Dragonlance 2022

Even though to some Dragonlance was the end of a golden era for Dungeons & Dragons, it will always hold a special place for me as the first Dragonlance calendar with all that amazing fantasy art made me want to become an illustrator and set me on that path. I don't know how well the current regime at Wizards will handle this world, but I'm hoping for the best.

The Atlas of the Dragonlance World

In 1987 TSR published the Atlas of the Dragonlance World. At the time Dragonlance was at the height of its popularity and dominated the fantasy section of bookstore shelves all across the US. Written and illustrated by Karen Wynn Fonstad who rose to fame with her oustanding Atlas of Middle-Earth, it is a detailed overview of Krynn and the continent of Abanasinia.

Like her other atlasses; Middle-Earth, Forgotten Realms, The Land, & Pern, it is very high quality and lavishly illustrated with brilliant cartography accompanying clear, concise, yet extensive text.

My video review goes into more depth and shows off the beauty of this book. Regardless of what you think about Dragonlance there is no doubt this atlas is a masterpiece of fantasy world building and can be great inspiration for creating your own fantasy world or for running a Dragonlance campaign.

Dragonlance the Musical!

Dragonlance seems nearly forgotten in all the recent 80's nostalgia. The original series called The War of the Lance ran from 1984 to 1987. Exactly the years I was in high school. So I was in the prime demographic for the adventure modules and novels.

Margaret Weiss posted an image on her Facebook and mentioned it was from the Russian Dragonlance Musical. That was immediately intriguing. So after hunting down more information about it I came across the entire play on YouTube. And found several images online. The costumes  are clearly recognizable and not too bad. The set though is very minimal and relies on lighting to hide that fact.

Turns out there are several versions of the musical you can find videos of, each with different actors performing the parts. I didn't do an exhaustive review to see which was the best as I enjoyed the first one I stumbled across well enough.

Wizards of the Coast seems to have pretty much forgotten the Dragonlance line and nothing new has really come out since 2010 as far as I can tell. In retrospect the novels aren't necessarily the greatest literature of all time and is highly derivative of Lord of the Rings. At the time the novels were immensely enjoyable, though they come across as a little naive and cliche by today's standards. But I do think the second trilogy, the Time of the Twins is much more original and tells a rip roaring story of a mage and his quest for power. Despite it involving time travel, which is annoying enough especially in a fantasy novel.

Its kind of funny to think that most of the performers probably weren't even born yet when the books came out. That makes me feel old.

The musical is interesting, a Netflix series with high production values would be even better. You can watch the entire musical with subtitles on YouTube. It's not that bad and has some really good moments if you don't mind opera:

Top 10 favorite TSR products, #8 Dragonlance

Dragonlance. For grognards the very name conjures up images of characters being railroaded through a storyline. The beginning of the end for "old-school" gaming. Considered to be mediocre derivative fantasy at it's worst by some.

For me, being the visual person I am, Dragonlance was the most compelling thing I'd seen in all my (then) 15 years on this planet. I've mentioned before that J.W. Waterhouse and Herbert Draper (19th century painters) were my inspiration to become an artist. It was Keith Parkinson, and specifically his Dragons of Desolation cover that made me want to become a fantasy artist. When I saw that ominous flying castle my mind was sufficiently blown.

For a moment, let's look at the first few Dragonlance modules not as the railroad stories they are, but as adventure locales - and you can see they really are compelling, even from an old-school perspective.

In DL1 Dragons of Despair, it had a village in huge vallenwood trees. It had a dungeon that was a collapsed, sunken ancient city. It had a mysterious elven forest. And the draconians, though almost a cliche now, at the time where new and interesting foes.

In DL4 pictured above it had a flying-freakin'-castle that was an ancient tomb! That is cool in so many ways. Or as we would say in the 80's, it was "rad"!

As a kid I did think the series got quite strange, and practically unplayable, sometime after DL6 Dragons of Ice (with the exciting ice boats), and I don't remember playing any of the others in the series except DL11 which turned out to be a wargame (I played the draconians and lost, badly). I recall being quite surprised it was not actually a module after excitedly buying it at the game store and bringing it home to open.

But, DL4 Dragons of Desolation still conjures up those deep feelings of nostalgia everytime I see that cover. It brings back memories of drawing characters for the other players, reading the novels, and our gaming sessions being nothing like the books - but much more fun in my opinion.

Interesting side note: that Dragons of Desolation painting came up for sale on eBay once. I had just gotten a bonus at work and had just enough, it was going for about $3000. My friend warned me that I would regret the purchase. It was a hard decision, but that was a lot of money, so I let it go. He was right about one thing, I do regret - but not in the way he thought, I regret not having purchased it.