Wizards of the Coast tease a new TV series about Drizzt Do'Urden from the creator of JOHN WICK

After yesterday's confusion about the setting of the Dungeons & Dragons movie, which they've now confirmed is indeed the Forgotten Realms world, Wizards of the Coast have teased that another TV show they are developing may be about their signature character of Drizzt Do'Urden.

News broke in January that Hasbro's internal production company, eOne, are developing a Dungeons & Dragons project for television. This would be released alongside the new film and would start building a D&D TV and film "multiverse," similar to the Marvel and Star Wars universes. D&D, to be fair, is well-suited to such an approach, with the game featuring over a dozen worlds and many more other planes and dimensions in which stories, series and films can be told. The Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance medieval fantasy worlds are the best-known, but others include those of Dark Sun, Ravenloft, Mystara, Greyhawk, Birthright and Eberron, with the Spelljammer setting (featuring space travel) and Planescape line (featuring interdimensional travel) linking them together.

Derek Kolstadt, who wrote or co-wrote the first three John Wick movies and also worked on The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, has been tapped to write and potentially showrun the new series.

Today, Polygon learned direct from Wizards of the Coast that this series may revolve around the Forgotten Realms - and arguably D&D itself - signature character of Drizzt Do'Urden. Drizzt is a dark elf (or drow) ranger from the Underdark who fights evil as one of the "Companions of the Hall," alongside halfling thief Regis, human archer Cattie-brie, barbarian warrior Wulfgar and dwarven leader King Bruenor of Mithral Hall. Drizzt fled his evil, corrupt home city of Menzoberranzan as a youngster and is regarded as a traitor by his people, leading to conflict with the dwarven city of Mithral Hall and the human city of Silverymoon.

Drizzt first appeared in the 1988 novel The Crystal Shard by R.A. Salvatore and has since appeared in more than thirty additional novels, charting his adventures across a time period of almost two hundred years (due to drow lifespans reaching or exceeding eight centuries, Drizzt is still considered a youngster). The Legend of Drizzt over-arcing series is the most popular line of Dungeons & Dragons novels ever published, selling more than 30 million copies (marginally more than Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman's Dragonlance series) over more than thirty years, making Salvatore one of the biggest-selling living fantasy authors in the field of epic fantasy. The popularity of Drizzt is such that even when Wizards of the Coast decided to reduce the number of D&D novels being published in 2016, Drizzt books have remained in production; the only three D&D-branded novels published since 2017 feature Drizzt as the protagonist, and a new Drizzt-centric trilogy, The Way of the Drow, begins publication this year.

Although Drizzt is immensely popular - more novels featuring the character have been sold than actual D&D rulebooks - he is also regarded with disdain by some fans, some feeling the character has been over-exposed and is no longer as interesting as in his early books, and others resenting the number of "copycat" characters created by players over the years. Others also feel the Drizzt's popularity has overwhelmed that of the rest of the Forgotten Realms setting, with arguably more interesting characters sidelined or under-utilised to keep the focus on Drizzt.

Previous film and television adaptations of Drizzt have also foundered on the character's ethnicity. Dark elves are dark-skinned in a manner that does not really exist in the real world, but some have drawn as analogous to actual human ethnic groups. Salvatore's depiction of the drow as being universally evil aside from Drizzt, his father Zaknafein and the morally-dubious assassin Jarlaxle, has also been criticised, especially as other Forgotten Realms books and products have increasingly focused on the noble drow goddess Eilistraee and her followers, who seek to redeem the race and end the curse that prevents them from walking in sunlight. These issues, extending to how you depict and cast the dark elves, were regarded as problematic enough to make the idea of depicting them on screen a headache.

It sounds like Wizards may have overcome this problem. Recent artistic depictions of Drizzt and other dark elves have given a purple hue to their skin unlike anything in the real world, perhaps a mild retcon to make them less like real human ethnic groups. There may also have been a decision to lean into the themes of racism and colonialism that run through Salvatore's books, which even in the 1980s were regarded as unusual and forward-looking (it not tremendously sophisticated), in a more modern context.

