The original author of the Dragonlance Chronicles (not!) revealed for the very first time

Update: YoDanno has retracted the claim, after Margaret Weis confirmed the contract was for a Western series of novels and not Dragonlance.

Way back in 1983, when TSR was plotting what they called "Project Overlord", they had a plan for a line of gaming materials and a line of tie-in novels. Margaret Weis would edit the novels and Tracy Hickman, along with TSR's editorial team, would oversee the whole story and the gaming materials. TSR hired a "proper" science fiction/fantasy author of significant experience to write the books, similar to how SFF megastar Andre Norton had written the first Greyhawk novel a few years earlier under Gary Gygax's direction.

However, that author failed to deliver. It's been suggested that they kept creating their own plot twists and story ideas (that dragged the story away from the outline, which it needed to stick to to tie-in properly with the gaming storyline), and basically were not gelling. Eventually TSR cancelled the contract and Weis & Hickman agreed to join forces to write the novels directly, with the rest becoming history: The Dragonlance Chronicles trilogy, by some estimates, is the biggest-selling epic fantasy trilogy of the 1980s.

The identity of that original author has never been revealed, at least until today. Dragonlance historian YoDanno received a copy of the TSR contract confirming that SFF author Ron Goulart (1933-2022) was the original contracted author for the trilogy. Goulart worked extensively in SFF media tie-ins, as well as mysteries and original fiction, and is known to have been the "actual" author of the TekWar series, working on an outline provided by William Shatner.

This wasn't the first time a relative SFF "big name" nearly got involved in the franchise. In 2009 Jim Butcher, author of The Dresden Files and the Codex Alera series, was asked to write a "reboot" of the original trilogy. Butcher came on board under the impression that the project had the approval of Weis & Hickman, only to withdraw when it became clear that was not the case. Weis & Hickman have subsequently returned with new Dragonlance novels.

New DRAGONLANCE novel confirmed for 2022

We've known it's been coming for a while, but not the final release date. Dragonlance authors Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman have confirmed their new novel in the setting, their first addition to the saga for thirteen years, will be published on 9 August 2022. Dragons of Deceit is the first volume of the Dragonlance Destinies Trilogy and the first Dragonlance novel of any kind since The Fate of Thorbardin by Douglas Niles in 2010.

Dragonlance is a setting for the Dungeons & Dragons table top roleplaying game. The setting was originally launched in 1984 with a series of D&D adventures and the first Dragonlance novel, Dragons of Autumn Twilight. Unlike other D&D settings such as Greyhawk and the later Forgotten Realms, which were both designed around giving the players a world to have many adventures in, Dragonlance focused on a single huge saga. It was effectively D&D's take on The Lord of the Rings, chronicling the adventures of a band of disparate heroes in their efforts to defeat the dark goddess Takhisis. The Dragonlance Chronicles and Dragonlances Legends trilogies sold more than four million copies before the decade was done, making them among the biggest-selling epic fantasy novels of that decade.

The Dragonlance setting was fleshed out by many other authors and game designers, eventually encompassing 203 novels and dozens of game supplements. Weis & Hickman's novels in the setting eventually sold almost 35 million copies. Although the novels continued to sell very well, the game materials were more inconsistent in sales and drifted in and out of print. In 2003 Wizards of the Coast licensed the RPG setting to Margaret Weis's own RPG company, Sovereign Press, and Weis created a version of the setting compatible with D&D 3rd Edition that sold well for many years. In 2008, after the release of the divisive D&D 4th Edition, WotC terminated its contract with Sovereign and brought the game materials back in-house, but surprisingly decided to sit on them rather than use them for anything. There has been no official Dragonlance material released since the last novel in 2010. In fact, the only D&D-branded fiction released since 2018 has been a series of Drizzt Do'Urden novels by R.A. Salvatore and nothing else, leaving an immense amount of money on the table given the massive popularity of D&D at the moment.

Weis and Hickman began working on the new Dragonlance trilogy in 2019. However, editorial disagreements led to the trilogy being cancelled despite the first two books being completed and the first volume fully edited. Weis and Hickman sued Wizards of the Coast for $10 million and breach of contract. Two months later the lawsuit was withdrawn, with both parties claiming an amicable settlement had been reached.

The refreshingly old-skool book cover uses an intriguing new logo, claiming that this is "Classic Dragonlance." There has been no confirmation from WotC if there will be new gaming material for the current D&D 5th Edition to accompany the new book. Two further novels are expected to follow in 2023 and 2024.

Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman confirm new DRAGONLANCE trilogy

Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman have confirmed that a new Dragonlance trilogy is to be published by Random House, starting this year.

The news comes after a lawsuit between the authors and Dragonlance IP owners Wizards of the Coast (and their parent company Hasbro) in October revealed the existence of the trilogy. The authors, Random House and Wizards had negotiated a deal for three new Dragonlance books and were halfway through writing the three volumes when Wizards put the series on indefinite hold. According to the filings, Wizards were experiencing problems with PR and image after a string of controversies and had decided that pursuing another legacy project was something they didn't want to deal with. However, this meant them breaking their contract with Weis and Hickman.

With Weis and Hickman suing for $10 million and Wizards in hot water with various other controversies going on, the two parties reached an out-of-court agreement in December and the lawsuit was dismissed without prejudice (meaning that Weis and Hickman could renew the lawsuit later on if there are further issues; usually a sign that the other party has surrendered without argument).

