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.

RIP James M. Ward

News has sadly broken that tabletop roleplaying pioneer James M. Ward has passed away at the age of 72.

Born in 1951, Ward was an acquaintance of Gary Gygax in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and agreed to help him road-test a new game he was developing in 1973. This game became Dungeons & Dragons, with Ward as one of the early players. Gygax created the wizard Drawmij of Oerth in Ward's honour. When Gygax started TSR in late 1973 and published D&D in January 1974, he recruited Ward to help work on the game as a writer and designer.

Ward collaborated with another of the original plays, Rob Kuntz, to create Gods, Demigods & Heroes (1976), a D&D sourcebook that introduced gods and religion to the game. Back when TSR was trying to publish a number of different systems, Ward created the first science fantasy roleplaying game, Metamorphosis Alpha (1976). Drawing on this work, Ward then co-created (with Gary Jaquet) the better-known Gamma World (1978).

Ward continued working as a staffer at TSR, contributing to different projects. He wrote Deities & Demigods (1980), an effective update of his 1976 book to the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 1st Edition rules.

In 1988 Ward drew on his background playing in Gygax's home games to write Greyhawk Adventures, which updated Gygax's signature home setting for the upcoming Advanced D&D 2nd Edition rules. Ward contributed to the design of AD&D 2E and was responsible for the removal of the assassin class, something he noted did not go down well with many fans.

Also in 1988 Ward worked on Ruins of Adventure, the tabletop supplement based on the Pool of Radiance video game set in the Forgotten Realms. Ward further developed the story and scenario into a trilogy of novels, published as Pool of Radiance (1989, with Jane Cooper Hong), Pools of Darkness (1992, with Anne K. Brown) and Pool of Twilight (1993, with Anne K. Brown).

Ward developed Spellfire, TSR's answer to Magic: The Gathering, in 1994. After an initially strong start, the game suffered from a lack of budget (resulting in a considerable reuse of art from existing projects, to fans' dismay).

Ward left TSR in 1996 during the major financial upheavals caused by Random House returning unsold stock to the company for refund, which the company could not afford to pay. This triggered the company's collapse and its subsequent buy-out by Wizards of the Coast in 1997. After departing, Ward worked as a freelancer on various projects (including a Metamorphosis Alpha reboot) before joining Troll Lord Games to work on their Castles & Crusades game line. Ward continued to work on Metamorphosis Alpha material - of which he retained full ownership - until the late 2010s.

As well as the projects with his name on it, Ward contributed in an enormous number of ways to other projects in a variety of roles, from proof-reading the Planescape Campaign Setting (1994) to providing additional design support for the Serenity roleplaying game (2004).

Ward produced new material under his solo companies, Fast Forward Entertainment and WardCo.

Ward was diagnosed with a serious neurological disorder in 2010, for which he received treatment at the Mayo Clinic. Friends, colleagues and fans rallied around with crowdfunding campaigns that ultimately helped him receive the treatment he needed to considerably extend his quality of life.

Ward passed away on 18 March 2024, and is survived by his wife and three children.

Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons by Ben Riggs

In 1974, wargamers Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson created the world's first roleplaying game: Dungeons & Dragons. An immediate, enormous hit, the game fuelled the creation of the TSR company and a quarter of a century of classic gaming products, not to mention power struggles and dubious corporate decisions.

The story of TSR, its rise and fall, has been told before and the narrative is familiar, from Gygax and Arneson's early days in miniature gaming to coming up with the first dungeons and the first campaign settings (Blackmoor and Greyhawk). They then start TSR and Dragon Magazine, Arneson is maneuvered out of the picture and the game's immense success sees Gygax living the high life in Los Angeles trying to get a movie made whilst the company teeters on without him. Then Lorraine Williams takes over, forces Gygax out, and the company sees renewed success in the late 1980s from new campaign settings (such as Forgotten Realms), a second edition of the game and entries to the video game and novel markets, which keeps things going until everything blows up spectacularly in the late 1990s, resulting in the sale of the company to Magic: The Gathering creators Wizards of the Coast.

Whilst the story is familiar, there's a lot more detail in Ben Riggs' book, which calls upon interviews with a huge number of ex-TSR luminaries, although there are two notable absences. Gygax passed away in 2008, so is only represented through archive interviews. Williams declined to be interviewed for the book, so Riggs has to rely on second-hand accounts, interviews with some of her close co-workers and a few archive interviews (particularly drawing on David Ewalt's Of Dice and Men, the last book Williams was interviewed for). This leaves the book feeling oddly structured: a heroic saga where both the main protagonist and main antagonist (who is who depends on your point of view) are absent for large stretches of it.

