The Worlds of D&D: Planescape

The Planescape logo, used between 1994 and 1999.

The History of Planescape

If there is one constant in these journeys through the Dungeons and Dragons campaign worlds, it is the apparent lack of the truly fantastical. Three of the settings visited so far are essentially secondary Earths, based on medieval Europe or other real-world analogues, whilst Dark Sun is effectively D&D interpreted by way of Mad Max. None of these things prevent these settings from being fun to play in or a viable setting for half-decent books, but at the same time we're not really seeing the truly fantastic on display here. D&D is sometimes used as a byword for 'bad' or at the very least 'unambitious' fantasy, and there is an element of truth to that description. However, hidden behind the Drizzts and draconians, there is one part of the D&D franchise that is truly interesting, original and home to some of the best stories ever told in the game.

The D&D multiverse developed over a long period in fits and starts. Gary Gygax wanted demonic entities, otherworldly beings and occasionally proud celestial warriors to show up who wouldn't reside on his campaign world, but would come from 'elsewhere'. This led to the creation of other dimensions and planes of existence. Over the lifespan of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 1st Edition (1978-89), many different writers and game designers added their own planes of reality, until the whole thing became somewhat unwieldy. Various print editions of the Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide attempted to streamline the confusing morass of parallel universes but it wasn't until 1987's Manual of the Planes, written by Jeff Grubb, that the D&D multiverse was finally codified.

The Manual of the Planes, published in 1987 for AD&D 1st Edition.

Grubb developed the idea of the Prime Material Plane consisting of various realities which were the already existing Earth-like worlds, such as Toril (home of the Forgotten Realms), Oerth (Greyhawk) and Krynn (Dragonlance). Around this swirled the Ethereal and Astral dimensions, then beyond them lay the Elemental or Inner Planes (of fire, earth, air and water) and the sixteen Outer Planes, which formed a 'great wheel' cosmology. These Outer Planes included places of great good such as Mount Celestia and places of fell evil, such as the Abyss, home of the Dragonlance goddess Takhisis and the drow god Lolth, where the Blood War between the baatezu and tanar'ri raged for all eternity. At the suggestion of another writer, Grubb also introduced the Plane of Concordant Opposition as a sort of neutral meeting ground between the various planes of reality.

This set-up was maintained, fleshed out a little in other products, until around 1993. At this time TSR were looking to develop a new 'unusual' campaign setting, based on the success of the offbeat Dark Sun and the horror-derived Ravenloft settings, and the feeling that between Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance and Greyhawk (then being briefly revived) the 'standard' fantasy setting was already well-covered. In addition the 2nd Edition of AD&D had been released in 1989, and a brief mention in the new Dungeon Master's Guide aside, no further development had taken place of the other planes of reality. Fan demand for an updated Manual of the Planes was strong. The need for more information on the planes and for a new game world naturally coalesced into an entire campaign setting revolving around the other planes of existence. Veteran game designer David 'Zeb' Cook was put on the job.

The Planescape campaign setting boxed set, released for AD&D 2nd Edition in 1994.

The Planescape campaign setting boxed set was released in 1994 and immediately caused a stir. This wasn't your traditional Dungeons and Dragons game. The game's artwork was like nothing seen before in the D&D canon, with muted pastels, striking imagery and unusual colours, apparently inspired more by Dave McKean's work on Sandman and Dr. Seuss than any of D&D's traditional inspirations. Opening the box proved likewise bemusing, with large maps of the entire multiverse and schematic diagrams showing the connections between the various dimensions. The books seemed to take delight in needling the player's incomprehension, referring to them as 'cutters' and 'berks' and that the secret of cracking this Planescape thing was 'getting a clue'. Being bewildered at the game's size and scope was natural and appropriate, as their characters would be bewildered and confused when torn out of their cosy Tolkien-lite secondary worlds ("Not that there's anything wrong with that,") and thrust into the teeming insanity of the cosmos. Whilst there was nothing stopping the players using traditional races like elves or dwarves, the setting strongly suggested using more interesting native races like githzerai, tieflings or bariaur was a better idea. Of course, this didn't quite work as intended, as more than a few players, after a few hours of struggling with the material, threw it under the stairs and went back to playing hunt the beholder in some dungeon instead.

For those who stuck with it, Planescape rapidly became the most rewarding and interesting roleplaying campaign setting ever published. The setting is literally infinite, with any type of game possible. Creative and offbeat DMs came up with some truly original and bonkers campaigns and gaming ideas. Groups of players, particularly those who favoured roleplaying and subverting expectations of the game and setting, enjoyed the game's unusual atmosphere and vibe and seized on the vast glossary of new phrases, colloquialisms and terms with glee. One of Cook's masterstrokes was to introduce the city of Sigil on the Outlands (the somewhat catchier new name for the Plane of Concordant Opposition), a neutral meeting ground where characters could meet or use as a base for their forays elsewhere in the planes. Sigil itself rapidly became one of the most iconic fantasy cities to emerge from the D&D game, to the point where players could spend entire campaigns taking part in intrigues between the factions of the city and ignoring the wider setting beyond.

In short, Planescape is D&D's answer to the New Weird, only it did it before China Mieville made it fashionable.