Dragonlance is a campaign setting for the Dungeons and Dragons roleplaying game, which has seen a huge resurgence in popularity in recent years. Many of the basic Dragonlance concepts were created by Tracy Hickman and his wife Laura in 1983, then fleshed out by a team of writers and editors who turned the basic idea into a series of adventure modules for the D&D game. Hickman teamed with editor Margaret Weis to write the original Dragonlance Chronicles trilogy novels, followed up by numerous more books in the same world. The Dragonlance Chronicles (1984-85) and Dragonlance Legends (1986) trilogies sold over four million copies before the end of the decade, making them one of the biggest-selling fantasy series of the decade. To date, the Dragonlance novels penned by Weis and Hickman have sold over 30 million copies worldwide, making them the second-biggest-selling authors of D&D fiction (only slightly behind R.A. Salvatore and his Legend of Drizzt series) and among the top fifty best-selling SFF authors of all time. Weis and Hickman have also worked widely in other settings and with original material, including the Death Gate Cycle, Rose of the Prophet Trilogy and Darksword Saga.

The setting has previously seen some controversy. In 2008 urban fantasy author Jim Butcher was approached by WotC to spearhead a full reboot of the entire Dragonlance saga, including rewriting the original trilogy as a five-book series. Butcher would only proceed with Weis and Hickman's blessing and, when that was not forthcoming, the project was abandoned.

Dragons of Deceit (working title) by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, will be published this year. Although ordinarily a new Dragonlance book or trilogy might not attract a huge amount of attention (the last few books were not well-reviewed), the combination of the lawsuit and a dearth of recent official D&D fiction (this will be only the fourth D&D-branded novel to be published in the last five years) should mean that this does rather well.

Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman end legal case against Wizards of the Coast, promising "exciting news"

Dragonlance authors Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman have ended their legal case against Wizards of the Coast. The two authors were suing the company for $10 million for breach of contract after attempting to terminate a book deal for a new Dragonlance trilogy when the authors had already completed almost half the work.

Legal filings confirm that Weis and Hickman themselves ended the case and on Twitter, Weis promises "exciting news in the weeks to come." From the tone of this, it sounds like an amicable settlement has reached and the project will likely see print after all.

Confirmation of that news when it is confirmed.

Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman sue DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS publishers for $10 million for breach of contract

Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, the famed authors of the Dragonlance Chronicles and many other series in that world, have sued Dungeons and Dragons publishers Wizards of the Coast for breach of contract after a new Dragonlance novel trilogy was abruptly cancelled after the first book had been completed.

The news that Wizards were planning a new Dragonlance trilogy is in itself a surprise, given that there has been an extreme dearth of D&D fiction over the last four years, with only three Forgotten Realms books by R.A. Salvatore being published in that time. There have been unsubstantiated rumours that Wizards are planning a relaunch of Dragonlance as a D&D campaign setting in 2021 or 2022, so relaunching the novel series at the same time would have been a good move, and an encouraging sign that Wizards might be reconsidering entering the novel space in a more substantial manner after they effectively cancelled their ongoing lines in 2016.

Weis and Hickman had completed the first novel in the trilogy, Dragons of Deceit, and were working on the second, Dragons of Fate, when Wizards of the Coast abruptly informed them that the trilogy would not be published and they were terminating the contract immediately. It sounds like there had been rumblings of problems before that, particularly when Nic Kelman had been assigned to edit the trilogy (replacing editors Weis and Hickman have previously agreed to work with). Kelman, the Head of Story and Entertainment at Wizards, has long been a controversial figure after publishing a book which was alleged to have "promoted misogyny and paedophilia".

From the complaint it sounds like Wizards of the Coast became concerned over "problematic" aspects of older D&D worldbuilding (such as always-evil races) and asked the authors to address these in rewrites, which they say they fully complied with. Wizards then terminated the book deal anyway. This is particularly bizarre given that Dragonlance, even in the 1980s and 1990s, had a progressive tone to its work, rehabilitating evil races from other settings into more honourable and nuanced civilisations (such as ogres) and featuring "good" members of traditionally evil races (such as goblins and draconians).

Weis and Hickman are two of the biggest-selling living fantasy authors and the second-most-popular authors of D&D fiction (only marginally behind Salvatore). A new trilogy from them, especially accompanying a Dragonlance relaunch, would have likely sold hundreds of thousands of copies and brought substantial revenues to both authors. For this reason, they are suing Wizards of the Coast for $10 million in lost income and damages.

Weis and Hickman were part of the editorial team at then-TSR which created the Dragonlance world of Krynn as a setting for Dungeons and Dragons adventures in 1983. They then co-wrote the Dragonlance Chronicles and Dragonlance Legends novel series between 1984 and 1986, the first six books which launched the setting to acclaim and which sold more than four million copies before the end of the decade. They returned to the setting several times in the 1990s and 2000s to pen more novels. Cumulatively, they have sold over 25 million books in total.

The setting has previously seen some controversy. In 2008 urban fantasy author Jim Butcher was approached by WotC to spearhead a full reboot of the entire Dragonlance saga, including rewriting the original trilogy as a five-book series. Butcher would only proceed with Weis and Hickman's blessing and, when that was not forthcoming, the project was abandoned.

Leaving Money on the Table: Why is There No New D&D Fiction Being Published?

A shelf of books from the Forgotten Realms line. 292 books in the setting have been published between 1987 and 2020.

Dungeons and Dragons is bigger than it has ever been. 2019 was the biggest and most profitable year in the game’s near half-century history, building on the massive success of the several preceding years where each year saw greater success than the one before. The 5th edition of the game, launched in 2014, has been the best-selling ever. Celebrity gamers, YouTube video series and a starring role on Stranger Things have helped propel D&D to a level of popularity unthinkable a decade ago, when the game’s fourth edition was attracting a lukewarm reception and gamers were flocking to competing products, such as Pathfinder.