Whatever the case, it does sound like a live-action depiction of Dungeons & Dragon's most popular - and divisive - character is on the cards. More news as it develops.

DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: DARK ALLIANCE gets release date and trailer

Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance has gotten a surprisingly imminent release date. The game will launch on 22 June this year.

D&D: Dark Alliance is a spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance (2001) and Dark Alliance II (2004). Like those games, this is an action title set in the Forgotten Realms world and emphasising combat over roleplaying. The game sees the players taking control of the infamous Companions of the Hall - drow ranger Drizzt Do'Urden, human archer Cattie-brie, dwarven warrior Bruenor Battlehammer and human barbarian Wulfgar - in a struggle against an army of invaders that swarmed into Icewind Dale in search of the infamous magical artifact known as the Crystal Shard. These characters and events were made famous in R.A. Salvatore's bestselling novel series, The Icewind Dale Trilogy, although the game does not appear to be a 1:1 adaptation of the novels, featuring as it does both beholders and wights (which are nowhere to be found in the books).

The trailer makes some bold choices with bombastic visuals, a heavy rock soundtrack and very generic-looking action. Hopefully the game will be better than it appears.

The game will launch on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, X-Box One and X-Box Series X, as well as, pleasingly, PC (the original Dark Alliance games were not released on PC).

The Halfling's Gem by R.A. Salvatore

The Companions of the Hall have successfully located Mithril Hall, the ancestral home of Bruenor Battlehammer and his clansmen. Unfortunately, the quest was completed only at great cost: Bruenor was lost in combat with the shadow dragon Shimmergloom and the halfling Regis was captured by the assassin Artemis Entreri. Entreri is now taking his prisoner back to the great southern metropolis of Calimport, leaving Drizzt Do'Urden and Wulfgar with no choice but to pursue them, whilst Catti-brie organises the armies coming together to retake Mithril Hall. The pursuit is long and dangerous, and Drizzt must decide whether the recovery of his friend is true motivation, or the knowledge that Entreri is the first warrior to have ever matched him blade to blade, and how eagerly he seeks a rematch.

The Halfling's Gem (1990) wraps up R.A. Salvatore's first fantasy series, The Icewind Dale Trilogy. The Crystal Shard had introduced the world to the dark elven ranger Drizzt Do'Urden and his companions and Streams of Silver had given them an epic, Tolkienesque quest to undertake. This concluding book sees them divided and hot on the heels of one of their kidnapped fellows, a scenario ripe for pulp fantasy adventure, and that's what we get. Drizzt and company visit the grand cities of Waterdeep, Baldur's Gate, Memnon and Calimport; engage in all manner of hijinks on the high seas; and are then pitched into battle with a shadowy thieves' guild and its allies, a mixture of wizards, giants and wererats. It's mostly splendid fun.

By this third book, Salvatore has become a reasonable writer of straightforward action adventure and delivers an entertaining book in that mode. It does feel like he has larger aspirations to write an engaging travelogue of the Sword Coast (the west coast of the main Forgotten Realms continent of Faerun and the focus for many of the works in the setting), and in that respect falters; 320 pages isn't really enough time to do that and  both Waterdeep and Baldur's Gate get decidedly short shrift in this book. Calimport is more fully fleshed out, but it's questionable to what extent Salvatore consulted the source material: the city's distinction of being divided into many dozen drudachs or subdistricts, each walled off from its neighbours, is not mentioned at all. As a result the unique character and flavour of Calimport is lost (Salvatore is also smarter than to rely on Arabian stereotypes for the city or Calimshan as a whole, although one hapless Memnon merchant does start leaning in that direction).

Characterisation remains reasonable and Salvatore explores some interesting ideas, such as Drizzt using a magical mask to pass as a surface elf and avoid the racist appraisals of his character stemming from his skin colour alone, and facing a crisis of identity as a result. Drizzt also has to face his motives for dealing with Entreri, and whether these stem from a desire for revenge, a desire for a rematch with a worthy foe or a genuine desire to save his friend Regis. Wulfgar also gets a fish-out-of-water storyline as he finds himself trying to survive in civilised surrounds for prolonged periods for the first time, and we meet a few more characters who will become important in future volumes of the wider Legend of Drizzt series, such as Captain Deudermont and the crew of the Sea Sprite.