Planescape's fire burned brightly but also briefly. There was a gradual downturn of new material being released (not helped by TSR's financial woes) and in 1998 the final product, a third Monstrous Compendium book focusing on the setting's creatures, was issued less than four years after the original campaign setting was published. Whilst it had been an enormous critical success, winning multiple awards for both game design and its unforgettable artwork, it had not captured the hearts of the masses. It was perhaps too radical, too ambitious and too arty for its own good. Critics pointed out that whilst the planes were fun to visit for a break from orc-killing, you wouldn't necessarily want to live there, and a common complaint was that the 'infinite reaches of the multiverse' all too often meant lots of arguments between philosophy majors and not as much demon-crushing as might be desired.

The D&D 3rd Edition Manual of the Planes, released in 2001.

Later editions of the game largely revoked or retconned a lot of Planescape material. In 3rd Edition the new Manual of the Planes saw something of a streamlining of the D&D multiverse and the confusing removal of the various campaign worlds into their own, independent cosmologies, which proved headache-inducing for those DMs who had previously been using dimension-hopping campaign ideas. 4th Edition increased this confusion with new dimensions introduced and old ones disappearing. However, 4th Edition has also given rise to hope that Planescape will be revisited, maybe not as its own setting, but as part of the basic setting, as the Dungeon Master's Guide II book and yet another Manual of the Planes feature information on several key Planescape locations, such as Sigil. Whether this will come to anything remains to be seen.

The D&D 4th Edition Manual of the Planes, released in 2009.

There is one ironic twist in this tale. One and a half years after Planescape was effectively dropped as a D&D campaign setting, a computer roleplaying company named Black Isle released Planescape: Torment, using the Infinity Engine which had proven so popular in the previous year's Baldur's Gate. Torment saw the player taking on the role of an amnesiac, immortal warrior and having to guide him through Sigil and various parts of the multiverse looking for his memories and his mortality, accompanied by a number of complex and multi-faceted companions. Following the advice of the campaign setting itself, there were no traditional D&D races, monsters or weapons. Characters including a burning man, a bodiless floating skull, a mobile suit of armour, a fallen succubi and a sentient clockwork robot. It was extraordinarily good, easily the closest computer games have ever gotten to achieving real literature, and is now commonly cited as the greatest computer roleplaying game ever made. Whilst not as successful as the Baldur's Gate series, it did do respectably well and could have generated much more interest in the Planescape setting, if it hadn't already folded by the time the game came out.

Computer role-playing's answer to The Book of the New Sun.

The Worlds of Planescape

The heart of the Planescape campaign setting and normally the first stopping-off point for visitors is Sigil, the City of Doors, also called the Cage. Sigil is located at the very centre of the infinite multiverse (which is both impossible and also accurate), floating above a spire of infinite height (also both impossible and also accurate). The city is located on the inner surface of an immense ring, several miles wide and several miles across, resembling an immense tyre lying on its side slowly rotating above the spire. The city's permanent smog thankfully hides the site of the ground, the constant presence of which which would probably drive half the populace insane through vertigo over time. The city's architecture is a mish-mash of a million different cultures and times from across the multiverse, harbouring as it does representatives from dozens of planes and thousands of worlds. Some of the buildings would give M.C. Escher a headache and make Hieronymus Bosch feel inadequate.

The Outlands, featuring the city of Sigil at the centre.

The city is home to sixteen factions, including the Bleak Cabal, the Dustmen, the Doomguard, the Mercykillers and the Harmonium, all of whom espouse different philosophical and ideological viewpoints. Most Sigil campaigns are based around the characters getting involved in disputes between the factions. A 'faction war', one of the few meta-events in the setting, later ravaged parts of the city and saw several factions outlawed or destroyed. Sigil is also home to many portals or planar doors leading anywhere in the multiverse. Some are well-known, marked and open for public use. Others are 'locked' and can only be used by those with a planar key. Some doors are hidden in plain sight (as a normal doorway, for example) and will only teleport those of a certain race, sometimes only on certain days, or on a whim. Mapping the planar gates in Sigil is a keen past-time for some scholars and mages.

The Lady of Pain. She can eviscerate you with her brain.

The city is ruled by a bureaucratic administration who answers to the Lady of Pain, an inscrutable and completely enigmatic entity. The Lady is assumed to be a deity as her powers within the City of Doors are absolute, but since she refuses to answer queries and flays alive those who try to worship her, this question is difficult to answer. One theory is that if Sigil is indeed a 'Cage', the Lady is both its ruler and its prisoner. The Lady has a perpetually serene, untroubled expression on her face and travels everywhere by floating along several inches above the ground, and her head is surrounded by a mantle of blades. These blades have never been used directly (in the presence of anyone who has lived to tell the story of it, however), but occasionally beings trying to waylay the Lady have suddenly been torn apart by simply stepping into the shadow of the blades. The Lady normally does not favour this type of violence, however, and mostly simply 'Mazes' transgressors, banishing them to a pocket prison dimension consisting of a maze and various inventive and original traps. If the imprisoned one manages to escape, they are usually permitted to return to Sigil. The Lady can also bar, close or shut down any planar gate in the city at will, or open new ones (although she has never passed through one herself, or at least again not in the sight of others). The Lady's powers extend even to barring all the gods access to Sigil. In short, don't mess with her.