To be honest, the main narrative of the book is well-known to the point of overfamiliarity to any long-standing roleplaying fans (newcomers who have come to the game in the last few years - and there's a lot of them - will find much more of interest here), so it's more in the details where it shines. The saga of TSR West, the California-based publishing initiative with its own products and an ill-advised idea to branch into comic books (costing TSR it's very lucrative licencing contract with DC in the process), is mostly new to me and fascinating. Additional details on how badly TSR could treat its superstar authors, and how some of the corporates who came in later on simply didn't understand the first thing about the product they were selling, are also intriguing. There some fascinating almost-ran stories, like when TSR nearly acquired the Middle-earth licence but foundered on Christopher Tolkien refusing to grant them permission to publish original fiction.

One of Riggs' biggest successes is getting his hands on hard sales data from TSR. In some cases, some of TSR's own big names were unaware of what the hell was going on with the company's products, and their reactions to learning how bad sales really were in the 1990s are startling. Learning that Forgotten Realms sold well, but not quite as well as some earlier, retired settings was a surprise.

The book is a goldmine of interesting trivia, but the writing tone is inconsistent. Sometimes the tone is serious and analytic, and sometimes jokey and anecdotal, and the tonal shifts sometimes feel random. There's also a marked difference in how Riggs talks about deceased people and folded companies and how he talks about still-living individuals and extant corporate entities. There's also a lack of deeper analysis on well-regarded stories. The suggestion that TSR collapsed due to an overload of campaign settings is taken as fact throughout, and the oft-mentioned idea that D&D faltered in the 1990s more because of an increasingly unwieldy rules set (contrasted to the streamlined rules of its biggest competitor, Vampire: The Masquerade) and the refusal to slay sacred cows with a more thorough revision - seemingly proven by the monstrous success of D&D 3rd Edition after the move to Wizards of the Coast and the even bigger success of the even more streamlined 5th Edition - is not really given any shrift.

There's also a distinct lack of coverage of the video game side of things, which mostly gets a few brief mentions and little more. The book may actually suffer from its conciseness: 278 pages to cover twenty-five years of history is not really enough, and several chapters halt just as they are starting to get interesting. There's also the fact that the revival of D&D's fortunes with 3rd Edition in 2000 and the subsequent appalling misjudgements that led to the ill-conceived 4th Edition in 2008 and the brand's subsequent eclipsing by former allies-turned-competitors Paizo with their Pathfinder game are just as fascinating a story, but the book decides not to pursue the story into that era. That's fair enough, but it seems to leave the book begging for a sequel (which, given Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro's legal firepower, might never happen).

Slaying the Dragon (***½) contains enough new revelations and interesting analysis to be worthwhile for seasoned D&D players, and newcomers to the game unfamiliar with all the old anecdotes will likely enjoy the book far more. But it does feel like the book could have gone into some areas in more detail and depth, and been a bit more consistent in tone.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

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.

Art & Arcana: A Visual History of Dungeons and Dragons by Michael Witwer

In 1974 Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson created a different type of tabletop game. Dungeons and Dragons became the world's first and most popular roleplaying game. For thirty-four years it ruled supreme and unchallenged, until a problematic fourth edition and the rise of the rival Pathfinder game knocked it off its perch. However, with its fifth edition the game has regained its crown. A key ingredient to the game's success has been the phenomenal roster of artists who have worked on the game for almost forty-five years.

Art & Arcana is a visual history of the Dungeons and Dragons game, taking in every edition and campaign setting the game has produced, as well as many of its novels, calendars and video games. Artwork from the very first prototypes right through the latest 5th Edition expansions and modules is featured, along with lengthy histories and interviews with key personnel.

Arts & Arcana is massive: more than 440 pages in length, it features over 700 separate pieces of artwork along with a significant amount of text detailing the history of the game in some depth. It starts with Gygax and Arneson playing miniatures wargames in Wisconsin in the late 1960s and rapidly hitting on the idea of moving from large armies of lots of figures to small parties of just a few figures exploring dungeons, and later wilderness and towns. Dungeons and Dragons was born, with Gygax and Arneson founding the company TSR to sell it all over the world.

This is where the fun began.

From there the game exploded, selling millions of copies and inspiring spin-off novels, board games and a TV show. Several times the management of the game became fraught and complicated, with Gygax forced out in a corporate takeover and TSR later collapsing before being rescued by Wizards of the Coast. The game's struggles in the face of competition from video games and card games such as Magic: The Gathering are also documented, not to mention the attacks on the game in the press by fundamentalist Christians in the 1980s. The book brushes over arguably the game's nadir, the problematic 4th Edition (2008-13) and the rise of rival products to challenge the game's supremacy, but it does end strongly with the game's return to recent prominence in a new era of podcasts, YouTube videos and Twitch streams.

