Dragonlance DRAGONLANCE is coming this year!

This year, a hardcover book and a 'battle game'. Here's the teaser trailer! The adventure is set at the start of the War of the Lance, while the battle game is designed for 'large scale' battles. And they're coming later this year, in 2022.

• Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen
• Dragonlance: Warriors of Krynn

 

[MonsterEnvy]

From the sounds of it, it's not going to be a retelling of the original novels. There might be cameos from various characters, but, they are not really a big part of the adventure. I wonder what part of Ansalon they would be looking at though. The War of the Lance does cover a LOT of the land.

Yeah it's something taking place alongside them. We are apparently going to a part of Ansalon that has not been explored much.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I'm assuming it has somekind of Gazetteer like Strixhaven.

That does seem like the closest comparison.

It might be worth mentioning that when the original Dragonlance modules where published, all we had on the setting was what was in the modules. The setting book was published later.

 

[Hussar]

Yeah it's something taking place alongside them. We are apparently going to a part of Ansalon that has not been explored much.

Yeah, i was kinda noodling around the maps for a few moments and I'm not really sure where they could go. Nordmar? Up north anyway. Silvenesti, Qualinesti, Solamnia and points in between have been covered pretty well in the original stories. Probably the north eastern quarter of the continent. I don't recall a lot of the action from up there anyway.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Is Raistlin's story with the gully dwarfs from the adventures, or the novels?

Because personally, I think it sucks having to have a game world adhere to novels. I should be able to run my game based on my game books only, not my game books and a bunch of novels.

The idea of playing out a prewritten story that had to conform to the books was a major flaw in the original design, turning the whole tabletop campaign into a hard railroad, and missing great chunks of the story that you had to read the novels to find out what happened.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Be that as it may, I wouldn't want to play a game that also required me to pay attention to another source of media, unless the game was actually based entirely on that media (like a Star Trek RPG). Tie-in novels or shows are great. My gaming shouldn't require them or be forced to include something as, let's face it, awful as the gully dwarfs just because of a tie-in.

Even playing Star Trek RPG, we played a different crew on a different Starship having different adventures.

 

[Aldarc]

Which as you sad they can just handwave it all because really, whos going to read those old novels anyway?

And I don't think it's that sad that few people under 45 will read/re-read the original books. They were of their time.

I mean, Dragonlance not being read much is about 1/10th as much of a "crime against literature" as the fact that no-one under 45 seems to know who Michael Moorcock even is, let alone have read any of his books, let alone understand his utterly gigantic influence on the entire fantasy genre (both literary and in terms of games - D&D would be pretty different and Warhammer literally wouldn't even exist in any recognisable form without him).

At least people still remember the name of the setting and what it's basically about. Moorcock, you're incredibly lucky if you can get an "Oh the Elric guy? Yeah never read any of this stuff!" out of someone these days lol.

Around the time that I got into D&D (3e) in high school during the early '00s, my friends and the online D&D fandom were raving about and recommending the Dragonlance War of the Lance novels. So I bought the books, but I couldn't even finish the first book. It was bad. Like bad bad bad. It was so transparently written for game fiction, even at times meandering into explaining the game mechanics of D&D spell casting. I recognize that this reinforcement of the game mechanics in the fiction excites some people, but for me it read more like cheap product placement. The writing, dialogue, and characters felt so flat. A sort of evocative charm seemed absent. War of the Lance is one of THE biggest reasons that I developed a prejudice against reading game/IP fiction as a general rule. Poor Drizzt never even got a chance.

For the record, as a result of my father's invested interest in my nascent enjoyment of fantasy literature, I had read a good chunk of the multiverse works of Michael Moorcock (e.g., Elric, Hawkmoon, Corum, etc.) in middle school. My father had a treasure trove of fantasy and sci-fi literature in the library of his old room at my grandparents' house that we plundered. Reading speculative fiction staples like Dune, A Wizard of Earthsea, Lord of the Rings, Elric of Melniboné, Conan, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Redwall, John Carter of Mars, Prydain Chronicles, Black Company, and others etc. definitely ruined my appetite for War of the Lance.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Around the time that I got into D&D (3e) in high school during the early '00s, my friends and the online D&D fandom were raving about and recommending the Dragonlance War of the Lance novels. So I bought the books, but I couldn't even finish the first book. It was bad. Like bad bad bad. It was so transparently written for game fiction, even at times meandering into explaining the game mechanics of D&D spell casting. I recognize that this reinforcement of the game mechanics in the fiction excites some people, but for me it read more like cheap product placement. The writing, dialogue, and characters felt so flat. A sort of evocative charm seemed absent. War of the Lance is one of THE biggest reasons that I developed a prejudice against reading game/IP fiction as a general rule. Poor Drizzt never even got a chance.