Beyond Sigil sits the Outlands, one of the seventeen Outer Planes. The Outlands are neutral ground where caravans of goods and travellers meet or simply pass through on their way somewhere else. At the 'edges' of the plane (although the Outlands, like all planes, are infinite, they also have an edge; go figure) are permanant trade towns and portals leading to the other Outer Planes: Elysium, the Beastlands, Arborea, Ysgard, Limbo, Pandemonium, the Abyss, Carceri, Hades, Gehenna, Baator, Acheron, Mechanus, Arcadia, Mount Celestia and Bytopia. These planes vary immensely in size (although they are all, of course, infinite) and composition. The Abyss is a vast chasm consisting of thousands of levels populated by various evil creatures, whilst Mechanus (also called Nirvana) consists of vast, thousand-mile-wide cogs and machines with cities and entire kingdoms sitting amongst gears and levers.

A map of the entire totality of reality in the D&D multiverse. Not to scale.

The Astral Plane, a sort of sea of unusual energy where the gods go when they die, links the Outer Planes to the Prime Material Plane, whilst the Prime Material Plane is also linked and surrounded by the Ethereal Plane, the home of various undead spirits and small demiplanes (the Demiplane of Dread, home of the Ravenloft campaign setting, is located in the Ethereal Plane). The Ethereal links the Prime Material Plane to the Inner Planes, which consist of various forms of energy and act as the power sources for spells.


Evaluation

The Planescape campaign setting eventually gave what a number of D&D fans had been asking for for a while: a truly original, fantastical campaign setting in which the traditional elves, dwarves, orcs and dragons were sidelined in favour of new (or previously-existing but lesser known) races and campaigns based around combat and levelling up were de-emphasised in favour of roleplaying and juggling factions and philosophical ideas.

Planescape: so awesome it even has robots.

It's both a good and bad idea. Good, because it encourages radical ideas and a different of gaming, and bad because unless the players are really into it, it can become a little gimmicky. DMs also tend to like the setting because they can take ultra-powerful player characters who are effectively the most powerful beings in their world and dump them in a situation where they are nobodies, whilst players are not always quite so keen on this approach. The setting's biggest problem is that finding and maintaining a coherent narrative plot strand in the vast infinity of the setting can be quite tricky, especially for an unwary or inexperienced DM.

However, for a party really in the mood for something different and a DM really willing to do something outside the box, Planescape is nothing less than the most impressive and versatile toolbox in the Dungeons and Dragons arsenal, and it is a shame it has been effectively on hold for all of 3rd and 4th Editions of the game. It'll be interesting to see if it does come back in a big way for 4th, and in what form it is when it does.

The Worlds of D&D: Dark Sun

The original Dark Sun logo, used from 1991-1995.

The History of Dark Sun

In 1990, with the Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms settings doing good business for the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons game and the newly-released 2nd Edition of the game doing well, TSR decided to create a new campaign setting for the game. With the 'generic' medieval fantasy fans well-catered-for, it was decided that this new setting would be considerably more original and would introduce new ideas and concepts whilst doing away with some of the more established ideas of the game.

1st Edition Dark Sun campaign setting, released in 1991.

To work on the new setting, TSR assigned designer Tim Brown and writer Troy Denning to brainstorm ideas with editor Mary Kirchoff, whilst AD&D artist Gerald Brom worked out a visual identity for the world. The idea of a post-apocalyptic society soon came up, a place where in the distant past the heroes hadn't managed to stop the evil dark lord and as a result the world was ravaged and destroyed. This was the genesis of Athas, the planet that became the home of the Dark Sun setting.

The first Dark Sun campaign setting was launched in October 1991 and immediately attracted a lot of attention for its highly unusual variant rules. Not only was the world a ravaged desert planet more akin to Dune than any other D&D world, it also saw a huge number of basic conceptual differences. The gods were either dead or sealed away from the world, so clerics instead worshipped elemental forces. Wizardly magic had become corrupted, so anyone trying to use it became a 'defiler', drawing energy away from his surroundings and making the land dead and lifeless and inflicting pain on living creatures. A small group of wizards known as 'preservers' worked instead to restore the world to its former glory, but were often mistaken for defilers and shunned or attacked. Far more common than magic was psionics, a new concept for the D&D game, which allowed players to use powers such as telepathy and telekinesis.

Troy Denning's Prism Pentad series kicked off the Dark Sun line of novels.

Changes were made to the core D&D races (who in fact were originally not to be featured at all, humans aside, until TSR insisted on it). The elves, largely removed from their more typical forest homelands, are less friendly and more surly. Halflings are savage cannibals and tend to dominate the few areas of woodland that are left. Rarer races in other settings such as the half-giants and thri-kreen are far more dominant in Dark Sun than many of the 'classic' races. New races such as the tarek and mul (half-dwarves) also appeared. Great emphasis was also placed on basic survival, with players have to ration their food and water supplies with care, and with numerous tables outlining the dangers of travelling the vast deserts or the great Sea of Silt surrounding the inhabited lands.

Another difference was that whilst the main continents and even some other landmasses for most of the other settings had been pretty thoroughly explored, the central region of Athas, the Tablelands, was actually pretty small, only a couple of hundred miles across, and the rest of the world was left a blank slate for DMs to detail or ignore as they saw fit. The explored lands were also pretty grim, with the nine major cities of the Tablelands controlled by evil sorcerer-kings and slavery endemic in the culture.

The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King is a solid novel, but later regarded as non-canon.

