Let's talk about Istarian Droids...

Only one question applies, there, and this question is... WHY?

Technology in Fantasy Universes

It's okay to have fantasy universes with technology, or firearms.

Some have these by design, like the firearms of Legends of the Five Rings.

And some others can have these design, like Pathfinder's Golarion and D&D's Forgotten Realms that either have advanced technology in some form, but usually rare or difficult to access (the Numerian technology of Golarion, the smokespowder of Toril): It these worlds, you could spend your whole life campaigning without any firearm in sight... Or you could be a gunslinger.

Matt Mercer's Exandria embraces the idea as Percy was the very first gunslinger, and knowledge of his discovery has slowly expanded.

Technology and Dragonlance

Krynn is a low-technology world.

Technology in the history of Krynn

The only civilization who somehow showed interest in advanced technology, and actually engineered something worthwile are the gnomes of Mount Nevermind.

Tinker gnomes have been cursed by the god Reorx to forever desire to build things, and yet, never succeeding in building something that works as expected and reliably (*).

(*) There has been one exception, though. He died, though.

Every other known civilization barely reached medieval-era technology like iron forging. The only clocks were water-based clocks, and certainly no firearms exist anywhere.

What about Istar?

Istar was described as having a lot of things, but advanced technology was not one of them. Nor did they had flying citadels, but that's another story.

So, lets take a look at Shadow of the Dragon Queen

So...

• Having technology or firearms in fantasy universes is not something shocking per se. But as every concept, you need to be sure this is coherent with that universe.
• Dragonlance has no firearms nor automation technology (if we except the gnome "inventions").

And yet, at some point, someone at WotC, out of nowhere, because their campaign was not original enough, decided to introduce advanced technology in an universe were technology was at its best primitive and/or unreliable.

And the problem is not the technology, it's how it's introduced in a setting where none existed before.

Indeed, this is important enough to warrant its own adventure, or important event. Maybe a continent in the northern hemisphere of Krynn has been discovered, maybe the Ogre Race had actually built droids 9000 years ago... Whatever. But in the end, as a writer, you need to do **the works** when you are deviating that much from the canon.

But in Shadow of the  Dragon Queen, this isn't even worth a footnote: p154, it abruptly starts with "monitoring tower", and "consoles, levers, colored stones, dull-glass hemispheres". Then it follows with "Energy Field", "magical systems", "drone monitoring", complete with a console to take control of "istarian drones".

Translation: You're on the bridge of 1960's era USS Enterprise, half-expecting an elf giving you the Vulcan Salute.

Someone thought: What this Dragonlance campaign really needs, is droids

Then come the droids: Someone in the Shadow of the  Dragon Queen team clearly wondered what if a Star Wars prequel's Droideka and a Portal's Sentry Turret had an illegitimate baby, but shooting electrified gel hardening into cristal instead of bullets or blasters:

Then, the authors pulled out of their ass a story about how these droids were somehow the robots who built the buildings of Istar, again, retconning half of the Time of the Twins novel, just for the lulz.

And this is how D&D5 adventurers end up fighting discount-cylons on discount-Dragonlance.

This is sad.