point closest to the Dragon Armies at the beginning of the War of the Lance which is NOT conquered by them. (I’ll stop calling out rotten continuity at this point, for that way lies madness.)

Across all fourteen of the original modules, there’s only like a dozen paragraphs you would have to keep track of to keep things consistent, so it’s almost impressive in a way that they nevertheless managed to screw it up.

Ironically, I think Kalaman was chosen for this campaign because so little was established in the Dragonlance Saga about what happened there during the War of the Lance. This is an earlier Siege of Kalaman that takes place in 3-mumble-mumble AC, when a completely different flying citadel showed up for the first time, shredding absolutely everything we know about this continuity. No, not the Siege of Kalaman in 352 AC where Laurana is the general and the Dragon Armies deployed their flying citadels for the first time. Shadow of the Dragon Queen takes place during the Siege of Kalaman.

Battlefield of the mind 2006