Like the other settings, Dark Sun was also driven by a series of novels, kicking off with the Prism Pentad by Troy Denning, which saw a major slave uprising successfully liberate the city-state of Tyr. Other novels included the excellent Rise and Fall of a Dragon King by Lynn Abbey, which was an exploration of the world from the point-of-view of one of the evil sorcerer-kings themselves. However, in contrast to the 200+ novels available for both Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms, only thirteen novels were ever published for the setting, and with some material in the later books clashing with the gaming materials only The Prism Pentad was eventually declared canon.

Over the next two to three years a number of expansions were released for the game, although compared to the likes of Forgotten Realms, this number was relatively modest. However, by late 1995 the setting had become big enough to warrant a make-over, and the second edition Dark Sun campaign setting was released late in that year. This second edition expanded the coverage of the settled lands of Athas to include more lands to the north and rolled the timeline forwards by ten years. Unfortunately, fan reaction was largely negative because the setting's dark and gritty feel was scaled back and a number of core concepts, such as the evil sorcerer-kings who dominated the lands, were removed. To a lot of fans, Dark Sun lost its edge and they either dropped it or simply ignored the developments in the second edition.

The 2nd Edition Dark Sun boxed set, released in 1995.

Unfortunately, Dark Sun, whilst a popular setting with its fanbase, never reached the sales of Forgotten Realms or Dragonlance, and with TSR entering severe financial difficulties around 1996, the decision was made to drop the setting. The last TSR expansion for the game was released in late 1996.

Whilst this lack of development means that the setting was never as detailed as some others, it also meant that a lot more of the world was left up to the DM's creativity to flesh out. Dark Sun fans also found it a lot easier to collect together a 'complete' collection of Dark Sun materials, with only 23 gaming products and nine adventures to the line's name contrasted to the many hundreds for Forgotten Realms or dozens for Dragonlance.

Wizards of the Coast bought out TSR and a 3rd Edition of Dungeons and Dragons was launched in 2000. Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk were resurrected and a new setting, Eberron, developed. Planescape was absorbed into the core of the game. Ravenloft and Dragonlance were licensed out to third-party companies to develop and less popular settings, such as Spelljammer and Mystara, were quietly dropped. However, Dark Sun remained in a rather odd state of limbo. Whilst not as popular as the 'big' settings, it was also not as obscure as the others and had a devoted fanbase. Eventually Dragon Magazine ran some articles on the setting and the fan group at Athas.org was given official permission to develop the setting for D&D 3rd Edition. Despite this, no further game products in the line were released.

The new Dark Sun campaign setting hardcover book, due for release in mid-2010.

However, in August 2009 Wizards of the Coast announced that Dark Sun would be resurrected in the summer of 2010 (fourteen years after the last 'proper' release of new material) as the third campaign setting for the Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition game, which they hinted would ignore the less popular developments from the 1995 boxed set in favour of the grittier and more hardcore original setting, news that was welcomed by many fans.

Fanon world map of Athas, with the Tablelands located on the far eastern continent.

The World of Dark Sun

Thousands of years in the past, Athas was a green and verdant world until it was ravaged by a series of genocidal wars launched by the sorcerer Rajaat and his champions to wipe out all non-human races. In the magical conflicts that followed, the planet was stripped of most of its water and plant life, and many non-human races (including D&D mainstays such as orcs) were rendered extinct. Such was the effects of this cataclysm that Athas was sealed off from the rest of the multiverse, no gods were able to influence the world (though it remains unclear if Athas once had a traditional pantheon or not) and planar travel was made impossible. Rajaat's champions eventually rebelled against him, imprisoning him, and then ruled over the shattered remnants of the world through an uneasy compact.

The Tablelands of Athas, with the Tyr region in the centre along the mountain range.

The main setting for the Dark Sun campaign is an area called the Tablelands, a vast plateau extending for several hundred miles that is located several hundred feet above the surrounding lands: a vast savanna to the west, a dead wasteland to the south and the treacherous Sea of Silt to the east. The Tablelands are dominated by nine great city-states, the largest of which is Tyr, which typically acts as a home base for player-characters setting out to explore the world. Tyr is also in an uneasy state as its ruler was slain in a rebellion some years ago and the other cities are considering moving against it to restore the rule of the sorcerer-kings. Only their mutual distrust and lack of cooperation has prevented this from happening so far. In the meantime, the people of Tyr enjoy a relatively unusual level of freedom.

The world is parched and arid. There are very few open bodies of water left, and rainfall is all but unknown, certainly in the Tyr region. Metals are also incredibly rare. Ordinary metal weapons and armour have the status of major relics, whilst there are probably fewer than a dozen magical metal weapon or armour items on the entire planet. Armour and weapons are instead made of wood or obsidian, whilst ceramic disks serve as coins and currency. The lands are extremely dangerous, with even the relatively well-travelled regions around Tyr and the other big cities still prone to infestations of monsters, ravaging bands of savages and attacks by bandit groups. Due to the dangers of travel, trade is even more valuable and the opportunities for adventure are great. The world is also littered with the ruins of the ancient past, lost cities, abandoned temples to the elements and so on, and many secrets about the world remain to be discovered.


Evaluation

I quite like Dark Sun but regrettably never got round to playing it. The Mad Max/Fallout-esque vibe to the setting, mixed in with a bit of Dune, is great stuff, very different to the other, more traditional D&D settings. The idea of a post-magical apocalypse where the bad guy actually succeeded in blowing up the world is also compelling, something rarely explored in fiction (although Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy nods in this idea's direction), let alone gaming. Part of me does wish that the original idea to kick out all the elves, dwarves and traditional D&D races altogether had been followed through, but the changes to those races in this setting do work quite well.

