The Dragonlance setting was originally created in the early 1980s by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman as a place to set a new line of AD&D adventure modules. As a game setting it didn’t exactly set the world on fire, but as a line of novels it was wildly successful. In this quick summary, I’ll try to share some bits and pieces of its real-world history to help contextualize the subsequent reviews.
Themes and motifs
The general theme of the Dragonlance setting is “hope in darkness.” The world is consumed by war and everything is completely shit, but as long as good people try to make things better in small ways, there’s a chance that the future will be better. You don’t have to be a Chosen One hero to save the world; you just have to do your small part, whatever that is, as best you can. It’s darker and grittier than a lot of TSR’s other settings — grittier than a lot of the fantasy published at the time, actually, although fairly tame by modern standards — but the emphasis on hope and faith means it’s never gratuitously dark.
It’s strongly character-driven, with an ensemble cast that drives the first six books and then shows up again in many subsequent ones. In some ways this is an improvement over the “world with lots of random unconnected stories” approach of a setting like the Forgotten Realms because it lets the reader develop and nurture attachments to the characters as well as the world. It turned out to be an Achilles’ heel for the setting, though, because the setting was so strongly associated with those characters and their overarching plotline that neither authors nor readers seemed to know what to do without them.
Dragons, unsurprisingly, play a large role in the setting. Hickman was particularly bored by how many D&D modules treated dragons as monsters which heroes could kill for XP and treasure, instead of making them special and awe-inspiring. As such, the plot of the first few Dragonlance novels centres around the return of the formerly mythical dragons to the world of Krynn, and they’re depicted as epic creatures in a world of ordinary humans.
How it started
In 1984, Margaret Weis was an editor in TSR’s fledgling book department and Tracy Hickman was a game designer with a few published TSR adventures to his name, including the seminal Ravenloft module. A couple years earlier, Tracy and his wife Laura (also a game designer at TSR) had come up with an idea for a series of modules that, unlike most of the combat-heavy, location-based modules TSR had published to date, would be strongly narrative. They’d tell a single story of an epic fantasy war over the course of multiple (initially three, which became twelve by the time of release) linked modules, each following on from the next and continuing the story. Instead of creating their own characters, players would choose from a set of pre-generated characters, which gave the module authors the opportunity to mix character-specific arcs into the plot.
Anyone who’s played Dungeons & Dragons before probably has some idea how unlikely it is that a group of players will do what the DM expects even during just a single session, let alone over the course of a dozen consecutive adventures. The idea of telling a long narrative is fundamentally at odds with the improvisational, collaborative storytelling approach of D&D, so these modules had to do everything possible to railroad the players into doing only what the storyline expected them to do. Ultimately, this story works much better as a series of novels than it ever did as a tabletop roleplaying experience. I suspect that if the novels had never been published, people nowadays would barely remember that the modules existed.
Fortunately, some bright spark at TSR decided that there should be a trilogy of tie-in novels to promote the module series. Unfortunately, this decision came very late in the development process. TSR hired some freelance author — nobody’s willing to name names — to do the work, but the results were apparently godawful. Weis and Hickman decided to write it themselves, but by this time they had only three months to complete a manuscript. Luckily for TSR, which was in serious financial difficulty at the time, the pair turned out to be up to the task. After working evenings and weekends to churn out the first draft in time, Weis and Hickman saw Dragons of Autumn Twilight, an adaptation of the first two AD&D modules, hit shelves in November of 1984.
The novels turned out to be a smashing success. TSR, whose management was skeptical about the concept of the novels, initially printed the minimum run of 50,000 paperback copies for the first book — and then were swiftly proved wrong, and had to scramble to print more. Hard sales figures for TSR novels don’t seem to exist, since TSR wasn’t in the habit of sharing their financial data, but it’s been said that Dragons of Autumn Twilight alone shifted somewhere in the neighbourhood of two million copies.
