The Dragonlance Chronicles by Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman

A band of friends meet at the Inn of the Last Home in the town of Solace. Five years ago they went their separate ways, searching for evidence of the lost gods. Their findings were inconclusive, but their reunion is interrupted by the news of vast armies allied with dragons on the march and the arrival of strangers bearing a crystal staff...and the long-lost power of healing. The continent of Ansalon is riven by war and it falls on this band of heroes to save it from destruction.

The Dragonlance Chronicles trilogy is one of the most famous works of epic fantasy of the 1980s. Published in 1984 and 1985, the trilogy and its immediate sequel series (The Dragonlance Legends) have together sold almost 30 million copies, making them one of the biggest-selling series of that decade. Millions of fantasy readers started out in the genre by reading these novels.

The question arises, then, is it a good idea to revisit these works as an adult and risk ruining nostalgic teenage memories in the process?

The answer is mixed. The paradox at the heart of enjoying the Dragonlance Chronicles is what age group it's actually aimed at. The generally jovial tone (even when quite dark things are happening), the casual dialogue (this is a trilogy where medieval fantasy characters say "Yeah!" a lot) and the extremely breezy pace make this feel like a series aimed at children. I don't mean YA, I mean 7-10 year olds. The prose is simple and easy to read, and it feels very much like a work aimed in writing style at the same kind of audience as The Hobbit. There's moments of whimsical humour, stirring action and intriguing worldbuilding which do withstand comparison with Tolkien's work, despite the less-accomplished writing.

However, there are moments when the series abruptly goes much more adult. There are several sex scenes (albeit mostly of the "fade to black" kind) and female characters are threatened with sexual assault on a fairly regular basis. Tanis Half-elven also can't even meet a stranger on the road without carefully explaining how his mother was assaulted by a human man, leading to his conception and outcast status from both communities. The trilogy is also painfully 1980s in how it tries to have both strong female characters (Laurana, Tika, Kitiara, Goldmoon) and then gets them into situations of undress, or wearing revealing armour or clothes (Tika, at least, gets to make some wry observations on this that makes me suspect Margaret Weis was rolling her eyes as she wrote to market requirements). There's also a quite spectacular amount of violence, including characters being beheaded, turned to stone or set on fire on a fairly regular basis, and some psychological horror in the form of Berem, who is cursed to die and live again so often that he is going insane.

If you can overcome the tonal dissonance - the gap between the lightweight, juvenile writing and sometimes darker, more adult content - then it's possible to enjoy the Dragonlance Chronicles as a fast-paced, popcorn read. The trilogy does have another key feature (or bug) which is that it is an attempt to adapt no less than twelve Dungeons & Dragons adventure modules into a coherent story. Several times the narrative cuts away from our heroes embarking on another side-quest only to come back to them after that quest is completed, leading to the heroes thinking wistfully back on adventures that the reader never experienced (such as the journey to Ice Wall Castle, or Raistlin's completely out-of-nowhere return to the main story in the closing pages of the third book). This does make the story feel somewhat incomplete. It also means that the stories are extremely fast-paced: the Chronicles trilogy features a bigger story and more characters and events than The Lord of the Rings in about 50,000 fewer words. Some will enjoy the breakneck pace, others may lament the lack of character and plot development this results in.

The Dragonlance Chronicles trilogy (***) is fast-paced, fun and easy to read. It's also simplistic, juvenile in tone and has not aged fantastically well. Truth be told, there's much better options available for both adult and children fans of fantasy these days. But if you can overlook the issues, there is still some fun to be had in revisiting Tanis, Raistlin, Caramon, Flint, Goldmoon, Riverwind, Tas, Kitiara, Sturm, Laurana, Gilthanas, Lord Soth and the rest of this memorable bunch of archetypes. The trilogy is available now in the UK and USA.

How to Make a Successful D&D Movie

With Hasbro and Sweetpea Entertainment snarling at one another like two litigious displacer beasts, it's unlikely we'll be seeing a new D&D movie any time soon. As a result, it's fun to speculate what might happen if the legal arguments are cleared up and someone is able to make a film, hopefully with also the rights to use the franchise's vast number of novels and characters as source material. The way I see it, there are three viable options:

"The Shadow!"