The one constant throughout the book is artwork. The initial artwork for the game was simplistic, sourced for very little money from whatever artists were on hand. As the game boomed in sales, so the quality of the artwork increased dramatically, with iconic artists like Larry Elmore, Clyde Caldwell and Keith Parkinson joining the company. Later on younger artists arrived with radically different styles, ready to reassess the game for its later editions. As well as artwork for the core game, they also produced art for tie-in novels and video games.

The githyanki, created by future-bestselling SF author Charles Stross, using a name he borrowed from future fantasy megastar George R.R. Martin.

The result is a splendid coffee table book and the perfect gift for a fan of Dungeons and Dragons specifically or fantasy artwork in general. In fact, it's a tribute to the artistic strength of Dungeons and Dragons that so many brilliant pieces of artwork aren't even in the book, as there wasn't enough room.

In fact, that's probably the book's biggest weakness (along with the somewhat dry and mostly controversy-ducking text): the sheer amount of material produced for D&D over the past forty-five years means that some elements get fairly short shrift in this book. Ravenloft feels a bit hard-done by in particular. There's also, somewhat bemusingly given their prevalence in and for the game, very little material on maps, although perhaps there's enough material there for a completely separate book later on.

If you can accept the fact that the book isn't exhaustively complete (and isn't meant to be, and would be far too unwieldy even if it was), there's still a huge amount to enjoy here, and the book forms probably the best and most concise history of the D&D game to date for the beginner. Art & Arcana (****½) is available now in the UK and USA.

Cities of Fantasy: Baldur's Gate

The Western Heartlands of Faerun form an extensive area of wilderness, hundreds of miles of open countryside dominated by several large city-states.  The most famous and storied of these is the great port city of Baldur’s Gate. From its position on the River Chionthar, Baldur’s Gate is the largest beacon of civilisation between Waterdeep and the kingdom of Amn and acts as a vital trading post. Everything is for sale in Baldur’s Gate, including adventure, trouble and morality.

Note: Baldur’s Gate’s fortunes differ significantly at different points in the history of the Forgotten Realms. This description explores the city during the “classic” era of Forgotten Realms history, just prior to the highly ill-conceived event known as the Spellplague, regarded as non-fanon by many fans and players in the setting.

Location

Baldur’s Gate is located close to the north-western coast of the continent of Faerûn. It is located on the wide and deep River Chionthar, approximately twenty miles upriver from where it flows into the Sea of Swords. Technically the city is not on the Sword Coast itself, but its position as a major port and one of the few waystops north of Amn makes the difficulty of beating upriver to the city generally worthwhile.

The city is also located on the Coast Way, a vital trade artery along the west coast of the continent. The Coast Way extends south through the towns of Beregost and Nashkel into the Kingdom of Amn and thence to the rich southern kingdoms of Tethyr and Calimshan. The Coast Way eventually terminates at Calimport, the largest city in Faerûn, some 1,000 miles to the south, and continues to Waterdeep, the City of Splendours, located about 480 miles to the north-west. The Coast Way takes a massive detour to the east to avoid the Troll Hills and Trollbark Forest north of the Winding Water, an area infested with monsters. The Coast Way runs a dangerous gauntlet between the Troll Hills and High Moor to the north on its way to Waterdeep, so trade caravans usually travel well-armed.

Physical Description

Baldur’s Gate surrounds a significant inlet of the River Chionthar. With tall hills to the east hemming in the city’s walls, the city resembles a crescent moon with the bay forming the gap in the circle. Districts within the city include Bloomridge, Twin Songs and the Port District.

The most notable feature of the city is arguably Black Dragon Gate, built by Balduran himself, a formidable gateway and mini-fortress which has never fallen in battle. The city core contains the High Hall (or Palace of the Grand Dukes), the High House of Wonders (a huge temple to Gond, God of Artifice and Invention), the Water Queen’s House (a rare temple to Umberlee, the capricious Goddess of the Sea) and the Lady’s Hall (a temple to Tymora, Goddess of Good Fortune). Temples to Ilmater, Helm, Lathander and Oghma can also be found within the city centre.

The city’s primary defensive bastion is the Seatower of Balduran, located on an island in the harbour.