It'll be interesting to see the setting's return as a 4th Edition game world. The psionic rules for both 2E and 3E were problematic and 4E's rules set-up does seem a much better fit for defiling, preserving and psionics. However, there are concerns that WotC will attempt to shoe-horn 4E's new races (the dragonborn and eladrin) and the basic classes (including the bard and paladin) into the setting where there is really no place for them. It'll certainly be intriguing to see how they handle these issues when the new book comes out in mid-2010.

The Worlds of D&D: Forgotten Realms

Original Forgotten Realms logo, 1987-2001.

The History of the Forgotten Realms

In 1967, the then-eight-year-old Ed Greenwood started writing stories for his own amusement about dragons and elves. Over the next few years the stories gained a coherent setting, a world Greenwood called the Realms, and when he got into the Dungeons and Dragons game a decade or so later, he adapted the Realms as a setting for adventures, and began contributing articles to Dragon Magazine located in the setting, beginning in 1978. Greenwood became a popular contributor to the magazine and fans were soon asking for more information about his home setting.

By 1986 D&D creator and TSR founder Gary Gygax had moved on and the company had decided to put his Greyhawk setting on the back-burner. With the narrative and history-driven Dragonlance setting doing great business at the time, TSR decided there was a gap for a new, large 'standard' medieval fantasy world which could be the setting for many different stories. They called in Ed Greenwood, paired him up with veteran designer Jeff Grubb, and set them to work on delivering the Forgotten Realms to a wider audience. The name was settled on because in the ancient prehistory of the world it apparently had links to our own world, but these gateways and portals closed, so from out point-of-view the Realms were now 'forgotten'. Also, it sounded cool.

Forgotten Realms 1st Edition boxed set, the 'Old Grey Box', published in 1987.

The Forgotten Realms, when the setting appeared in mid-1987, was a mixture of Greenwood's home setting and several other existing D&D properties. The popular Bloodstone Lands series of adventures (beginning in 1985) was retconned into the setting, as was the even more popular Oriental Adventures landmass of Kara-Tur, which was bolted onto the eastern side of the Realms core continent of Faerun.

The setting was an almost immediate hit. After the success of the Dragonlance books, TSR decided to launch a range of novels accompanying the new setting. The first novel and Realms product ever published was Douglas Niles' Darkwalker on Moonshae, which appeared a month ahead of the first edition boxed set. Showing the versatility of the setting, this first novel and its two sequels were set on the Moonshae Isles, a Celtic-flavoured society a hundred miles off Faerun's west coast. Greenwood's own stand-alone novel Spellfire soon followed, set over a thousand miles to the east in the Dalelands (a mid-European, Black Forest-style society) and featuring zero references to the earlier work.

The cover to The Crystal Shard, depicting Wulfgar, Drizzt Do'Urden and Bruenor Battlehammer.

However, what really took the setting to the next level happened in 1988, when the computer game Pool of Radiance was released. Although previous D&D-flavoured computer RPGs had appeared, Pool of Radiance was the first one to become a really big hit, and was followed up by a series of best-selling sequels in the now-fondly-remembered 'Gold Box' series of games. Even more important this year was the release of a novel called The Crystal Shard by a new, young author named R.A. Salvatore. Set in the frozen subarctic tundra of Icewind Dale, the book charted the coming together of a band of adventurers including the dwarven warrior-chieftain Bruenor, the halfling thief Regis, the barbarian warrior Wulfgar (originally the main character) and, most infamously, the dark elven range Drizzt Do'Urden. The book took off, propelling its sequels into the bestseller lists and beginning one of the major success stories of fantasy in the 1980s and 1990s. The Drizzt books, of which there are now eighteen (plus another nine books featuring related characters and situations), have sold almost ten million copies and are now a staple 'entry point' for young readers looking to get into fantasy fiction.

Four of the Realms' most iconic characters. Clockwise from top-left: Elminster Aumar, Drizzt Do'Urden, the Simbul and Khelben 'Blackstaff' Arunsun, Archmage of Waterdeep.

The Realms continued to develop and expand. New expansions and sourcebooks detailed most of the continent of Faerun, from the distant and remote lands of the Great Glacier to the humid jungles of Chult to the depths of the Great Desert of Anauroch to the city-states of the Vilhon Reach. The secretive Black Network of the Zhentarim, the insane Cult of the Dragon and the villainous Red Wizards of Thay proved to be worthy foes for many D&D adventuring parties over the years and new books and products were lapped up. The great city of Waterdeep was detailed and became a fan-favourite location and base of operations for their parties, its iconic status increased by the arrival of the best-selling Eye of the Beholder computer game trilogy. The Realms also proved popular and endurable enough to host 'sub-settings' on other continents. The oriental lands of Kara-Tur were soon joined the Aztec-influenced continent of Maztica across the western sea, whilst the Arabia-like landmass of Zakhara to the south hosted the Al-Qadim setting, heavily influenced by the stories and legends of the Arabian Nights.