1) D&D: The Metafilm


In this idea, the film takes place from two different perspectives. In the first, we follow a group of real-life D&D players. They're in the here and now and meet up once or twice a week to play the game. When they're playing, rather that us just watching some people sit around a table, instead we slip into the D&D game itself. The same actors are now playing the players' characters, swinging swords, firing lightning bolts and pausing in mid-action for fifteen minutes whilst someone tries to perform a grapple check. There are a lot of effects. It's all kind of awesome, except it's interspersed with scenes of the players playing around the table. You could show how random out-of-game decisions are portrayed in the game world. This could include the classic dodge of one character dying, so the player creates a new character who bumps into the old adventuring party, usually somewhere incongruous like the middle of a vast desert or ruined temple, and is immediately accepted into their ranks with no questions.

Of course, this is such a good idea that it's already been done several times, most notably in Dead Gentlemen Productions' very fine Gamers trilogy of fan films (the first movie even has the unconvincing replacement character scene). My preference would be to remake one of them and give Dead Gentlemen a truckload of cash for the pleasure.

Also, for added geek-cred, you could cast well-known real D&D players in the film, like Wil Wheaton, Felicia Day and of course Vin Diesel. How about Diesel as the DM? Who'd ever argue with a decision? In addition, with this sort of project you can make it as high or as low-budget as you like, and vary the tone from comedy to drama and back again. Most importantly, it is true to the D&D experience in a way just a generic fantasy movie isn't.

2) Dragonlance: Dragons of Autumn Twilight

Actually, this has already been done but few people ever saw it. Mainly because it was a bit rubbish (though still the best D&D movie made to date), but also the fact it was animated put a lot of people off. Still, as far as 'classic D&D narratives' go, this is the most obvious to go for. It has built-in franchise appeal (the core Dragonlance mythos consists of two trilogies of novels, with a multitude of spin-off books and a later series of less well-received sequels), some fairly iconic characters and some spectacular action set pieces. These include massive aerial battles featuring dragons, dungeon adventuring, storming an ice castle and spooky encounters in haunted forests. It pretty much encapsulates a lot of the traditional D&D tropes into one story.

There are of course two problems. The first is the budget, which would need to be 'large', to put it mildly. The second is that Dragons of Autumn Twilight is only the first third of a longer story, not a self-contained story in its own right. If the movie bombs, it'll be left on an annoying cliffhanger. The scale and budget means it's more of a project you build up to rather than lead with straight out of the gate. And that neatly leads to my third and final choice:

3) The Crystal Shard

Originally published in 1988, The Crystal Shard, a novel set in the Forgotten Realms world, has become one of the best-known and most iconic D&D novels. It introduced the world to the character of Drizzt Do'Urden, a drow (or dark elf) ranger. Unlike most of the rest of his species, which was cursed and evil, Drizzt was noble and honourable, seeking to live in peace away from his evil kin. And kick ridiculous amounts of arse. Whilst later Drizzt books can be charitably described as 'formulaic', the early books were (relatively speaking here) fairly engaging action-adventure stories. Drizzt was a (very much speaking relatively here) complex character and author R.A. Salvatore gave him a lot of character stuff to work through, including parenting issues, the problems of racism and how to make friends with people when you're going to outlive them by centuries.

In addition to that, The Crystal Shard has the benefit of being an ensemble (Drizzt is just one of a team, unlike later books in which he becomes the dominant hero) and also of being self-contained: it was later retconned as Book 1 of The Icewind Dale Trilogy, but its own narrative ends in the first instalment, with a simple segue into further adventures at the end. Whilst there are also major effects moments (a battle with an ice dragon in its lair; the people of Ten Towns fighting off a monster assault; a duel between Drizzt and a demon), it also wouldn't be quite as expensive as a Dragonlance movie.

More to the point from a commercial viewpoint, R.A. Salvatore has sold more than 15 million novels in the USA alone (which indicates worldwide sales likely double that, if not more). Far more Salvatore novels have been shifted than D&D rulebooks, and Drizzt and Forgotten Realms are better-known brands than D&D itself. If Hasbro want to maximise their potential revenue, this is definitely the course to pursue. I wouldn't bet on it being a good movie unless they get a particularly talented director and scriptwriter, but it would have commercial clout. And of course, they already have the perfect actor ready to play Drizzt:

"Magic-user, baby!"

It'll be interesting to see how this all pans out after the litigation is over, and what sort of film we get.