A new, big-budget D&D movie is in development and a high-profile video game, Baldur’s Gate III, is set for release early next year. But there seems to be a glaring and baffling omission when it comes to the popularity of the game at present: the total dearth of tie-in, written fiction. Since 2018, a grand total of three novels based on the Dungeons and Dragons brand have been published: Timeless, Boundless and Relentless, all by R.A. Salvatore. 2017 was the first year since 1983 in which no D&D fiction was published at all. There are currently no scheduled D&D novels for 2021 or onwards.

This state of affairs is bizarre, all the moreso because it wasn’t too long ago that D&D fiction was being produced and selling at a rate completely at odds with the game’s then low-profile.

The cover art for Dragons of Autumn Twilight (1984), the very first novel published by TSR, Inc.

As of next month, 623 novels and anthologies* will have been published with the Dungeons and Dragons logo on it or set in one of the D&D worlds. The first, Andre Norton’s Quag Keep (1978), was published by DAW, but almost all of the rest were published by the D&D game creators themselves, TSR from 1984 to 1997 and then Wizards of the Coast from 1997 to 2016. The last three books by RA Salvatore have been published by HarperCollins, under licence from Wizards (and their parent company, Hasbro).

The D&D line’s biggest performer is easily R.A. “Bob” Salvatore, who started writing for the line with his Forgotten Realms novel The Crystal Shard, published in January 1988 as just the second book in that franchise. Salvatore’s signature character, the honourable dark elf ranger Drizzt Do’Urden, has gone on to become arguably the single most famous and popular Dungeons and Dragons character of them all, and the books starring Drizzt or spinning off from them (now totalling 38) have sold over 30 million copies worldwide. That’s more than every single D&D sourcebook, campaign setting and adventure since 1978, combined (estimated by WotC at around 20 million). Salvatore’s sales performance makes him one of the biggest-selling living fantasy authors, behind only Terry Brooks, George R.R. Martin and J.K. Rowling (add J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Robert Jordan and Terry Pratchett for deceased fantasy authors, and the still-living Stephen King if you count his brand of horror-fantasy) and ahead of the likes of Raymond E. Feist, Terry Goodkind and, at this time of writing, Brandon Sanderson (although Sanderson is catching up like a freight train).

Salvatore’s success puts him in a different league to any of the other authors in the same line. The second-biggest-selling Forgotten Realms novelist seems to be the creator of the setting himself, Ed Greenwood, who had definitively sold 3 million books by a decade or so ago (including a million of his debut, Spellfire, by itself) and probably a couple of million more since then. Paul S. Kemp, Elaine Cunningham and Troy Denning all seem to have sold at least a million books apiece in the setting as well. But, although strong, that’s in a completely different league to Salvatore, who remains the outlier.

In the wider world of Dungeons and Dragons fiction, Salvatore’s only competition comes from the team of Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, the co-authors and co-creators (with several others) of the Dragonlance Saga. Weis and Hickman’s Dragonlance Chronicles Trilogy had sold 4 million copies before the end of the 1980s, making it one of the most successful epic fantasy series of the decade, and their total sales since then (including a dozen or so additional books) are on the order of 25 million.

The non-Weis and Hickman Dragonlance books have not sold anywhere near as many copies, but they have done cumulatively quite well. In total, it is estimated that approximately 100 million Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms novels have been sold since the lines began in 1984 and 1987 respectively.

These aren’t chump figures, and they compare very well to, say, Star Wars tie-in fiction (which has sold an estimated 120 million copies or so, in a vastly better-known franchise) and may even rival Star Trek novel sales, and are certainly far ahead of the sales of the likes of, say, Doctor Who. It’s an impressive achievement which brings us back to our original question: why isn’t more Dungeons and Dragons fiction being created?

The success of D&D fiction is not particularly tied to that of the roleplaying game; the majority of people who’ve read a Salvatore novel have probably never played a game of Dungeons and Dragons in their life, and the books all stand alone with no knowledge of the game needed to enjoy them. That in itself may be part of the problem: relatively few people are reading Star Wars novels or Star Trek books who don’t also watch the films or TV shows, but the same is not true of D&D. The cross-pollination between the novels and the game is, at least historically, limited. We can see that when D&D was selling very poorly in the late 1990s, shifting only a few hundred copies of the latest sourcebook, but the latest R.A. Salvatore hardcover was debuting on the New York Times bestseller list. Similarly, when the 4th Edition of D&D crashed and burned in sales (after a successful initial launch in 2008, but then a swift and ignominious outclassing by the rival Pathfinder RPG, which launched with a D&D-compatible and more popular rules set), the novels continued to sell quite well for years afterwards.

When the 5th Edition of D&D launched in 2014, the fiction lines were still running. There was a cross-brand, multimedia story event called The Sundering, which spanned several ongoing Forgotten Realms series with several of the setting’s most popular authors (including Salvatore, Greenwood, Kemp, Denning and successful relative newcomer Erin M. Evans), which seemed to do well. However, immediately after the Sundering concluded, the previous high output of the Wizards of the Coast fiction department seemed to drop. R.A. Salvatore published five more books, Ed Greenwood two and Erin Evans three, and absolutely none of the enormous battery of other authors on hand released any more books. All of the published books were additions to ongoing series, indicating that they were being released to fulfil contracts and run those contracts out. The low print runs for Erin Evans’ Brimstone Angels novels (hence the insane prices they are currently commanding on eBay) seems to indicate that this was the case.