To mark the introduction of AD&D 2nd Edition in 1989, the Realms were afflicted by the Time of Troubles, also known as the Avatar Wars, when the gods were cast out of the heavens and forced to walk the Realms as superpowered but still vulnerable mortals. The pantheon was shaken by the deaths of several major deities and the rise of new ones to replace them, the rules of magic were changed and things generally shaken up. Some fans were suspicious of what seemed a bit like a Dragonlance-style Cataclysm, but it actually proved compatible with the basic idea of the Realms as a world where many different stories could be told. The Avatar Wars had many different fronts and many different regions were affected on a small, local level without any interaction with the wider storyline. After the success of this big event, TSR repeated it two years later with the introduction of the Hordelands, a new, Mongolian-influenced sub-setting located between Faerun and Kara-Tur, and the invasion of a horde of barbarians into the eastern Realms. This gave rise to probably the Realms' finest series of novels, The Empires Trilogy.

In 1993 the second version of the Realms boxed set was introduced to codify and tidy up the previous materials, and new versions of old products were published. However, this marked the first appearance of a real inherent problem with the setting. It was simply far too vast for all the different cities, countries, dungeons, ruins and islands to be detailed within the lifespan of any one edition of D&D, and of course the introduction of a new edition and the constant pushing ahead of the timeline would make the extant material outdated quite quickly anyway. A lot of DMs had no problem with this. After all, it was up to them to create games and settings based on the source material, not slavishly following it. However, a tremendous urge to detail every nook and cranny of the Realms now seemed to take root amongst the D&D writers, an ultimately futile and unachievable goal which they nevertheless tried to satisfy.

In 1996 TSR fell into deep money worries, although the Realms, as its most profitable setting, was not as adversely affected as say Birthright, Dark Sun and Planescape (which were all dropped at short notice). A new writer, Steven Schend, came on board at the TSR design team with the goal of really expanding on and developing the deep back-history of the Realms and bringing new depth to the setting. During his watch the Arcane Age sub-setting, which explored the backhistory of iconic fallen Realms empires such as Netheril and Cormanthyr, was developed whilst the long-neglected south-western kingdoms of Faerun such as Calimshan and Tethyr were also radically updated. Schend also thought outside the box, developing an entire undersea setting based on the floor of the Sea of Fallen Stars, complete with sea elf cities and hordes of hostile sahuagin led by a dark god-like force determined to conquer the world. Other writes also expanded on the Realms' pantheon of gods through three classic game products, namely Faiths and Avatars (sometimes argued to be the single finest D&D product ever written, although it has plenty of competition), Powers and Pantheons and Demihuman Deities.

However, whilst the Realms underwent an impressive creative surge, in other areas it was taking knocks. RA Salvatore and TSR had a falling-out in the mid-1990s that led to another writer being brought in to replace him on the Drizzt novels. They changed their minds and Salvatore returned with a new Drizzt novel in 1998, but the resulting lack of his bestselling novels for several years in a row hurt TSR's finances. In addition, the mid-1990s Realms computer games (Descent to Undermountain and Blood and Magic) were notably inferior to earlier games.

The Forgotten Realms 3rd Edition hardcover campaign book, published in 2001 and one of the very best products ever published for D&D.

Wizards of the Coast took over TSR in the late 1990s and decided to introduce a 3rd Edition of D&D and, with it, the Forgotten Realms. A wide-ranging revamp of the setting took place. No 'Realms-shaking' war or cataclysm, but some (mostly cosmetic and mostly growing out of the direction of the latter part of 2nd Edition) changes to the setting which made it a more interesting and vibrant place to game. The 3rd Edition Forgotten Realms setting hardcover book remains almost certainly one of the single most attractive and impressive D&D books ever published, certainly the best ever published by WotC, with a gorgeous art style and real attention to detail.

The original cover art to Baldur's Gate, BioWare's first game and the beginning of a series of classic computer RPGs that continues today with Mass Effect and Dragon Age.

The Realms' fortunes in other areas radically improved as well. In 1998 a little-known Canadian company called BioWare released a Forgotten Realms computer RPG called Baldur's Gate. Featuring a vast playing area, memorable characters, excellent writing and a faithful but fast-paced implementation of the D&D rules, Baldur's Gate was an instant classic and is still one of the finest computer roleplaying games ever made. BioWare released an expansion called Tales of the Sword Coast in 1999 and a colossal, ambitious sequel called Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn in 2000, concluding the saga with the expansion Throne of Bhaal in 2001. Some five million games in the series have been sold to date. In 2002 BioWare released a new game with an updated engine called Neverwinter Nights, which also enjoyed widespread popularity, whilst their partner studio Black Isle (later Obsidian) released Icewind Dale in 2000, Icewind Dale II in 2002 and Neverwinter Nights II in 2007, all of which were popular if not quite hitting the heights of the Baldur's Gate series. These games introduced a whole new audience to the Realms, to the pen-and-paper game and to the novels.