Population

The population of Baldur’s Gate varied according to the season. In 1372 DR the city’s permanent population was approximately 42,100, but at the height of the summer trading rush this could more than double to around 86,000. During the height of the trading season, it’s not unusual to see extensive tent cities and ad hoc markets springing up outside the walls.

Government

Baldur’s Gate is ruled by the Council of Four, also known as the Four Grand Dukes. As of 1372, the Four Grand Dukes are Eltan, the leader of the Flaming Fist Mercenary Company; Belt, a poweful warrior-priest; Liia Jannath, a wizardess; and Entar Silvershield, the city’s richest merchant. The Council works closely together to keep trade flowing through the city and to ensure threats are dealt with quietly and efficiently.

Baldur’s Gate is also part of the Lords’ Alliance, an alliance of city-states in north-western Faerun designed to resist the corrupting influence of the Black Network of the Zhentarim, the rulers of Amn, the Red Wizards of Thay and other potential enemies. Although the Alliance is a powerful force in resisting such enemies, it has no say over the internal running of the city. Other members of the Alliance include Waterdeep, Daggerford, Neverwinter, Mirabar, Gundarlun and the newly-founded Kingdom of Luruar in the Silver Marches, centered on the great city of Silverymoon.

History

The history of Baldur’s Gate dates back to the adventurer Orluth Tshahvur. In 227 DR he founded the short-lived kingdom of Shavinar at the mouth of the River Chionthar. He built a crude keep near the site of what is now Baldur’s Gate and attracted settlers to the town with a promise of freedom and mutual defence against marauding monsters and bandits. He gained a boon when a skilled Calishite shipwright arrived in the settlement, leading to a shipbuilding and repair yard springing up. The village became known as Gaeth (the local Thorass word for “rivermouth”) but, despite its good fortune, it was slow to grow. By Orluth’s death in 242 DR, the population was only 120 but the wider realm of Shinvar extended almost 100 miles upriver and as far north as the Troll Hills, where Orluth had built watchtowers to keep an eye out for trolls. Orluth’s son Arlsar, neglected his father’s achievements and was murdered in 256 DR by merchants angered by his incompetence.

There were several attempts to hold Shavinar together, the most notable being Arlsar’s youngest son Kondarar who had magical backing. Under his rule Shavinar began to grow again…but it was swept away by a troll horde in 277 DR. Gaeth was destroyed along with the rest of the realm.

Still, the realm’s existence did confirm that the location was a viable one for a port and over the next eight centuries several attempts were made to establish another settlement in the region. However, this always failed because the cost of building a wall around the port – which due to the geography required a very large one – was ruinous.

This situation was finally broken circa 1050. A great sailor hailing from the region, Balduran, took his ship, the Wandering Eye, across the Trackless Sea in search of new lands. Against the odds, beyond Evermeet he found a rich new continent, Anchorome, and found many riches there. He returned home, laden with gold, and paid for massive stone walls to be built around the nascent settlement on the site of ancient Gaeth. The port was named Baldur’s Gate in his honour and Balduran briefly stayed to rule and help the city become more established. However, he eventually could not resist the call of the sea and returned to Anchorome. He was killed there by the natives circa 1068, although some conflicting rumours suggest he actually returned to Faerûn but his ship was smashed to pieces on the coast south of the city. This rumour is considered fanciful.

Despite Balduran’s death, the city he left behind prospered. This was helped by the rise of Waterdeep to the north, and the presence of two new rich trade ports to the north saw trade start to flow up the Sword Coast from the rich southern kingdoms of Amn, Tethyr and Calimshan. The growing city was threatened in 1235 when the Black Horde, the largest orc horde in recorded history, rampaged down the Sword Coast. Both Waterdeep and Baldur’s Gate were besieged, but their walls held and the ports remained open, preventing either from being starved out. The Black Horde itself fragmented due to a lack of food and supplies and eventually dispersed.

Circa 1350, the fighter Eltan founded the Flaming Fist, a mercenary company rooted in honour and order. The mercenary army, noted for its discipline and its success in resisting border incursions from Amn to the south and repelling monsters and trolls to the north, soon became the de facto police force of Baldur’s Gate and Eltan ascended to the rank of Grand Duke.

In 1358 the Time of Troubles (or Avatar Wars) wracked Faerûn. Bhaal, God of Murder and Patron of Assassins, did battle with the nascent demigod Cyric on Boareskyr Bridge a couple of hundred miles north-east of Baldur’s Gate. Bhaal was defeated and slain, but upon his death his essence was split between several mortals, the so-called “Bhaalspawn”. Ten years later, in 1368, one of these offspring, Sarevok, instigated a plan to kill the other Bhaalspawn and reunite Bhaal’s power in himself. To this end he allied with the Iron Throne criminal organisation and a band of doppelgangers to topple the Four Grand Dukes and seize control of the region. However, another Bhaalspawn thwarted his plans and killed Sarevok, preventing Bhaal’s return and restoring peace to the region.