For the record, as a result of my father's invested interest in my nascent enjoyment of fantasy literature, I had read a good chunk of the multiverse works of Michael Moorcock (e.g., Elric, Hawkmoon, Corum, etc.) in middle school. My father had a treasure trove of fantasy and sci-fi literature in the library of his old room at my grandparents' house that we plundered. Reading speculative fiction staples like Dune, A Wizard of Earthsea, Lord of the Rings, Elric of Melniboné, Conan, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Redwall, John Carter of Mars, Prydain Chronicles, Black Company, and others etc. definitely ruined my appetite for War of the Lance.

Very understandable re: ruining your appetite.

White Wolf, of all things, are why I know much about Moorcock. In the mid through late '90s they republished virtually all of Moorcock's stuff via their literary arm (and yeah it is the same people as World of Darkness etc.) into nice collections with handsome covers. But I don't think those started coming out until like '93 or '94.

I think I was lucky to read The War of the Lance at 12-13 (after having become aware of the DL setting), and even then I was detecting some issues with it, and I preferred the other DL novels. I tried to re-read it at 18/19 and yeah, as with you, found it actually unreadable by then. Drizzt I also read mostly aged 12-16, and was never particularly impressed by, but my friend kept buying the books and handing them to me after he read them, so like, free books. They're not as technically bad, but even as older teenagers we generally agreed that apart from the fight scenes, which Salvatore was decent at, they weren't great. I remember having a lot of very specific criticism I have long since forgotten! I'm utterly terrified to ever re-read a book I really enjoyed at 12 from Krynn, Galen Beknighted, which was about a young and somewhat reluctant/lazy Solamnic Knight. I'm sure it's probably awful but I totally loved it lol.

In general I think fantasy/SF, in part as a result of merchanised/IP-based fantasy/SF being very succesful, and in part because Tolkien's influence was so strong - far stronger than now - but so few writers could match him, was having something of a nadir in the late '80s and early '90s. A wonderful BBC documentary on the history of fantasy (sadly extremely hard to track down, I'd love to get it on DVD) from the '00s, which features interviews with all sort of fantasy luminaries (including China Mieville) and historians mentioned the '80s particularly as the era of what was termed "Extruded Fantasy Product", which seems fair (basically endless same-y sub-Tolkien drivel, most of which is long-forgotten now). Things improved somewhat as the '90s progressed.

I do think there are some "excessively generic" or tail-eating issues with fantasy now, particularly "Teenage girl magical assassin pygmalion" sub-genre that's emerged, but the average standard of writing is a lot higher at least.

 

[Hussar]

Well, the thing to remember is that the 80's is when fantasy as a genre really gets rolling. Prior to the 80's, there just isn't all that much published. Not comparatively anyway. There's very likely more fantasy published in the 80's than there was in the previous 80 years. And a lot of it was ... well... not very good. Granted, lots of the stuff before the 80's wasn't very good either, but, there was so much less of it, that it was pretty easy to find the gems.

To put it in perspective, prior to the 80's, there were entire years when you might get a couple of dozen original fantasy titles. Total. By the end of the 80's, you generally are getting several dozen original fantasy novels in a month.

And that's not including media tie in stuff.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Yeah, I was a little too old to appreciate the Dragonlance novels when they came out, having already read the usual suspects:

Dune, A Wizard of Earthsea, Lord of the Rings, Elric of Melniboné, Conan, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser

Although I appreciated the first module, and the attempt to make a setting that was a little distinctive.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

I hope Krynn to be "unlocked" in DMGuild.

Other point is the concept of "Akasha realm", a demiplane created by the collective memory. Have you read "Tanis, the shadow years"? This could allow plots in "alternate continuities", even "isekai", stories about people from our reaility to other world, sometimes within a fiction work.