On the minus side, there isn't much. This very much remains an action-focused, fast food meal of a fantasy novel and is enjoyable on that level, but those looking for a deeper, richer experience best look elsewhere.

Otherwise, The Halfling's Gem (***½) wraps up this trilogy reasonably well. From this book readers can go back to experience Drizzt's backstory in The Dark Elf Trilogy or press on to find out what happens to the Companions of the Hall and Mithril Hall next in the Legacy of the Drow Quartet (I'd strongly recommend the former). The book is available now in the UK and USA.

Streams of Silver by R.A. Salvatore

Having successfully saved Icewind Dale from the invading army of the sorcerer Akar Kessell - albeit at a high cost - Bruenor Battlehammer, Drizzt Do'Urden, Wulfgar and Regis embark on a new quest. This time their goal is Mithril Hall, the long-lost homeland of Bruenor. Unfortunately, Bruenor was only a child when the hall fell and has no memory of its location. The companions set out for the cities of Luskan and Silverymoon, hoping they will find clues to the Hall's whereabouts. But danger stalks the party, for the assassin Artemis Entreri is on their tail, seeking the halfling Regis, whilst the mages of Luskan are anxious for news of the Crystal Shard and are determined to recover it.

Streams of Silver (1989) is the middle volume of the Icewind Dale Trilogy but mercifully escapes "middle book syndrome" by virtue of Salvatore not planning a trilogy in the first place. The Crystal Shard had to stand well enough alone so that if it bombed, readers would not be left on too much of a cliffhanger for a sequel that would never come. Fortunately, the book did very well and two sequels were commissioned, which are more tightly connected together (the "standalone+duology" school of trilogies, which has an honourable precedent in the original Star Wars trilogy).

Streams of Silver is a less tightly-plotted book than The Crystal Shard and less epic in terms of having large armies clashing, but it's much more of a traditional Dungeons & Dragons adventure. We have our party, who even now get a cool name (The Companions of the Hall™) and they have a quest which takes them across the Savage North of the Forgotten Realms. Many, many later books would also focus on this region but it's interesting to see it in a nascent state here with a lot of the worldbuilding still in a fairly embryonic stage, to the point where Salvatore overlooks the existence of the later very high-profile city of Neverwinter, which is amusing, and Alustriel Silverhand, one of the infamous Seven Sisters, only has two sisters at this juncture. We get a nicely varied story as well, taking in political-magical intrigue in the city of Luskan, a semi-comic interlude in the whimsical wizard hamlet of Longsaddle, a more desperate long-running battle across the troll-infested Evermoors, an angsty stay in the city of Silverymoon (a bastion of peace and enlightenment where Drizzt hopes for respite, only to be turned away because of his dark elven heritage) and a final descent into Mithril Hall, presumably thoroughly checked by TSR's legal team to stave off the J.R.R. Tolkien Estate suing them into the next universe.

An interesting parallel storyline emerges where the assassin Artemis Entreri is hot on our heroes' trail and assembles an "evil party" to bring parity to their encounter, complete with its own wizard, tracker, magical construct and a reluctant guide in the form of Catti-brie, Bruenor's adopted daughter now turned hostage. Given that Catti-brie was barely even in the first book, it's good to see her have some character development in this volume.

There's a lot more female characters in general, including several among the villains, which remedies one of the oddities of the first book. There's a fair bit of action, although not quite as breathlessly over-the-top as in the first book (sadly Drizzt and Wulfgar don't get to take out two dozen giants single-handed, which was stretching credibility just a bit), and Salvatore's writing calms down. No more excited exclamation marks after every other sentence! His prose can still veer towards the cheesy (especially whenever he decides Drizzt needs to be introspective and ponder on the unfairness of the world), but it's easily accessible and straightforward. There's still more enthusiasm than skill here, but it's surprising how much fun that can be.

