D&D General What Are Dragonlance's Weis & Hickman, and Actor Manganiello Cooking Up?

Actor and D&D superfan Joe Manganiello and Dragonlance co-author Tracy Hickman have both posted a cryptic image on their respective social medias showing themselves, along with Margaret Weis standing together in front of a large dragon statue at Wizards of the Coast's offices in Renton, Washington.

Hickman's image was accompanied by the words "Something is coming...", and in Manganiello's case "WE'RE BACK", to which Wizards of the Coast replied "Welcome back to the table!" A later photograph from Weis also included Laura Hickman and Dan Ayoub, who was named head of Dungeons & Dragons back in July of this year.

The posts have sparked speculation as to what they might mean, with guesses ranging from a revival of Manganiello's Dragonlance TV show project--which was no longer in development after he stated in February 2024 that "Dragonlance is not a property WotC are interested in developing further currently"--to a new Dragonlance-based D&D adventure.

Weis and Hickman co-wrote a new Dragonlance trilogy in recent years following a legal dust-up with Wizards of the Coast which was ultimately dismissed without prejudice, so it would seem that any bad blood from the dispute has been left in the past.

The question now remains--what are they all cooking up this time?

 

[Misanthrope Prime]

Thing about “native” is there aren’t many native Americans in London - I wouldn’t recognise one if I saw one. But as I understand it they are multiple ethnic groups, not just one. To be representative of my world, you need to have black people, who I gather you are excluding because somehow they are more different to you than other skin tones.

So, look. I'm mixed race, live in NYC, will fight to the death to defend actual diversity and multiculturalism among living, flesh and blood humans. The multiculturalism that you and I both know is contingent on our attachment to globalized colonial empires; without those, you shouldn't expect to see a city in fantasy that resembles the one out your window.

There's a reason that flesh and blood humans congregate in big cities like NYC or London. We have history, economies and technology that caused people to leave their ancestral homelands, where their physical phenotypes were at one point environmental adaptations (skin tone pretty much easily maps onto latitude here on Earth; fairer people towards the poles, darkest skinned people at the equator) and settle elsewhere.


Dragonlance, as far as I'm aware, does not have any of those. There are no multicontinental empires with large oceangoing ships picking up people from one place and enslaving them in another place. There is no silk road connecting Ansalon to fake Asia so we have an excuse for katana and nunchuks to show up. And no one can just casually decide to teleport their family to Palanthas because they want to get in on the lucrative plumbing trade.

If there are going to be black people in dragonlance, either the story needs to be set closer to the equator or, if it's in a more temperate region, there needs to be some sort of reason and method by which large populations of people would migrate or be taken out of their homelands to become a significant visible minority elsewhere.

In FR, we have this here and there; we know why Turmish is mostly populated by darker skinned people who migrated during the fall of Imaskar, for instance. But to my knowledge, no one has ever set down and actually done this kind of worldbuilding for Dragonlance. And just saying "this city is diverse now!" or "there have been dark skinned people in this population of arctic vikings for centuries, deal with it" showcases a stunning lack of creativity as writers to me.

EDIT: I don't really understand the idea that fantasy needs to resemble either your society, or the society the creators of the work were in. If I want to read a fantasy story about diversity in a dense city, I can crack open a superhero comic book or read something set in Ankh Morpork or Lankhmar. I don't need Camelot or Minas Tirith to look like NYC, diversity doesn't just mean diversity of people within a story but also diversity of stories within a medium or genre.

 

[Parmandur]

Represent the region it is set in

So, I am goijg to say this gently, but...Krynn isn't real. It has no actual identity.

Would it be a weird flex to make a biopic about Martin Luther King, Jr. and cast a Cambodian actor? Yes. But this ain't that.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

So, look. I'm mixed race, live in NYC, will fight to the death to defend actual diversity and multiculturalism among living, flesh and blood humans. The multiculturalism that you and I both know is contingent on our attachment to globalized colonial empires; without those, you shouldn't expect to see a city in fantasy that resembles the one out your window.

There's a reason that flesh and blood humans congregate in big cities like NYC or London. We have history, economies and technology that caused people to leave their ancestral homelands, where their physical phenotypes were at one point environmental adaptations (skin tone pretty much easily maps onto latitude here on Earth; fairer people towards the poles, darkest skinned people at the equator) and settle elsewhere.


Dragonlance, as far as I'm aware, does not have any of those. There are no multicontinental empires with large oceangoing ships picking up people from one place and enslaving them in another place. There is no silk road connecting Ansalon to fake Asia so we have an excuse for katana and nunchuks to show up. And no one can just casually decide to teleport their family to Palanthas because they want to get in on the lucrative plumbing trade.

If there are going to be black people in dragonlance, either the story needs to be set closer to the equator or, if it's in a more temperate region, there needs to be some sort of reason and method by which large populations of people would migrate or be taken out of their homelands to become a significant visible minority elsewhere.

In FR, we have this here and there; we know why Turmish is mostly populated by darker skinned people who migrated during the fall of Imaskar, for instance. But to my knowledge, no one has ever set down and actually done this kind of worldbuilding for Dragonlance. And just saying "this city is diverse now!" or "there have been dark skinned people in this population of arctic vikings for centuries, deal with it" showcases a stunning lack of creativity as writers to me.