Adapting a set of AD&D modules to fiction was a restrictive and frustrating task, so the second two books in the trilogy (Dragons of Winter Night and Dragons of Spring Dawning) were written before the corresponding modules were published, freeing the authors from having to write more interminable dungeon crawling sequences. TSR would go on to try this “you’ve read the novel, now play the D&D module!” approach with a few other books, like Azure Bonds and the Avatar trilogy. They’re not very fondly remembered, largely due to the amount of railroading required to keep players on track. (Ruins of Adventure, the module adaptation of the Pool of Radiance video game, is the only one that’s not awful, largely because it’s a flexible and open-ended sandbox that doesn’t enforce a narrative.)
How it went
Clearly, you can’t have a success like that without both readers and businesspeople clamouring for a sequel. Weis and Hickman quickly followed the original trilogy (“Dragonlance Chronicles”) with a second “Dragonlance Legends” trilogy that was, at least in the short term, even more successful than the first. The second Legends book, War of the Twins, became the first TSR book to hit the New York Times paperback best-seller list on July 13th, 1986. It peaked at #11 and stayed on for four weeks, and then the third book (Test of the Twins) hit the list shortly thereafter on October 12th. Overall, it’s said that the Dragonlance novel line sold a combined total of around 30 million books — but again, it’s hard to find authoritative sources for these numbers.
Weis and Hickman’s success ended up spelling doom for the series, though. Once the authors became a success, other book publishers started making them offers — and those offers made it clear just how badly TSR had been screwing them financially. TSR had been paying them like employees, not like best-selling authors, and TSR wasn’t going to pay their authors anything near market rates if they didn’t have to. (The people in positions of authority in the book department, like Jean Black and Mary Kirchoff, were extremely pro-authors, but upper management was decidedly not.) Weis and Hickman sensibly decided to publish their future works with other publishers who would give them a fair deal, and TSR, whose attitude towards authors was that they were interchangeable cogs in the machine, found other people to write the rest of the Dragonlance novels. Many of these other authors didn’t have a good grasp of the theme of the setting, and TSR was not exactly stringent about quality control.
After Chronicles, later Dragonlance novels were faced with a serious dilemma: where to go next? If you want to stick to a “hope in darkness” theme, you need darkness to contrast your story against. But once the War of the Lance has been wrapped up and the world is rebuilding, where are you going to find a similarly compelling epic conflict that will reel readers back in? Weis and Hickman solved the problem by narrowing the focus of the Legends trilogy to a small subset of their characters, sending them back in time to explore more of the setting’s history. Other authors handled this by either setting their stories in and around the time of the War, filling in little bits of the world at around the same time, or filling in the setting’s past before the Chronicles trilogy began. Some books, like The Legend of Huma, reached into the distant past; others, like the Preludes and Meetings series, depicted the pre-war adventures of Weis and Hickman’s characters. There were only so many gaps to fill, though, and things got much iffier once TSR turned towards the setting’s future.
Over the years, the world of Krynn would be wracked by two more world-threatening conflicts, plus whatever is going on in the new trilogy that W&H are currently writing. But these ran into the inevitable issue with sequels: you can only save the world once, and after that it becomes boring. Weis and Hickman were smart to focus their second trilogy on personal stakes instead of ginning up another continent-spanning war, because you can’t go back to that well without cheapening the outcome of the original trilogy. Later books tried to move on and tell the stories of the children of the original books’ heroes, but I think the setting was so tightly associated with the original heroes and their stories that readers didn’t particularly want to start over with a bunch of newcomers. Sales of Dragonlance novels seem to have encountered diminishing returns, and the setting drifted into cultural irrelevance over the years.
How it ended
The last Dragonlance novel rolled off the presses in 2010, and then there was a 12-year hiatus where we saw neither novels nor tabletop gaming material. Everyone assumed that Dragonlance was dead… and then, after a fair amount of legal wrangling, Wizards of the Coast started publishing a new Dragonlance novel trilogy by Weis and Hickman in 2022. [1] Ironically, the legal dispute attracted a lot more attention than the actual novels did; I’ve heard next to nothing about them since they came out, and they don’t seem to have made much of an impact on the fandom. (As I write this, the Dragonlance wiki doesn’t even have a page for the second novel in the trilogy, which has been out for most of a year.) I strongly suspect this new trilogy will be Dragonlance’s last outing.