With the release of Erin Evans’ The Devil You Know in December 2016, Wizards of the Coast shut down its book imprint, at least for new submissions. In fact, Hasbro terminated its entire fiction acquiring role outright. Other book lines, such as the perennially popular Magic: The Gathering novel series, were also shut down for new authors. The divisions would still exist, but only to reprint and pump out legacy sales (such as the excellently-performing omnibuses of Drizzt Do’Urden adventures).

This seemed counter-intuitive and baffling, but some logic soon emerged. The Dungeons & Dragons and Magic lines had not been discontinued, but they’d been moved to other publishing houses: HarperCollins picked up the Dungeons and Dragons/Forgotten Realms licence and announced a new trilogy contract with R.A. Salvatore. Del Rey announced a licencing deal for Magic: The Gathering. Interestingly, Wizards of the Coast and Del Rey had also lined up well-known, more mainstream fantasy authors to continue the Magic line: Brandon Sanderson, Kate Elliott, Django Wexler and Greg Weisman (although several of these would be online-only publications).

HarperCollins has so far not announced any plans for additional D&D or Forgotten Realms novels beyond Relentless by Salvatore (which is released at the end of July), which given the nuclear-hot status of D&D at the moment feels weird. I do think it’s likely that there will be more books from Salvatore and probably a new trilogy is deal is being discussed now. Certainly, many of the other, well-established D&D authors stand ready to write more fiction but they haven’t even had meetings with HarperCollins to that end.

I suspect the main problem here is licensing: Hasbro bought Wizards of the Coast in 1999 and let them do their own thing for quite some time, but around a decade ago, in the wake of the mega-success of the Transformers movies, instituted a new corporate policy which insisted on maximum return on any deal. In particular, all Hasbro-owned properties would be required to generate a rock bottom amount (rumoured to be $15 million) in profit in any given year, otherwise they would be temporarily retired for several years before being brought back in a blaze of publicity. This meant that a product line could be successful at what Hasbro would consider a low level – generating several million in profits per year – but still not be doing enough for Hasbro to consider it worthwhile. Hasbro also wanted to make its own operations leaner and more efficient, focusing on its core brands of toys and games. Publishing was a tangent and they decided to shut it down so they didn’t have to bother with it and could just outsource licences to third party publishers.

That’s fine as far as it goes, but it does create a significant entry barrier. If the licencing fee is high enough, then the publisher will become increasingly risk-averse. For an author like R.A. Salvatore, who is guaranteed to sell at least a million copies of their latest novel no matter what, that’s not a problem as their sales will easily make up for the lost revenue to the licence fee. For even a very solid performer like Ed Greenwood or Paul Kemp, whose latest book is still guaranteed to sell at least a couple of hundred thousand, the fee might make the prospect of publishing the book riskier. For authors further down the sales hierarchy, it actually becomes prohibitive.

If these books were still being published in-house, then the licencing fee wouldn’t exist: the profits would go to Wizards and thus Hasbro regardless, so even relatively low-selling authors who were still breaking even were still worth publishing, because it puts books on the shelves, keeps the brand visible etc, and that mass accumulation of sales can drive an overall strong sales performance. But since Wizards and Hasbro can’t be bothered with that approach, it’s not happening.

The Grand History of the Realms details some 38,000 years of history of the Forgotten Realms setting, highlighting its immense attention to detail and the size of its background lore, seen as both a benefit and a drawback.

I Fought the Lore and the Lore Won

I suspect there is another problem, much more specific to the Forgotten Realms setting. Created by Ed Greenwood in 1967, converted for use for his home Dungeons & Dragons campaign in 1976, converted as a background to Dragon magazine articles in 1978 and finally officially published in 1987, the Forgotten Realms holds a strong claim to being the most detailed, continuously-in-print and popular shared fantasy world ever created. This has manifested through approximately 243 dedicated gaming products (boxed sets, supplements, adventures, sourcebooks and adventure paths), 292 books, 53 video games and thousands of magazine and online articles and in-depth discussions on dedicated message boards.

This has resulted in a robustly-detailed world. The Forgotten Realms Wiki has 32,000 entries and is not still not remotely complete. Although the central tenet of Forgotten Realms has always been "make the world your own," including or ignoring elements of the canon as you choose, the setting did gain a - somewhat unfair - reputation for being impenetrable to newcomers or casual fans by the end of D&D's third edition in 2008.

This resulted in the highly controversial decision to nuke the setting. The version of Forgotten Realms that was released for the 4th Edition of D&D in 2008 moved the timeline one hundred years into the future - promptly killing every single human, non-magically-enhanced character in the setting - and saw the Realms effectively destroyed by a magical cataclysm known as the Spellplague, with the setting now adopting a post-apocalyptic tone. Needless to say, fans were utterly furious and most pointblank ignored the changes. The hope that the "factory reset" of the setting would bring in new fans also failed to materialise. The rival Pathfinder game stole D&D's thunder and its own setting of Golarion became an effective replacement for the Realms as the "default" D&D-style fantasy world for several years.

The success of D&D 5th Edition helped save the Realms. The Sundering event saw a second "factory reset" of the Realms, restoring the pre-Spellplague (and in fact pre-3rd Edition, in several key respects) version of the setting whilst maintaining the time jump. The 5th Edition of the setting thus maintains the rich backstory of the setting whilst not alienating the fans who came on board in more recent years. The absence of new novels is also helpful in not adding to the mountain of lore the setting has built up, allowing fans to get a better handle on the settle over a wider period of time.

Long-term fans of the setting note that the rich depth of the setting in terms of backstory and characters is one of its key appeals, and not developing that further through fiction is doing far more to damage the setting's appeal than inaction is in making it more popular.