Dragonlance: Dragons of Autumn Twilight

Back in 2001, a movie based on the Dungeons and Dragons roleplaying game was released. It can charitably be described as, "Not all that it could have been." At the time many fans pondered why Wizards of the Coast had allowed an inexperienced director to adapt their best-known product using his own (not particuarly impressive) homebrew campaign world as a basis, rather than using some of their best-selling novels as a source, such as RA Salvatore's Drizzt Do'Urden books or, the more popular suggestion, the epic Dragonlance saga by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. Well, in 2006 it appears that someone finally took the (rather obvious) move of licensing the Dragonlance world and series to be used as the basis of a movie trilogy.

For readers of a particular age (those who grew up in the mid-1980s), Dragonlance is as seminal a fantasy touchstone as Tolkien. The original Dragonlance Chronicles (Dragons of Autumn Twilight, Dragons of Winter Night and Dragons of Spring Dawning) is a traditional tale of a band of heroes who come together and get embroiled in the ongoing war between the armies of dragons, led by the dark goddess Takhisis, and the forces of light, represented by the god Paladine. Over the course of many battles and adventures, they eventually succeed and overthrow the Dark Queen. What is more interesting, however, is the internal journey many of the heroes undertake, most notably that of the extremely morally ambiguous mage Raistlin, who is torn between his loyalty to his friends and his own thirst for power, which forms the basis of the superior sequel series, The Dragonlance Legends (Time of the Twins, War of the Twins, and Test of the Twins).

That a film adaption of Dragons of Autumn Twilight has taken so long to arrive is surprising. The original trilogy sold well over 4 million copies in its first decade in print, and Weis & Hickman are often credited - alongside Stephen Donaldson, Terry Brooks and Raymond E. Feist - of helping to kick-off the post-Tolkien epic fantasy boom. At the same time, the demands of such an adaption are notable. The story features sequences involving armies of dragons attacking cities, lots of magic and enormous battles. Making a live-action movie would have been impossible before the advent of the CGI age, and an animated film would have disappointed most of the fans.

Which makes it all the more inexplicable that, in 2006, Paramount and Wizards of the Coast agreed to go with an animated film. And not a CGI movie or a high-quality animated feature employing the best Korean or Japanese animation houses in the business, but a cheap 'n' cheerful adaption by an unknown Indian company which employs less-advanced animation techniques than mid-1980s episodes of He-Man. The animation is somewhat stilted throughout and the character designs tend to be somewhat bland (with arguably only Fewmaster Toede really being a memorable design). Even more bizarre is the decision to use rather weak CGI to depict the dragons and their half-humanoid servants, the draconians, leading to a mishmash of styles which detracts from the story.

The other problem is that the entire 400-page novel has been squeezed into a 90-minute film, leading to severe compression of the story. Fan-favourite scenes such as the wicker dragon are thus lost, and climatic events in Pax Tharkas are simplified considerably. Lots of character development is also abandoned on the cutting room floor, and elements such as Tanis' continuing inner turmoil at being caught between the elven and human worlds but not a part of either are depicted clunkily. Raistlin's story arc more or less survives intact, and is enlivened by a decent vocal performance by Kiefer Sutherland.

That all said, the writer does do a good job of transmitting the background story to the viewer. A pre-credits, Fellowship of the Ring-style prologue gets the story across quite straightforwardly, and the adaption makes use of the fact that they're not making it up hurriedly as they go along (as the original writers of the novels did) to set things up ahead of time. High Lord Verminaard doesn't just show up out of nowhere as he does in the books, for example.

As a slice of entertainment for young children, the film works quite well (although a few scenes do contain blood, and Tasselhoff Burrfoot has become a psychopath in this adaption, stabbing a goblin repeatedly through the heart in one particular scene, so parental discretion is advised), and fans of the novels may get a nostalgic kick out of seeing their old favourite characters on screen. It's also notably a better viewing experience than either the live-action 2001 Dungeons and Dragons movie or its utterly horrific direct-to-DVD sequel (Wrath of a Dragon God, which may actually be the worst movie created in the history of humanity to this time, the works of Uwe Boll of course excepted). However, the adaption does have the feel of being a major missed opportunity. With better animation and a more generous running time, this could have been a very good adaption indeed, but instead it has to settle for being rather mediocre.

Dragonlance: Dragons of Autumn Twilight (**) is available in the United States on DVD, and as a Region 1 import in the UK.