On the surface, it’s surprising to see how the Dragonlance franchise has aged much worse than the Forgotten Realms. Despite having almost ubiquitous cultural penetration in the 1980s and 1990s, it never took off as a general-purpose D&D campaign setting. Wizards of the Coast has shown next to no interest in reviving it — aside from a single 5th Edition adventure released in 2022, they’ve never produced any first-party Dragonlance gaming material. The Forgotten Realms wiki is jammed to the gills with thousands of pages of trivia; the Dragonlance wiki feels like a small, empty room by comparison.
But the more I think about it, the less surprising it feels. Krynn feels more like the backdrop for Weis & Hickman’s stories rather than a living world where you can tell your own stories, so once the story of the War of the Lance wrapped there wasn’t much to make people stick around. Personally, I never really felt that the world was a place that operated independently of the novels’ stories, nor did I feel like I had the freedom to do whatever I liked in that sandbox without stepping on the toes of the novels. The initial novels in the series were a huge success, but that success is also indirectly the reason why it didn’t thrive for decades the way the Realms did.
With all that out of the way, let’s take a look at the first book and see if we can puzzle out what people found so compelling about it.
Footnotes
[1] Well, technically it was Del Rey Books, a division of Penguin, doing the publishing; Wizards of the Coast canned its in-house fiction department at the end of 2016.
Dragonlance biggest strenght, being character- rather than setting-centered, was also its biggest problem in terms of possibilities to exploit Krynn beyond the War and the Heroes of the Lance. When you haven’t got interesting characters to bring on the plot, the setting per se seems rather boring or generic. It’s completely different from what TSR implemented with the Forgotten Realms, where the world itself was “living”and interesting beyond the Elminsters or the Khelbens or the Harpers. If the quality of the tens of novels set in the Forgotten Realms is fluctuating between good and bad, the novels in Krynn, beside those by Weiss and Hickman, are painfully awful, at least those trying to focus on the Heroes of the Lance before the War
Correct on all counts. “Living” is a great word to describe the core problem, actually. It’s remarkable, re-reading the Dragonlance books now, how static and shallow the world seems. I feel like I don’t actually know all that much about what life in Krynn is like. The cost of focusing so hard on characterization and having an epic war plot is that there’s just not much time or attention paid to the world itself.
I myself have not read the Dragonlance novels, nor have I played or DMed a game in this setting, but have always been interested to check it out. Who knows, maybe I’ll try reading them after checking out your reviews. Funnily enough, I hear that here in Brazil, Dragonlance was always very popular as both fiction and game setting, compared to FR even. In cursory research (which means googling it for 10 minutes) I could not find specific data to back this up, but it is what I always hear.
I don’t know exactly, but my feeling is that in Italy, in the late nineties, Dragonlance was more popular as a setting than the Forgotten Realms. I myself started playing AD&D with the “Dragons of Ice” module. Maybe I am biased by my own experience but until recently no FR author except Salvatore and some Greenwood has beene translated in italian, while quite all the DL novels were. Having dead the DL modules, they seem really hard to be played by the DM, though, with a lot of railroading and eternal dungeon crawling
I would absolutely agree that what makes the Realms as a setting more hit-and-miss for novels — that it’s an anthology world of a thousand stories rather than a saga of a few main characters — is also what makes it superior as a setting for D&D adventures. I know Realms-haters kvetch about “why would my character save the world when Drizzt or Elminster is around?” but in actuality Drizzt and Elminster have very narrow bands of things they actually care about, and it’s sort of like “Why doesn’t Thor do something about the Green Goblin?” Not his baileywick, y’know?
But the Dragonlance world was so very much about the War of the Lance and the Heroes of the Lance, that it very much has the Star Wars problem of what to do outside of the original trilogy (except the Star Wars RPGs found remarkable depth in filling in the gaps of that world and things to do inside it).