The cover of Relentless, only the third D&D novel published since the end of 2016.

So, what does the future hold for D&D novels?

I suspect in the near future we will see confirmation of a new R.A. Salvatore deal. I also suspect that there are negotiations going on for relatively “big name” fantasy authors to perhaps line up a D&D novel or three (Brandon Sanderson would be a shoe-in, especially after his recent Magic: The Gathering novella, but he’s way too busy with his own Cosmere setting). One of the biggest factors in D&D’s current success has been the success of YouTube web series like Critical Role, and I suspect if Matt Mercer and a novelist teamed up to write a novel set in the world of Exandria, that deal would be done pretty quickly. I also suspect that if Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman came to Wizards of the Coast with a new Dragonlance proposal, that would also be snapped up pretty quickly.

Otherwise I think we’ll be seeing the licence-holder being quite cautious going forwards. There could be a tie-in novel for the D&D movie due in 2022, but beyond that things may depend on the success of the film. If it is huge, that could propel things forward on other fronts. I suspect, though, the days of 15-20 novels being published a year may be in the past, with a much higher barrier for entry in the future, unless Wizards of the Coast take the publishing arm back in-house. Given that D&D is, at heart, a series of rulebooks, it’s a bit weird that the fiction publishing arm was shuttered anyway.

What is clear is that there is an enormous audience out there for Dungeons and Dragons-branded fiction, whether set in one of the established worlds or a new one, and the current D&D licence-holders are leaving a lot of money on the table by continuing to ignore them.


* The count is currently 292 books in the Forgotten Realms line, 203 in the Dragonlance franchise, 40 in Eberron, 24 in Ravenloft, 16 in Dark Sun, 13 in Greyhawk, 10 in Mystara, 7 in Nentir Vale and 6 apiece for Birthright, Planescape and Spelljammer.

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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.

A History of Epic Fantasy - Part 13

When they came up with the name "Dungeons and Dragons" for their roleplaying game in 1974, Gary Gygax and David Arneson envisaged heroic adventurers entering vast underground labyrinths in search of treasure and battling mighty dragons. It turned out this didn't happen too often, as their dragons were incredibly tough monsters, best-handled by heroes only after many months of adventuring and acquiring magical weapons.

In 1982 TSR, Inc., the owners of Dungeons and Dragons, decided to restore the game's focus on the mighty winged beasts. They had developed an elaborate number of different types of dragons, some good, some evil and some indifferent, and wanted to draw them together with a cohesive backstory and mythology. They also wanted to create a grand story using the D&D brand, rather the smaller-scale, sword-and-sorcery adventures that most players had been enjoying up to this point. So was born "Project Overlord", an attempt to turn D&D into an epic saga.

To bring this project to fruition, TSR turned to Tracy Hickman. A (relatively) new employee at TSR HQ in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, Hickman and his wife Laura had conceived of a new campaign idea during a lengthy car journey. This campaign had been unfolding in D&D sessions run by Hickman for his friends and co-workers, and would now serve as the basis for "Project Overlord". Hickman was put in charge of the project, along with Margaret Weis, an editor working for the company. This was going to be a multimedia project, incorporating a series of a dozen or so roleplaying adventure modules and a series of novels. TSR had limited experience in this field, so brought in a professional author to write the books. Weis and Hickman felt that this author didn't get what they were trying to do, and in the end fired him. Over the course of a weekend they together wrote the opening chapters of the first novel themselves. Impressed, TSR hired them as the authors for what would now be called The Dragonlance Chronicles.

Red dragon pulls off the best portraitbomb ever.

Dragons of Autumn Twilight

The world of Krynn is suffering in the aftermath of the Cataclysm, the devastation of the landmass of Ansalon by the gods, furious at the temerity of a human empire which had challenged their power. The gods have turned their backs on the stricken continent, which has sunk into war and conflict. When the dark goddess Takhisis secretly casts her influence over Krynn once again, sponsoring the rise of an empire allied to the dragons of chaos, it falls to a band of heroes to save the world. However, the heroes are divided by internal conflicts and their would-be allies are scattered and leaderless.

Dragons of Autumn Twilight certainly didn't win any awards for originality in its setting or general storyline. But it did do things a little differently to other fantasy stories. The magically-enhanced genetic engineering of a race of human-dragon hybrids was fairly unusual for the time and the story took a number of unexpected, dark turns. A major character died unexpectedly in the cliffhanger to the second volume (more shockingly, killed by one of his own former friends and allies), and there were a number of epic dragon-on-dragon battles. That said, these flourishes were more about rearranging the furniture than totally rewriting the rules.

What made Dragons of Autumn Twilight and its immediate sequels, Dragons of Winter Night and Dragons of Spring Dawning, such a success was the marketing. The books were pitched at a young and teenage audience, many of them already familiar with dragons and Takhisis (in her core D&D guise of Tiamat) from the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon series that had started airing in 1983. The focus on dragons and the cross-marketing with the adventure modules also proved extremely successful. Sales of the Dragonlance Chronicles shot through the roof, helped by strong sales in the UK thanks to a team-up with Penguin Books. Sales increased again a few years later when the trilogy was repackaged and sold in an omnibus edition.

By 1991 there were over four million copies of the Chronicles trilogy in print, giving it a claim to being the biggest-selling epic fantasy trilogy of the 1980s. It helped revitalise interest in both dragons and the D&D game, as well as serving as the entry-point for hundreds of thousands of young and new fantasy fans. It also kick-started the collaborative writing career of Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. They followed up on the initial series with an expectation-defying sequel trilogy, The Dragonlance Legends, comprising Time of the Twins, War of the Twins and Test of the Twins (1986). The original trilogy had been a war epic of massive scale and scope, but this was a far more intimate story focused on the intense and complex relationship between the heroic Caramon Majere and his brother, the sickly, morally-compromised wizard Raistlin, whose antihero antics had made him easily the most popular character in the franchise.