The novel is very much still in the "Big Mac with extra fries" mode of fantasy literature, but it does make some clumsy nods towards engaging with a big theme when it comes to racism. Drizzt is a dark elf or drow, whose people were cursed and outcast from the rest of elven civilisation ten thousand years ago after betraying the other elven peoples during the Crown Wars. As a result, Drizzt encounters extreme hostility from pretty much everyone he meets. Later Forgotten Realms fiction would cast this event as a grand tragedy, with many tens of thousands of innocent and "good" dark elves punished for the crimes of their evil brethren, with many drow fighting for redemption under the banner of the goddess Eilistraee. At this early stage in the setting's history, though, the worldbuilding is more that all the drow are evil all the time (apart from a small number who are merely totally amoral instead), and Drizzt is the only exception in the whole world. On that basis it's hard to make Drizzt's story about racism work when virtually all the other drow we meet are inherently evil (shades of Dragon Age trying to make a story about bigotry against its mages because the run the risk of being overwhelmed by evil forces, despite the fact that almost every single mage we meet does go insane and get possessed by a demon at one point or another). Later books, which introduce more nuance to the setting, do deal with the issue more successfully.

Streams of Silver (***½) is a reasonable follow-up to The Crystal Shard. Salvatore has improved as a writer, although this is still very much at the enjoyable pulp end of the literary spectrum, and makes a couple of nods at larger themes around racism, homelands and belonging in this book, which are not altogether successful. He does deliver a readable, action-packed story which moves with verve through an interesting setting. With the success of this novel a bit more assured, there's a cliffhanger ending leading into the concluding book in the trilogy, The Halfling's Gem. Streams of Silver is available now in the UK and USA.

The Crystal Shard by R.A. Salvatore

Far beyond the Spine of the World mountains, the ten towns of Icewind Dale stand in danger from an army of invading tribesmen. The outcast dark elf Drizzt Do'Urden learns of the impending threat and through his allies, the halfling Regis and the dwarven chieftain Bruenor, helps save the community from destruction. But in the aftermath of the conflict a betrayed mage finds an ancient artifact of incredible power, through which he means to conquer Icewind Dale.

Published way back in 1988, The Crystal Shard was the debut novel by R.A. Salvatore, the first novel in The Icewind Dale Trilogy (a trilogy notable for two-thirds of it taking place outside Icewind Dale) and the first in the much longer Legend of Drizzt mega-series, which now encompasses thirty-six books (thirty-nine if you count associated spin-off volumes focusing on other characters). It was also only the second novel published in the Forgotten Realms setting, the most popular fantasy shared-world setting in history, and a key reason why that setting exploded in popularity in the following months and years. It is also one of the biggest-selling and most popular Dungeons & Dragons spinoff novels of all time, possibly the biggest-selling (although it shares mighty competition from Dragons of Autumn Twilight).

As the ship that launched a thousand sub-series, it's a curiously unassuming book. The stakes are relatively low - the fate of the world is not in the balance, just a backwater wilderness way beyond the northern edge of most maps - and there's a distinctly old-fashioned feel to the book. There's a fair bit of exposition and characters are prone to making declarative statements that end in exclamation marks! Not every line, but enough to feel like you reading a book where everyone is slightly deaf and has to shout to make themselves heard. The absolute near-absence of female characters in the otherwise extremely egalitarian Forgotten Realms (only one, Catti-brie, has any lines of dialogue) is also baffling, and was somewhat odd at the time, let alone today. It's something Salvatore does fix in later books (where Catti-brie becomes a major player and more female characters appear) but I had forgotten how hugely imbalanced this first book is.

If you can overlook that, although the novel is very much not High Art, it is definitely fun. It's riper than three-year-old Stilton, but Salvatore makes up for a lack of technical skill with unbridled enthusiasm. There's fast and frenetic action scenes, and the characters may adhere to broad archetypes but they are executed well. Drizzt lacks his later mopiness at this stage and is even allowed to have some character flaws (his weakness for treasure and finding valuable magical items is something rolled back later on, but is amusing here). Indolent and morally suspect Regis gives us an answer to that question of what would have happened if one of the dodgier Sackville-Bagginses had joined the Fellowship of the Ring, and Bruenor is the most dwarfish dwarf who ever dwarfed. The only one of the core cast it's hard not to entirely like at this stage is Honourable Barbarian Warrior Wulfgar, Who Is Honourable And Stuff. Wulfgar is the kind of guy who has his own special rock where he goes to sit and be stoically honourable on (to the unbridled amusement of Catti-brie, who seems to have some kind of metatextual awareness of Wulfgar's character and needles him mercilessly about it, in one of the more modern-feeling touches to the novel). It's unsurprising that Salvatore seems to tire of Wulfgar - originally supposedly the hero and main protagonist - quite quickly and instead refocuses on the quirkier characters like Drizzt and Regis.

