Dragonlance Chronicles Omnibus Coming February 2025

Dragonlance fans will be able to pick up a compiled hardcover edition next year. By Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, the trilogy was originally launched in 1984 with Dragons of Autumn Twilight. While there have been omnibus editions before (I have one!), this one features a foreword by actor and Dragonlance megafan Joe Manganiello.

The hardcover comes out February 4th 2025 for $35. You can pre-order it from Penguin Random House.

ABOUT DRAGONLANCE CHRONICLES

“Before there was Game of Thrones―there was Dragonlance.”—Vox

Rediscover the unforgettable world of the New York Times bestselling Dragonlance series with the first three novels of one of the most popular fantasy series of all time—now featuring a new foreword by Joe Manganiello!

Once merely creatures of legend, the dragons have returned—but with their arrival comes the departure of the old gods, and all healing magic. As war threatens to engulf the land, lifelong friends reunite for an adventure that will change their lives and shape their world forever….

Meet Sturm the Solamnic knight, Tanis Half-Elf, Tasslehoff Burrfoot the irrepressible Kender, Flint the Dwarf, Caramon the warrior and his twin brother, Raistlin the red-robed mage—former comrades together again after five years apart, and looking for adventure.

They find it when they see a woman use a blue crystal staff to heal a villager. Wondering if it’s a sign the gods have not abandoned them after all, they investigate and swiftly find themselves in deep trouble.

The Seekers, members of a new religious order, want the artifact for their own ends, believing it will help them replace the gods and win the continent of Ansalon. Now these old comrades in arms must fight again to prevent the staff from falling into the hands of darkness….

Dragonlance Chronicles features the three novels Dragons of Autumn Twilight, Dragons of Winter Night, and Dragons of Spring Dawning.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I kinda think that going with the high page count releases for A Song of Ice and Fire was a mistake. If you look at his previous work, much of it is novella and short story length. The Armageddon Rag, the last full-length novel he published before A Game of Thrones, was still under 400 pages. If he had kept things at a tidy 200-300 page length, he might not have gotten as easily trapped by the dozens of threads he had going. Or at least, he wouldn't be stuck trying to unravel them all in a thousand-page book for thirteen years and counting.

The individual characters' POV chapters would also naturally break into short stories and novellas much of the time, too.

Let's get you into a time machine and send you to 1990s New Mexico.

 

[Spellslinging Sellsword]

Never read the trilogy, so decided to pre-order this to check it out.

 

[Parmandur]

If I'm extra honest, I prefer the Chronicles to a lot of (supposedly better) contemporary fantasy. I think it reads better than ASoI&F, for example, way better than anything Sanderson has ever published, and so on and so forth.

OK, I actually agree that Dragonlance holds up a little better than it is being given credit for in this thread...but that is a bit much. I think they hold up well to a lot of current popular YA stuff, but Martin and Sanderson are on a different level.

 

[Velderan]

I mean, the writing, the actual prose, sentence by sentence, is bad IMO. It reads like YA fiction, and I am not a fan of that style of prose.

So basically it reads like what it's supposed to be. These were books written for teenagers.

I'm with @Helena Real in being fine with the books whenever I've picked them up to reread them. They're basically what I remember and I don't expect them to be something they're not, just like I don't expect anything more out of some of the memorable X-men trade paperbacks I picked up and reread every few years (Dark Phoenix Saga, God Loves, Man Kills, etc) which also were stories written for teenagers.

 

[Helena Real]

OK, I actually agree that Dragonlance holds up a little better than it is being given credit for in this thread...but that is a bit much. I think they hold up well to a lot of current popular YA stuff, but Martin and Sanderson are on a different level.

Matter of opinion, I guess. Martin's best writing happened 20 years before ASoI&F—and it's only gone downhill from then. And I haven't read a single book by Sanderson that I actually enjoyed enough to finish. They're like oatmeal to me. Fine, but nothing to be excited about.

Just the other day I grabbed my copy of Dragons of Winter Night and read the whole scene where You-Know-Who is about to die... And I couldn't help but tear up once again. Nothing in ASoI&F or the Sanderson stuff I've read has ever come close to affecting me emotionally like that.

 

[EthanSental]

Since DragonLance is on the dmsguild, has Tracey, Laura or Margaret did like Ed with FR and create new things we could buy? Don’t need a novel contract to create new stuff that fans could purchase and many would think of as their version of Cannon like they do for Ed’s works on dmsguild.

 

[Tyler Do'Urden]

Interestingly, I didn't read the Dragonlance books until I was in college, and, while I found them enjoyable - I wasn't terribly impressed. But I'd already read many of the top fantasy authors by then.

But then, when looking for novels to read out loud to my son, I decided to pull them out again. He enjoyed Dragons of Autumn Twilight, so we continued... and read Legends... and The Second Generation... and we finished up with Summer Flame. He wanted more, but I felt like the story ended for me at that point. I enjoyed them so much more, reading them to my son, making voices for the different characters (he came to be able to immediately tell which characters were which even before I announced them just by which voice I'd gone into)... I found them delightful when seen through the eyes of an eight year old boy.

After that, we've been reading the Drizzt novels. I decided to do them out-of-order, reading the Icewind Dale Trilogy first. He got just as into those as he was into Dragonlance. In fact, I'm about to go to Shanghai to pick him up from his grandparents who he has been staying with, and when I called him two days ago the first thing he asked me was "Are you bringing the next Drizzt novel?!"

As far as the caliber of the writing... I recently started reading The Hunger Games, and I must say that I find Weis and Hickman to be slightly better writers than Collins - and Salvatore a much better writer. I've always thought that whatever other deficiencies Salvatore might have, the man is better at writing action scenes than nearly anyone else in the genre, and that's a pretty great talent in itself.

 

[Parmandur]

And I haven't read a single book by Sanderson that I acqptually enjoyed enough to finish. They're like oatmeal to me. Fine, but nothing to be excited about.

You are definitely missing out: Sanderson has written approximately 4 dozen novels that I would rate higher than the original Dragonlamce Chronicles.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Since DragonLance is on the dmsguild, has Tracey, Laura or Margaret did like Ed with FR and create new things we could buy? Don’t need a novel contract to create new stuff that fans could purchase and many would think of as their version of Cannon like they do for Ed’s works on dmsguild.

Weis never did any of the RPG stuff and Tracey is still in a snit with WotC for wanting the racism removed.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

You are definitely missing out: Sanderson has written approximately 4 dozen novels that I would rate higher than the original Dragonlamce Chronicles.

Has the same failing as most modern fantasy - it takes it way too seriously. I’d rather reread Pratchett.