The 5th Edition take on Dragonlance was making it the world for war epics, but even it showed that the War of Lance was the most interesting thing by telling a story of that era instead of dealing with the setting as it stood post-2010 in the narrative. In fact, even when the Dragonlance Nexus people released a 5E campaign guide for the setting I could find hardly anything in it about what the world is like as of the “present day” of the narrative.
Dragonlance, to me, is a great world for big sweeping epics of good versus evil and big heroes tempted by foul villains, stories in a grand romantic/tragic/chivalric kind of mode — the problem is just that unless you’re playing the novels you always know you’re gonna be the side story to the main event in that world.
Very well put! I touched on that a bit in my review of Curse of the Shadowmage as well. I think the reason why Dragonlance fares worse than Star Wars in terms of other authors finding good stuff to do outside of the main epic story is the quality of the world-building. Even in the original Star Wars trilogy, where we only see a handful of places and stay tightly focused on the main story, there was always the feel of a big universe just out of frame. They were good at environmental storytelling and implying the existence of things outside of the story. The worldbuilding in Dragonlance, on the other hand, was on the level of “this is a town.” What makes Palanthas feel different from Kalaman? What makes Port Balifor obviously distinct from Flotsam? What’s in the areas of the map that the heroes never visited? It’s really hard to say.
The Forgotten Realms often is criticized for how much of it there is – how many characters, how many cities, how many different places with different things going on – but I think the strength of that as a setting for D&D games (not necessarily novels) is this: it gives your players a lot of reasons to wanna save the world. It’s a cool world, worth saving. To me, Dragonlance doesn’t inspire that as much.
That said, obviously there are people who *are* invested in Dragonlance *a lot*. Like, you see it in the comments pages here! Dragonlance fans will argue with you to the *death* about stuff that doesn’t even seem arguable! The passion is definitely there.
These DragonLance books were my introduction to the marvellous world of Fantasy. Very soon after that, I discovered Tolkien and I have never been the same since.
For a long time I was determined to read as much fantasy as I could, from all eras, but as the years have gone by, I’ve actually found myself more and more drawn to the works of Lewis and Tolkien, and their whole movement (the famous “Inklings”) as well as the earlier fantasy (or, I guess you could call it pre-fantasy) that influenced them. This is the work of people like George MacDonald, William Morris, the romantic poets, the Arthurian, Celtic and Welsh legends, and works of Greek, Latin, and Norse mythology.
Tolkien’s accomplishment, and the centrality of his work to the genre of fantasy, is hard to get past. I had always expected to be excited by what people did with the “formula” he seems to have originated. But these days my feeling is that what happened in fantasy after him is less exciting (to me) than working backwards and discovering all the various streams that ended up converging so powerfully into his great, surging, mythopoeic river, which has carried us through to the modern era (like George RR Martin, etc. etc.)
However, a few years ago I did reread the DragonLance Chronicles for old times sake, and, while I have to admit I was disappointed that they weren’t as good as I remembered, there is something in them that reminded me of why I found them so attractive in my youth. I do hope to come back here and leave some individual comments on each book.
On top of that, I applaud your effort to critically examine these books. I have read at least one short work on the history of fantasy, and I regularly read articles from the online Encyclopedia of Fantasy. In both cases, I would say the incredible TSR boom of the 80s is woefully underrepresented. These works are simply not taken seriously. When reading the book on the history of fantasy, I got the impression that “mainstream” or derivative works were just not considered that important to the development of the genre, and almost every book cited, especially post-Tolkien, had to have something unconventional about it, or subvert the formula in some way, to warrant inclusion and discussion. To me, this is a mistake, because the overwhelming popularity of the TSR books, whatever their quality, surely contributed to the success of fantasy as a genre and influenced the general feeling and flavour of fantasy in the eyes of many (perhaps even most) readers of the genre.
So I really appreciate the work you’ve put into this endeavour, and I look forward to reading your thoughts on some of these books!
Thank you so much for the kind words, Laurence! I hope you get some joy from it.