In 1361 word arrived in the city that Captain Cordell and the Golden Legion of Amn had discovered a new continent far to the west, across the Trackless Sea. They had named this continent Maztica and toppled the evil empire that had dominated the land, as well as founding the new town of Helmsport to help exploit this new continent. The Council of Four realised that Maztica was likely associated with Anchorome and dispatched an expedition to stake out their own claim to the land. This expedition confirmed that Anchorome is the continent to the north of Maztica (with Maztica as a subcontinent or region of Anchorome rather than a geologically separate landmass) and founded Fort Flame on the coast of the continent in 1364. The local jungle elf tribes attacked Fort Flame several times but were repulsed.

In 1369 the Fifth Serôs War, also called the Sea War, raged when the sahuagin minions of Iakhovas the Taker attacked the city (and most of the coast of Faerûn). They were defeated and forced out of the city thanks to the Flaming Fist and the city’s wizards and priests.

As of 1372 Baldur’s Gate appears secure, having averted the threat of war with Amn to the south and increased its dominance on Sword Coast trade. Baldur’s Gate’s ambition seems to be to surpass Waterdeep to the north as the greatest city on the coast. Some have speculated that the Gate may try to expand into a nation or at least a more formal alliance, comprising all the lands between the Troll Hills and Cloud Peaks and incorporating settlements as Ulgoth’s Beard, Candlekeep, the Friendly Arm Inn (located inside a massive fortress) and Beregost, but if so this ambition has not been realised so far.

Origins and Influences

Baldur’s Gate is part of the Forgotten Realms fantasy world, originally created by Ed Greenwood in 1968 and then developed as the setting for his home Dungeons and Dragons campaign from 1976 onwards. The world became better-known when Greenwood began writing for Dragon Magazine in 1978, often referencing his home campaign in his articles. In 1987 TSR, Inc. released the Forgotten Realms campaign setting, marking the first appearance of Baldur’s Gate in print. The city first appeared in a novel in 1990, when R.A. Salvatore set part of The Halfling’s Gem (the concluding novel in The Icewind Dale Trilogy) in the city.

Baldur’s Gate received little more attention in the second edition of the Forgotten Realms campaign setting (1993) but it was expanded greatly by Ed Greenwood in Volo’s Guide to the Sword Coast (1994), a sourcebook which provided the first canonical map of the city itself. He detailed much more of the city’s history, geography and power groups.

In 1995 the video game company Interplay bought a licence to release games set in the Forgotten Realms setting and using the Dungeons and Dragons rules from TSR. After a couple of disappointing titles, Interplay partnered with a new Canadian game development studio called BioWare to develop a D&D game. They considered several settings, including better-known Realms locations such as the Dalelands and Waterdeep, but ultimately settled on Baldur’s Gate as the city had just enough background to be interesting but enough blank spaces they could fill in with new information.

The resulting video game, Baldur’s Gate, was released in 1998 and was a smash hit, setting BioWare on the path that would eventually lead them to the Mass Effect and Dragon Age franchises. This game began a series which continued with Baldur’s Gate: Tales of the Sword Coast (1999), Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn (2000) and its expansion Baldur’s Gate II: Throne of Bhaal (2001) (although only Baldur’s Gate itself was set in the titular city). It also inspired a spin-off console game series, comprising Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance (2001) and Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance II (2004). In 2012 Beamdog released Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition which updated the game for modern PCs and added a new expansion, Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear, in 2015 (although this expansion is not set in the city itself).

Baldur’s Gate III: The Black Hound was in development at Interplay when the company went bust in 2004. Despite the name, the game would have been set in the Dalelands with no connection to the earlier series by plot.

More recently, Baldur’s Gate was explored in both the 4^th and 5^th edition campaign settings for Dungeons and Dragons. The former saw the Forgotten Realms destroyed in an event known as the Spellplague, with Baldur’s Gate emerging as one of the few settlements to flourish following the cataclysm, becoming larger and more powerful than Waterdeep (a move motivated, it was believed, to cash in on the name recognition of the video games). 5^th Edition has undone many of the impacts of the Spellplague, but Baldur’s Gate retains its place as one of the most prominent cities in the setting.

Most recently, the city is the focus for the Betrayal at Baldur’s Gate board game (2017), a variant of the classic Betrayal at House on the Hill board game.

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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.