Keldryn
Adventurer
RangerWickett said:
The Dragonlance Chronicles were amongst my favourite fantasy novels for many years. But they were also some of the first fantasy novels that I ever read. I was about 12 years old at the time, and I had read The Hobbit and Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain. And many Endless Quest books (TSR's D&D-based take on "Choose Your Own Adventure"), which were what originally led me to D&D. I read a few other fantasy novels in my youth, such as some Thieves' World books and the original Shannarra trilogy, but the overwhelming majority of the novels that I read were TSR's D&D-based books. I'd read a few other fantasy authors as well, such as Raymond E. Feist, whose work doesn't really stray that far from the D&D-esque vision of fantasy. I'd read David Eddings' books as well, but it seemed like everything he wrote after The Belgariad was basically the same story all over again. I didn't do much recreational reading for a few years... guess I kind of got burned out on reading in university.
I didn't particularly enjoy the Dragonlance novels that weren't written by Weis & Hickman. The details of the story were often inconsistent with what had been established previously (particularly The Legend of Huma, IIRC), and the overall tone was just different. When other authors started writing about the actual characters from the original story, I disliked them even more, as they just didn't seem to capture the essence of those characters. This was also one of the main reasons that I stopped reading Star Wars novels and is a major factor in why I don't really care for shared-world novel series in general.
I re-read the Dragonlance Chronicles about 5 or 6 years ago, and found them ... rather amateurish, to be honest. It was one of their first novels, but the writing style was definitely not what I'd remembered, the plotting was clumsy, and there were far too many characters involved. I had re-read Legends right after, and they were far more well-written, although not particularly great. Nostalgia definitely helps keep the characters and story of Dragonlance dear to my heart, because the books themselves aren't terribly good. I read the first of the "War of Souls" books a few years ago, and was pretty disappointed with it. Weis & Hickman have become much better writers than they were when Chronicles came out, but the world of Krynn had become so distorted by 15 years of other authors playing with it and writing about world-shattering events that it didn't really resemble the world and characters that I was familiar with. Plus there were a lot of references to characters and events from books that I didn't care to read by authors that I didn't really like. Again the comparison to Star Wars novels... too many authors who don't really capture the tone of the original work, too many pet characters that try to overshadow the original heroes, too many world-shaking events that seem to be required to one-up all of the previous ones... ugh.
It gets too messy. The timelines get too crowded. The tone of the world changes from one author to another. The original creative vision gets too watered-down and becomes bland and generic. I haven't read every shared-world and/or franchised novel series out there, but every one that I have read has succumbed to the same flaws.
Dragonlance was a bit different, as the world was designed around the story and characters of The War of the Lance -- for both the novels and the modules, concurrently. Outside of that campaign, however, it was a pretty limited world. The continent of Ansalon just wasn't very big. If you're not playing the original modules, then your PCs are likely to be overshadowed by the Heroes of the Lance. Krynn was too narrowly-focused to make for a really good campaign setting for a typical D&D game.
The Forgotten Realms have the opposite problem. It started out, of course, as a background for the short stories that Ed Greenwood used to write. But that was a very different Forgotten Realms than what was originally released in the grey box in 1987, which is again a very different FR from what it is today, after two decades of being a shared-world. It's lost most of its flavour and become a pretty generic melting pot where pretty much anything in fantasy can find a home. There are too many heroes and villains -- many of whom strangely seem to barely even notice each other's presence. The 1987 boxed set was actually a very good setting for a D&D game, with just the right amount of detail, and plenty of memorable NPCs that didn't necessarily overshadow the PCs -- even Elminster seemed to be more of a reclusive sage and not some super-powered behind-the-scenes manipulator of almost everything. 20 years of tales of currently-active legendary heroes makes it more difficult to tailor the world to the PCs. Of course you can throw out what you don't like, but that isn't the only problem. The FR suffers from an acute case of expansionitis and it has lost the unique flavour it once had. I think Ed Greenwood has even said that he didn't really want to write novels about Elminster and didn't find him that interesting a protagonist, but the fans wanted stories about him, so that's what he wrote...
I think that authors generally write their best work when writing about characters and stories (and worlds, if appropriate) entirely of their own creation. There's too much baggage involved in writing stories set in other authors' creations. And, as elitist as it sounds, most of it reads like sanctioned fan-fiction.
My wife has introduced me to a lot of great fantasy authors that I'd never read before. Some of my recent favourites are Orson Scott Card's Homecoming saga, Sheri Teper's The Family Tree, and Jaqueline Carey's Kushiel's Legacy... Saga... whatever.
I really like the Song of Fire and Ice (just finished A Feast for Crows), but it's not a fast-moving story. If you like novels to have resolutions at the end though, you might have a problem with the series, as none of the books have a satisfying conclusion.