The book also has a splendid feel for the wider community of characters. In books like this it would be very easy to have our core foursome (Drizzt, Regis, Bruenor and Wulfgar) undertake valiant deeds that save Ten-Towns from oblivion, with the people they are saving reduced to faceless background roles. Instead, the people of the towns are depicted as fierce and independently-minded, always eager to mix it up with the various invaders and with their own internal politics that are well-described, and even bit-characters are given some complexity. Kemp, the spokesman for Targos, is both a selfish political game-player and a brave warrior eager to get to grips with the enemy. Surprisingly, Salvatore makes you care slightly more about these people more than you would for the otherwise amorphous blobs of "people we must save" in such stories.

The characterisation of the villain is also quite interesting: Akar Kessel, the mage who finds the Crystal Shard, is a complete and total imbecile and the semi-sentient Shard has to do a lot of work to mould him into a credible threat to Ten-Towns, to the point of often despairing at his total ineptitude. This is sometimes played for laughs, although darker character traits are hinted at: the fate of various "wenches" that Kessel mind-wipes into becoming his playthings - in another outbreak of 1980sness in the text - is mercifully left unaddressed. Kessel's ultimate fate is also darkly amusing.

The Crystal Shard (***½) - the literary equivalent of a Greggs Festive Bake - has not aged as well as might be hoped, but it's still a cracking adventure yarn which is well-paced, entertaining and occasionally surprising, if you can get through the wincing generated by some of the book's more dated aspects. Salvatore shows more enthusiasm than skill here, but does improve as a writer over the next few volumes. The book is available now in the UK and USA.

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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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.

UNFETTERED gets UK book deal

Fantasy author (and well-known fantasy webmaster) Shawn Speakman's fantasy anthology Unfettered has been picked up by Orbit Books for a UK release next year.

 
Unfettered features short stories by Patrick Rothfuss, Brandon Sanderson, Jacqueline Carey, Tad Williams, Naomi Novik, Peter Brett, R.A. Salvatore, Daniel Abraham and Carrie Vaughn, amongst many others. It was released last year in the United States to a good reception. Speakman created the book to help pay for his medical bills after suffering from cancer, with the writers making money back from foreign rights sales.

The UK edition of Unfettered will launch on 20 February 2014. Speakman is also working on a sequel to the book, currently untitled but planned for release in 2015.

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.

New book deal for R.A. Salvatore

Wizards of the Coast have announced the signing of a new contract with R.A. Salvatore, their most successful author. Salvatore will pen six new books set in the Forgotten Realms setting featuring his signature character, the dark elf Drizzt Do'Urden, to be published between 2011 and 2016, almost taking him up to the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of his first novel, The Crystal Shard.


The article is noteworthy for mentioning Salvatore's popularity. I'd seen previous claims that Salvatore had sold 10 million books worldwide, which struck me as possibly on the low side compared to Weis & Hickman's 22 million given that Salvatore has, unlike them, had a constant rate of output since the late 1980s and also has a greater profile currently. The article confirms this, stating that Salvatore's sales now stand at 15 million in the United States alone (meaning far higher, maybe twice that much, worldwide). This definitely puts Salvatore in the big league of fantasy mega-sellers, on a par with or just ahead of the likes of Terry Goodkind, Terry Brooks and Raymond Feist.

By all accounts Salvatore is a great guy who has been a major inspiration to a generation of budding fantasy writers and his early books (the first nine or so) stand as fine examples of 'gateway' fantasy books for younger readers looking to break into the genre.