Throughout the 2000s the Forgotten Realms remained WotC's most popular campaign setting for D&D, generating significant amounts of revenue. However, as with the previous edition, a decision was made to explore the Realms in extreme depth and just as before it turned out to be a futile endeavour, with several key areas left unexplored. As before, fans seemed suspicious of these moves, and there was some grumbling when the mercantile kingdom of Sembia, deliberately left a blank slate in previous editions for DMs to develop as they saw fit, suddenly got 'filled in' by game developers. This problem was now exasperated by the designers' growing obsession with 'Realms-shaking events' (RSEs, as dubbed by the fanbase). After the success of the Avatar Wars and the Horde Invasion, designers now seemed to enjoy blowing up the Realms every other week, or so it felt. The Babylon-esque kingdom of Unther was devastated by flood and famine and then invaded by its Egyptian-style neighbour Mulhorand. The Zhentarim suffered civil wars and realignments. The Red Wizards, somewhat unconvincingly, became a race of magical merchants. A new kingdom appeared in the formerly lawless (and therefore fun to roleplay in) Savage North. Thanks to some time-travelling shenanigans, a bunch of ultra-powerful wizards from the ancient fallen kingdom of Netheril showed up to rebuild their empire. A massive and devastating horde of dragons run amok across the continent. The pantheon seemed to radically change every other week.

The second Forgotten Realms logo, 2001-08. The new edition doesn't have one.

These rapid and radical changes to the setting at the same time the designers were trying to describe the setting in insane levels of detail led to both a loosening of focus in the setting and the growing apathy of the fanbase. In addition to these problems, 3rd Edition was an inherently higher-powered game than its forebear, and as a result many, many NPCs and groups in Faerun were now ridiculously high-powered (to stop player-characters being able to kill them at will). With an almost encyclopediac knowledge of the setting now required for any DM wishing to run a canonical game set in the Realms, it is unsurprising that many either gave up or went over to the newer, much more straightforward Eberron setting.

Aware of the growing disenchantment of the setting (although computer game, novel and sourcebook sales remained strong), WotC decided to take a radically different approach when they introduced the 4th Edition of D&D (and, with it, Forgotten Realms) in 2008. Only a single campaign setting and a single add-on sourcebook were released, which would give the DM a bare bones knowledge of the setting they could add onto and flesh out as they wished. They also pushed the timeline of the Realms an additional 100 years into the future and, almost literally, blew up the setting in a magical cataclysm that radically altered the setting right down to its fundamentals.

The Forgotten Realms 4th Edition hardcover campaign book, published in 2008 and one of the very worst products ever published for D&D.

Forgotten Realms fans really did not like the changes, at all. With 4th Edition itself proving very controversial, these simultaneous huge changes to the game's biggest setting really earned WotC a lot of ire. Even big fans of the 4th Edition rules seemed to dislike the extent of the changes done to the Realms to make it fit the game. Even before the campaign setting hit the shelves, fans were working on ways of adapting existing 3rd Edition material to 4th without incorporating the nuking of the world. The existing Realms fanbase was resulting shattered between those who hated the changes (a clear majority, at least going by reviews and message board comments) and those who embraced them (plus a new, younger generation of new players put off by the previous edition of the setting's bloat). How this affects things in the long run remains unclear, but the Realms have survived for forty-odd years so far, so I wouldn't be writing its obituary just yet.


The World of the Realms

Canon world map of the Forgotten Realms in late 2nd Edition, before the shrinking of Faerun for 3rd Edition and the nuking of it for 4th.

The Forgotten Realms world is called Abeir-toril, and is an Earth-sized planet (know any other kind?) divided into four huge landmasses and many thousands of islands. The main landmass comprises three continents or subcontinents, called Faerun in the west, Kara-Tur in the east and Zakhara in the south. Across the Trackless Sea to the west, beyond the elven home island of Evermeet, lies the continent of Anchorome (with Maztica a subcontinent in the south of this landmass). South of that lies the jungle-filled, secretive land of Katashaka. Far to the east of Kara-Tur lies a large, unexplored continent called Osse.

Between the 3rd and 4th Editions of the game, the subcontinent of Maztica was destroyed in an transdimensional cataclysm called the Spellplague. It was replaced by a new landmass called 'Returned Abeir'. The fate of the neighbouring landmasses of Anchorome and Katashaka is unknown. Many fans of the setting have disregarded this 'official' change.

Map of Faerun in 2nd Edition D&D.

Faerun is the principle campaign setting of the Forgotten Realms world. Approximately 3,500 miles across, the continent is based on Europe and the Middle-East in the medieval period, although Faerun is considerably larger than Europe. It has a landlocked sea called the Sea of Fallen Stars which allows relatively rapid transit across the centre of the continent, with its oldest and most formidable nations located on or close to its shores, such as Cormyr (an English-influenced kingdom controlled by a powerful, centralised monarchy), Thay, Chondath and the resurgent Mulhorandi Empire. Whilst all of Faerun is covered in various Forgotten Realms products, a strip of land running west from the Sea of Fallen Stars' north-western shores to the Trackless Sea has received more development than any other part. This area, the 'Heartlands', incorporates Cormyr, Sembia, the rural Dalelands, the forebidding Moonsea (most notably the city of Zhentil Keep, home of the Black Network), parts of the Great Desert and the western city-states of Baldur's Gate and Waterdeep on the exterior ocean. This is the area which Ed Greenwood notably set a lot of his fiction, RPG campaigns and later novels.

RA Salvatore's Drizzt books mostly take place north-west of this area, in the forebidding and mostly uncivilised Savage North.

The slightly shrunken Faerun of 3rd Edition D&D.

In 3rd Edition WotC oddly decided that Faerun was too large and shrunk the continent in size by about 15%, losing several areas in the far south of the continent in the process and altering its shape. This was a retcon, with no in-universe reason given for the change. In 4th Edition the continent was almost completely devastated by the Spellplague, with the south-eastern coast destroyed, massive channels connecting the Great Sea to the Inner Sea formed, the Great Desert wiped out, several entire kingdoms drowned beneath the waves and millions of people killed. Quite a few players have disregarded this official change as well and continue to game in the pre-Spellplague version of the setting.