Weis and Hickman then edited some additional Dragonlance books before striking out to write original fiction for Bantam Books, including the hugely popular Death Gate Cycle, before returning to the Dragonlance world for more novels around the turn of the century. With sales approaching 30 million, they the most successful collaborative writing team in the history of epic fantasy and one of the most influential.

The success of the initial Dragonlance books led to more, a lot more, written by numerous authors. Almost 200 Dragonlance novels have now been published, ranging over a span of time from millennia before the Chronicles trilogy to centuries after, but none have repeated the enormous success of Weis and Hickman's books. It would take another four years - and a completely different world - for that to happen.

The Crystal Shard

Ed Greenwood had started writing fantasy stories in 1967, at the age of eight. Over the course of years he built up and created his own fantasy world, telling stories about characters like Mirt the Moneylender, a cheerfully roguish adventurer-turned-merchant who was actually one of the secret lords of Waterdeep, the City of Splendours. In 1978 Greenwood converted his world into a setting for his homebrew games of D&D and started publishing gaming articles in Dragon Magazine. Over the next seven years or so he became one of the most prolific and popular contributors to the magazine, making frequent references to his home setting.

In 1985 TSR bought the rights to Greenwood's fictional world and turned it into an official D&D campaign setting. The idea was that Dragonlance had become very narratively centred on the War of the Lance (covered in the Chronicles books) and its aftermath, and TSR wanted a much bigger world where they could tell a wider canvas of stories. Greenwood and designer Jeff Grubb set about this project with enthusiasm, releasing in 1987 the Forgotten Realms campaign setting. It was accompanied by novels, both a trilogy by Douglas Niles about the Moonshae Isles and a stand-alone book by Greenwood called Spellfire. These did okay, but were not huge successes. It was the next book published in the setting that established its popularity.

Robert Salvatore was 28 years old and had sent TSR a novel on spec, Echoes of the Fourth Magic, about a research submarine and its crew which are transported into a fantasy world. It wasn't TSR's normal kind of thing, but it was enough get the attention of editor Mary Kirchoff. She gave Salvatore a large map of the Realms and asked for ideas. The one he came up was for a sub-arctic tundra setting, an evil magical gemstone of enormous power and a young barbarian hero. The editor bought the idea, but later on had to reject one of the sidekick characters. Five minutes late for a marketing meeting to discuss the book, she asked for Salvatore to create a new character on the spot. His panicked response was to suggest a dark elf ranger named Drizzt Do'Urden, which he didn't even know how to spell. On that random moment, Salvatore's entire writing career was set in motion.

Published in 1988, The Crystal Shard was a slightly unusual D&D novel. The frozen setting, the characters who are twisted versions of standard fantasy archetypes (the dark elf character suffering from racial prejudice and a halfling who's a shrewd trickster and thief rather than a cosy hobbit) and an unusually proficient ability at writing action sequences set The Crystal Shard apart and made it an enormous success. Two sequels followed, but it was the Dark Elf Trilogy (1990-91), which abandoned the epic scale of the earlier books and delved deep into Drizzt's personal backstory, which took the character and made him iconic. Almost thirty years later, approximately 30 million copies of Drizzt's adventures have been sold, making him the most popular-ever D&D character and Salvatore the single most successful author to have worked in that fantasy universe.

By the late 1980s epic fantasy was now firmly established as a marketable, popular genre. There were a few bestselling authors working in the field, critically-acclaimed novels and books which did things a bit differently. But it was still lacking a work that would build on Tolkien's legacy and take it to another level. But at this point there was not just one but two authors working on books and series that would be defined by their extraordinary lengths, their enormous popularity and the huge impact they would have on the genre.

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.

The Worlds of D&D: Dragonlance

The History of Dragonlance

In January 1984 a rather minimalist advert appeared in the pages of Dragon Magazine, the monthly Dungeons and Dragons periodical published by TSR. This advert informed the reader that something called 'Dragonlance' was 'coming soon'. In March, the magazine published a short story called 'The Test of the Twins', written by Margaret Weis, and had a feature on the forthcoming new game. It was revealed that Dragonlance was going to be a line of epic D&D adventure modules set in a brand new world and featuring an ongoing storyline the players would get embroiled in. The first Dragonlance product, the adventure Dragons of Despair, appeared later that month and was a success, spawning no less than thirteen sequels that combined to form one huge story arc, a first for the D&D game at that time.

The first Dragonlance product, released in March 1984.

Dragonlance was originally the brainchild of Tracy Hickman and his wife Laura, who brainstormed the concepts behind the setting during a long drive from Utah to Wisconsin in 1981. Hickman proposed the series of modules to TSR the following year, and won the approval of TSR boss Gary Gygax, who had long planned to do a series of modules where each adventure was based around one of the twelve dragon types from D&D's Monster Manual. A team was put together consisting of Hickman, top TSR artist Larry Elmore and several other writers, including Jeff Grubb. As the project expanded in scope and ambition, it was given the code-name 'Overlord' and more writers were brought on board, including Margaret Weis and Douglas Niles. What had started as a linked series of adventures about dragons had become something much more massive: no less than The Lord of the Rings of fantasy role-playing campaigns.