EDIT: I don't really understand the idea that fantasy needs to resemble either your society, or the society the creators of the work were in. If I want to read a fantasy story about diversity in a dense city, I can crack open a superhero comic book or read something set in Ankh Morpork or Lankhmar. I don't need Camelot or Minas Tirith to look like NYC, diversity doesn't just mean diversity of people within a story but also diversity of stories within a medium or genre.

I’ve news for you - humans have always migrated. It’s not huge empires or epic trade routes that create genetic diversity, it’s migration, which it the natural human reaction to pressure. We are not naturally a sedentary species. The evidence is there in our genetic history. We are all “mixed race”. Europeans were dark skinned until around 10 thousand years ago. That’s after settling in Europe 100 thousand years earlier . That’s how long it takes skin coloration to adapt - much longer than humans spend in any one place.

But Krynn is a fantasy world. There is no reason to suppose UV radiation exists, nor genetics, nor evolution.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

I guess we will see something like the action-live movie "Honor among thiefs".

I wonder if FXs created by AI could be used to add details in the background, for example a couple of dwarves drinking beer in the tavern.

Maybe we see a cameo of MW&TH in the first episode, like in the cartoon movie.

I suspect we are going to see serious retcons, among other reasons to allow space for possible spin-off with other groups of characters. For example tarmak and other ithi'carthians could appear before the war of the lance. And the kenders and gullys are going to be "softed", to avoid "typecasting".

My fear is not to find Dragonlance female characters in Rule34 but..... neither dwarves nor gnomes but the those with a cute face.... yes, the minotaurs.

Have you got any suspect about the possible producer? Maybe Mickey Mouse in the naughty word was a clue.

 

[Misanthrope Prime]

I’ve news for you - humans have always migrated. It’s not huge empires or epic trade routes that create genetic diversity, it’s migration, which it the natural human reaction to pressure. We are not naturally a sedentary species. The evidence is there in our genetic history. We are all “mixed race”. Europeans were dark skinned until around 10 thousand years ago. That’s after settling in Europe 100 thousand years earlier . That’s how long it takes skin coloration to adapt - much longer than humans spend in any one place.

But Krynn is a fantasy world. There is no reason to suppose UV radiation exists, nor genetics, nor evolution.

Yes, I'm familiar with Cheddar man.

Humans migrate when given reason to. Through archaeology and paleontology, we can piece together the reasons that humans have migrated here on Earth. The problem is barely any fantasy works ever bother to do the same, to say "The Sungadungan People came to the continent of Yagablaba after a crop blight wiped out the Pondobobo plant that formed the staple of their diet." It's always "IDK some of these hobbits are black now and some are white, even though you'd think everyone would've interbred into having an even skin tone after a few generations". Off the top of my head, the only ones that have done so are Forgotten Realms (credit where credit is due, Ed Greenwood isn't just an elven breastmilk sommelier) and Pillars of Eternity.

Krynn is a fantasy world, but it still takes plenty from Earth. It includes humans, which are based in a scientific understanding of reality, and unless the book tells us that humans produce vitamin D differently on Krynn, and we also know Krynn is spherical, we have no reason to believe humans have a different relationship to the sun and skin tone than they do on Earth. If they do, all it costs the authors is a half hour of thinking and some ink to explain themselves.

 

[Scribe]

"IDK some of these hobbits are black now and some are white, even though you'd think everyone would've interbred into having an even skin tone after a few generations".

 

[Umbran]

Krynn is a fantasy world, but it still takes plenty from Earth. It includes humans, which are based in a scientific understanding of reality, and unless the book tells us that humans produce vitamin D differently on Krynn, and we also know Krynn is spherical, we have no reason to believe humans have a different relationship to the sun and skin tone than they do on Earth. If they do, all it costs the authors is a half hour of thinking and some ink to explain themselves.

So, here's the central item.

You are holding some elements of the real-world paramount, and insisting that they must also hold true in the fantasy world. But, the authors explained the origin of species on Krynn... decades ago - it is central to much of the extended fiction outside the War of the Lance.

The world of Krynn clearly violates real-world biology in several ways, and we are given as canon to accept that the sapient species of the world are created by gods (humans, elves, and ogres, specifically), and altered by magical chaos, rather than exist as the result of biological evolution.

People of Krynn have different skin colors because they were created that way. So, the usual models of real-world populations do not apply to Krynn, and therefore cannot be naively applied to support your preferred result.

 

[Misanthrope Prime]

People of Krynn have different skin colors because they were created that way. So, the usual models of populations do not apply to Krynn, and therefore cannot be naively applied to support your preferred result.

Then we need to ask as critics why did the gods make only white people? And rather than handwaving it and saying "they made black people too, they were just tucked offscreen this whole time" we should actually address it.

 

[Teemu]

Ansalon has black people though. Ergothians are described and generally depicted as black. You also have the peoples of Khur and Nordmaar who would be brown or black too. And of course the other "nomadic" (as per the RPG books) peoples like in Abanasinia. Also, in canon, 300 years ago, the Cataclysm upended the societies of Ansalon and mass migrations ensued. There's actually very good reason to depict the peoples of Ansalon as very diverse looking.

 

[Misanthrope Prime]

Ansalon has black people though. Ergothians are described and generally depicted as black. You also have the peoples of Khur and Nordmaar who would be brown or black too. And of course the other "nomadic" (as per the RPG books) peoples like in Abanasinia. Also, in canon, 300 years ago, the Cataclysm upended the societies of Ansalon and mass migrations ensued. There's actually very good reason to depict the peoples of Ansalon as very diverse looking.

And of course, the gods saw that none of those people were fit to save the world.