The post-apocalypse, magically nuked, WTF?-ified Faerun of 4th Edition.

Unlike Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms has no over-arcing metaplot as such. Instead, the setting is built on the idea that the modern kingdoms and cities are built on the ruins of much older, usually much more powerful and advanced civilisations, with humans as a relative newcomer race on a world where at different times the elves, dragons, giants and lizard-folk held domination. This set-up means that the dungeons and ruins strewn over the world usually have deeper back-stories than some others. These dungeons include one of the biggest dungeons ever detailed for the game, Undermountain (located underneath Waterdeep) and the tantalisingly-described fallen city of Shoonach, once the capital of the most populous human empire in the history of Faerun, sprawling across tens of square miles of above and below-ground sites, but the size of the dungeon defied any kind of detailing in game products.

Whilst there is no world-spanning storyline, there are regional ones. Waterdeep, for example, is a safe and civilised city but there are political machinations as well as hidden threats to its continued survival. The city of Silverymoon in the distant north is a beacon of light surrounded by thousands of square miles of hostile, monster and bandit-infested territory. Cormyr, on the other hand, is a powerful and civilised kingdom which unfortuantely lies between several rival and competing powers who desire nothing more than its collapse, whilst the peaceful rural folk of the Dalelands have been forced into a sometimes strained and uncomfortable alliance with the local elves against the encroaching desires of the Black Network to the north. These more locally-focused stories give rise to greater feeling of realism than some other fantasy worlds where absolutely everything that happens ties in with an over-arcing metaplot in some fashion.

The classic 1991 RPG Eye of the Beholder. In-game, skeletons cannot smash through doors like this. Still a nice cover though.

Evaluation

I got into the Realms by playing Eye of the Beholder on my Commodore Amiga in 1992. In the manual was a small map showing the west coast of Faerun (taken from Karen Wynn Fonstad's very fine Atlas of the Forgotten Realms) and the lands within several hundred miles of Waterdeep and I was immediately intrigued by the scope of the setting. When I picked up and read The Crystal Shard in the library a few months later, I realised that all the lands in the book fitted into a tiny corner of the map from the computer game, and I was impressed by that sense of scale. After I started playing D&D in 1995, the 2nd Edition Forgotten Realms campaign setting was one of my first purchases, and I went on to purchase dozens of further game supplements and novels over the next decade or so as I ran several campaigns in the setting.

During that time my adventuring parties attacked Waterdeep with an army of infuriated treants (hey, I was young and inexperienced), re-opened the Silk Road between Faerun and Kara-Tur by blazing a trail of violence through the enraged Tuigan clans, inadvertantly joined forces with a vast orc horde descending from the Spine of the World mountains (and ended up besieging their own castle), engaged in a clandestine battle of assassins on the streets of a drow city and helped save Cormyr from the machinations of a dragon-led horde of interdimensional goblins (which, seriously, was from an adventure book and not my own crazed mind). I have lost more hours than I can count to the Eye of the Beholder, Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale and Neverwinter Nights series of computer role-playing games, and still recommend the early Drizzt books for anyone looking for an easy-to-read YA fantasy series (although, seriously, stop after Siege of Darkness as it's all downhill from there).

I always liked the idea of the Forgotten Realms as a world with each nook and cranny, every village and ruin hiding a dozen stories behind it, where people in one town might not give a toss that the dark god Bane was running amok 300 miles away because they were more concerned with solving a spate of local murders or tracking down a lost flock of sheep. Whenever I encounter a roleplayer who says they dislike the Realms I am always somewhat puzzled, as an adventure set in Cormyr should be so different varied from a campign set in Zakhara or Calimshan that they might as well be on different worlds. It's a bit like meeting someone who loathes going on holiday to Bognor and thus concluding that NYC also sucks because it's on the same planet.

Of course, it's easy to get lost in the moirass of details in the Realms setting. The latter 3rd Edition products also unwisely focused on big epic events, which has never been the setting's main purporse, and the prevalence of NPCs like Drizzt Do'Urden, Elminster (worst author-insertion character ever) and Khelben in some campaigns (either directly by the DM or by players playing knock-off characters) is annoying. I am also not a fan of high-powered, high-magic settings and the Realms, whilst not really like that in 1st and 2nd Editions, definitely became that in 3rd, leading to apathy with the setting. The changes and alterations to the world for 4th Edition, however, seem like the equivalent of cracking a walnut with an atom bomb. There were more elegant solutions they could have used to fix what was wrong with the Realms. Certainly my interest in playing in the current incarnation of the setting is very low.

Still, I have to thank Ed Greenwood, Bob Salvatore and the rest of the Forgotten Realms game-designers, computer game programmers and novelists for providing me with many hundreds of hours of entertainment in the setting, and I will continue to keep an eye on it in the future.

The Worlds of D&D: Dragonlance

The History of Dragonlance

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

The first Dragonlance product, released in March 1984.

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

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

For a lot of people, where Dragonlance really began.

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

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

The Heroes of the Lance.

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

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

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

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

The World of Dragonlance

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

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

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

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

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

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


Evaluation

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

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

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

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

There is also another problem with the setting:

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

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

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

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