Given that huge numbers of D&D players were also fans of the works of Tolkien and some other epic fantasy authors (the works of Stephen Donaldson, Raymond E. Feist, David Eddings and Terry Brooks were gaining enormous popularity at the time Dragonlance started development), it was inevitable that something along these lines would happen. The previous 'main' D&D world, Gygax's Greyhawk setting, had been defined as a setting which would handle lots of different stories along the lines of Howard's Hyboria or Leiber's Nehwon. This new setting, however, was defined and driven by one large storyline, that of the War of the Lance, and the various roles that player-characters could take in that story.

For a lot of people, where Dragonlance really began.

Whilst the adventure modules were rolling out, TSR decided that the story was big and interesting enough to be turned into a series of novels. After the initial writer they hired didn't meet their expectations, they fired him and assigned Weis and Hickman to the job. They decided to base the book on the first two adventure modules and it was published under the title Dragons of Autumn Twilight in November 1984. It was followed by Dragons of Winter Night in April 1985 and Dragons of Spring Dawning in November 1985, bringing the epic story to a conclusion (although the modules wouldn't catch up until later in 1986). The trilogy, known as the Dragonlance Chronicles, became one of the biggest-selling epic fantasy sequences of all time, shifting four million copies in its first five years. In total, the thirteen Weis and Hickman Dragonlance novels have sold a massive 22 million copies to date.

In 1987, with Gygax departing TSR and Greyhawk's future being uncertain, the company released Dragonlance Adventures, a book that opened up Krynn as a world for many different stories outside the War of the Lance. Additional Dragonlance novels were solicited, with Weis and Hickman penning the well-received Dragonlance Legends trilogy (Time of the Twins, War of the Twins, Test of the Twins). Not tied to any adventure modules, this was a 'quieter' but still important story focusing on the fan-favourite character of Raistlin, a sickly but powerful mage, and his brother Caramon, and is certainly a more interesting story than the more traditional original trilogy. However, Weis and Hickman then decided to break with TSR and begin penning original-fiction novels for other publishers, going on to deliver the best-selling Darksword and Rose of the Prophet trilogies and the well-received seven-volume Death Gate Cycle through the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The Heroes of the Lance.

Other writers carried on the Dragonlance name, with the novel range eventually encompassing a colossal 190 books. However, a key weakness in the Dragonlance setting was exposed in the process. The Dragonlance world had been created to tell the story of the War of the Lance and the various attempts to turn it into an 'open' game world where any story could be set never really seemed to catch on, possibly as D&D already had Mystara, Greyhawk and, after 1987, Forgotten Realms to fulfil that function. Dragonlance's selling points were its epic history, memorable characters and the vast scale of the War of the Lance, and the various novels and further RPG materials kept falling back on those elements, making the setting rather insular and self-referential. It became difficult for newcomers to break into the setting. An attempt to create a new continent across the sea, Taladas, in the expansion product Time of the Dragon for AD&D 2nd Edition, also failed to garner much attention. As the 1990s rolled on, the setting seemed to have become somewhat moribund.

In 1996, TSR resurrected Dragonlance. Accepting that the setting's strength was its story, they wooed Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman back to the fold and they wrote a new novel, Dragons of Summer Flame, as a follow-up to the original series. This epic novel introduced the Fifth Age of Krynn's history and severed its ties to the D&D game, with a new, diceless RPG rules system called Saga introduced to carry the roleplaying side of things forward, whilst other writers wrote new novels. Unfortunately, this burst of activity came just as TSR entered a period of financial crisis. The new novels and the Saga game died an unexpectedly early death and with TSR going down in flames, it looked like Dragonlance was going to go down with it.

Wizards of the Coast swooped to the rescue and bought out TSR, resurrecting D&D and introducing a new 3rd Edition of the game in 2000. With Wizards of the Coast deciding to concentrate only on Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms as their core settings, the other gameworlds were up for grabs, and several third-party publishers licensed various settings for their own purposes. Seeing an opportunity to regain creative control of Dragonlance for the first time in fifteen years, Margaret Weis founded Sovereign Press and licensed the Dragonlance setting for her own use. She and Hickman published a new series of novels, the War of Souls trilogy, to take Krynn into a new era whilst Sovereign Press re-established the setting as a D&D gameworld, to great success. Wizards of the Coast used its financial muscle to re-release many of the original Dragonlance novels, building up some excitement over the setting that finally led, in 2007, to the long-mooted animated Dragonlance movie, although this was not very successful. In 2008 Wizards took back control of the Dragonlance licence from Sovereign and published a 4th Edition of D&D, leading some fans to believe that Wizards are planning new Dragonlance material for release in 2011 or later. So the setting is on hiatus again at the moment, but it appears that it will make a reappearance at some point in the future.

Fanon map of Krynn, with Ansalon in the south and Taladas to the north-east.

The World of Dragonlance

The Dragonlance saga takes place on the world of Krynn, a more-or-less Earth-sized world consisting of three or four major continental landmasses, although only two - Ansalon and Taladas - have been developed in any detail. Ansalon, a fairly small continent in the southern hemisphere connected to the southern polar icecap, is the primary setting for Dragonlance material.

Since Dragonlance was designed as an attempt to convey the traditional epic fantasy story in a roleplaying setting (as opposed to the likes of Greyhawk, which took its sword 'n' sorcery cue more from the likes of Howard and Leiber), it has a fairly detailed and involved backstory. The major event in the history of the world is the Cataclysm, which took place roughly 300 years before the events of the original books and modules. A powerful kingdom, Istar, angered the gods to the extent that they dropped a hail of flaming meteors across the planet, devastating large portions of it and severing all ties between the gods and their followers, removing clerical magic from the world. At the time the books begin, the many-headed draconic god Takhisis (a Krynn-based representation of the more traditional D&D deity Tiamat, made famous by frequent appearances in the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon series) has decided to breach the ban of the gods from influencing Krynn and has had her followers amass a vast army to conquer the world. Takhisis' opposite number, Paladine (a Krynn-specific version of the draconic god Bahamat), has decided to also take a part in events to balance out her influence, and eventually the other gods are reluctantly drawn back into the affairs of Krynn.

Ansalon, the main continent of Krynn, at the time of the War of the Lance. It gets blown up a lot.

Takhisis' legions of 'draconians' (human-sized dragon-like creatures), human and goblin followers supported by several powerful dragons overrun much of Ansalon, but thanks to Paladine's machinations a band of heroes escape the conquest of their homeland, Solace, and join forces with local dwarf and elf communities to form armies to slow down the enemy advance. They also undertake dangerous quests to win the allegiance of the 'good' dragons and recover the dragonlances, powerful weapons that can be wielded from dragon-back. Eventually this 'War of the Lance' is concluded with our heroes victorious, but not without a cost. Several of them die in the war and its aftermath, and one of their number, the wizard Raistlin, develops a somewhat disturbing interest in raw magical power. Later Dragonlance works focus on Raistlin as he his torn between his lust for power and his former friends, most notably his noble brother Caramon who tries to 'win him back'. This personal story rapidly became Margaret Weis' favourite storyline, along with many fans, and satisfyingly addresses the question about what happens when the heroes who have become so powerful they can defeat a dark god decide they have come to enjoy their immense power and influence a little bit too much.

"Excuse me, do you have five breath mints?"

Later Dragonlance materials focus on the Second Cataclysm, which takes place 25 years after the War of the Lance, and sees the world severed once again from the gods and forced to endure forty years of darkness and war before the epic War of Souls restores the gods (yet again) and sees Ansalon united under a new empire after the final defeat of Takhisis.


Evaluation

Many fantasy fans who entered the genre in the 1980s and 1990s likely did so with the Dragonlance Chronicles and Legends trilogies as early reading material. I actually didn't read them until some time after I'd gotten into fantasy via Terry Brooks, Terry Pratchett, Tolkien and R.A. Salvatore, but still found them quite enjoyable. One of the more interesting things I found in the books was that the writers didn't try to depict every single event and front of the war, and they constantly reiterated that whilst the core cast of heroes was vital to the war they couldn't have succeeded without the help of many other characters fighting their own battles elsewhere. Of course, I learned later that this wasn't for artistic purposes but was simply done because the novels couldn't fit all fourteen of the original adventure modules into a trilogy, so they just left several of them out and referred to their events obliquely instead.

As a setting for stories, Dragonlance is a fairly decent world with a broad, if unoriginal, history and an interesting focus on dragons. One of the reasons TSR liked the original proposal was because they felt the game had concentrated on the 'dungeons' to the exclusion of the 'dragons' over the years and this was a good way of redressing the balance. However, as a setting for roleplaying campaigns Dragonlance is problematic.

As I indicated earlier, Dragonlance was built around its story, the War of the Lance, and whenever the focus moves away from that story the elements that make the world different and interesting compared to other D&D settings promptly vanish. In short, unless you are specifically going to tie your campaign into the Dragonlance metaplot, there is very little reason to adventure in Dragonlance and not in, say, the far larger and much more varied Forgotten Realms setting, or the more old-school, swashbuckling Greyhawk world. If you are going to tie your campaign into the history of Krynn, this is great but this option brings its own challenges. Players are much more likely to have read the Dragonlance books than any other D&D tie-in fiction out there, and if you get details wrong or go off-story you may find players not liking that (and of course if you are trying to stay on-history, you may find players not liking that either and getting annoyed at being railroaded). This makes running a Dragonlance adventure or campaign difficult, to say the least.

Another problem is that following the story forwards after the War of the Lance leads into a rather repetitive cycle of peace, wars, cold wars, the gods withdrawing or returning to the world on a giant cosmic yo-yo and confusion over the status of different characters (so is Raistlin dead now? Or is this when he becomes trapped in another dimension? Does he become a god at some point or was that someone else?). In short, the success of the original Dragonlance story turned it into a franchise, and like all franchises at some point originality has to be chucked out of the window in favour of what the suits think sells, and in this case it seems to be repeating the War of the Lance with the serial numbers filed off, which gets rather old.

There is also another problem with the setting:

Have you seen this kender? You have? And he still lives? Why?

Jar-Jar before there was Jar-Jar, Tasslehoff Burrfoot may actually be the single most annoying character ever created in the entire history of Dungeons and Dragons and all of its spin-offs over the past forty years, with the Dragonlance wizard Fizban coming in at a close second. When the writers become a little too enamoured of their annoying comic relief sidekick character and start having him save the day every other book, you know something has gone wrong somewhere.

In the final analysis, the original Dragonlance saga is an interesting and enjoyable story for YA readers first starting out in epic fantasy. The original adventures and their various remakes under 2nd and 3rd Edition D&D are also enjoyable, if a bit rail-roaded and limited in giving the players free choice about what to do next. However, I remain unconvinced that there is much more that can be done with the setting outside of its core storyline and characters. If Wizards can find a new, fresh angle to explore the setting from in 4th Edition, Dragonlance's inevitable return could be a very good thing, otherwise it seems a little pointless.

Next time, we will journey to the continent of Faerun, home of beholders, author-insertion mages and a ridiculously large number of emo-riven dark elves. Seriously guys, you get to live for 400 years, girls like you and you can do magic tricks. Cheer up!