Tearknack (Re)Reads the Dragonlance Chronicles

TearfulDevil · Aug 2, 2019

Hello SV! It's been a while! This is (a slightly toned down version of) the worst idea I've ever had, and I don't know why I'm doing this!

This "project", as I suppose I'll call it, has been inspired by a lot of those "In Which I Watch/Read" threads I've seen. In particular, what inspired this is SV user Shockz's In Which I Watch: Sword Art Online (which was 5 years ago now, fucking hell), the Naruto Reread thread on SB, and all the times people roasted shit like Chunin Exam Day or Methods of Rationality over an open fire. The Naruto one in particular is relevant, because you see, this shit was my childhood.

I was raised on a diet of (probably?) mediocre fantasy and scifi with either the TSR/Wizards of the Coast logo on the spine, or Star Wars written on the cover. I read many other books, many of them of a similar nature, but my parents, realizing that I liked SW and D&D, gave me a library card and told me to hunt for my food, and hunt I did. While there was notable absences in the platters of novels that I feasted upon due to libraries having either no copies or limited copies of certain books (also I never read any comics), I read every single novel licensed to the properties I loved that I could find, ordering them to the library in the largest amount I could order in one go (15 at a time, iirc). I would read other things of course, priding myself on reading every new book that arrived in the kids or YA sections of my local library (even, secretly the novels for girls) but the only things I would use the rather archaic computer system for were shit like X Wing Rogue Squadron: the Kytos Trap or Eventually, however, my passion for books faded. Getting fat stacks of money from odd jobs and my parent's odd implementation of an allowance meant I would move away from the library and towards more expensive hobbies like video games and Magic the Gathering. More access to the internet at home lead me into fanfiction (thanks, fellows) and we all know where that leads. Over the years I would read less and less physical novels, as my tastes got more exacting. Nowadays I hardly ever read physical books, and when I do its generally non-fiction, and I haven't touched a licensed SF/F paperback in years.

Now, as I mentioned, this idiotic endeavor is inspired a lot by the people on SB who reread all of Naruto, from start to finish. I didn't get a chance to actively reread with them, but I went over it a bit after, and it was a pretty fascinating experience, seeing what held up, what didn't, what I used to like and now hated, and things I used to hate but now loved (less relevant to D&D novels, but wiping out years of shitty fanon was also nice). I've been thinking ever since I finished reading through that thread about what it would be like to do a similar thing with another series. My first thought was actually Harry Potter, but I saw someone else was doing one already, and I've never liked the series that much to begin with, it was just more popular than the shit I really liked as a kid. My second thought was the Star Wars EU, but, while I really do want to go through the whole thing, I figured it would be better to try something a bit tamer first.

I picked Dragonlance to start with because both the core trilogy, and each of the individual novels, are fairly self contained. Don't get me wrong, there's still a hell of a lot of other novels that come after (and even some in-between, more on that later), but if I find that I don't really like doing this whole review thing, or if I just can;t stand the setting, there's some nice points to end it.

So, lets begin! I'll start off with just introducing the first book, because it's 1:34 AM and I've got a meeting with college official types at 9.

TearfulDevil · Aug 2, 2019

To begin with, Dragons of Autumn Twilight. DoAT is the first novel of the Dragonlance Chronicles trilogy, written by married couple Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, and was published in 1984. The Dragonlance novels actually followed a series of adventures (the first of which was written by Hickman) that covered roughly the same material, with DoAT roughly corresponding with DL1 Dragons of Despair and DL2 Dragons of Flame. The characters of the novels were even included in the adventures, not as NPCs but as prebuilt characters that could be played instead of building your own.

Anyways, if you want a full history of the publication of the series, its relations with the adventures, the writers relations with TSR, and so on, its all pretty fascianting but there's better sources than me, as I am very dumb, and also a youngin was not alive when any of this stuff was happening.

Ive got a digital copy of the individual issues of the trilogy, and a big physical copy of them all together. While I much prefer reading paper books I'll probably mostly be reading the digital ones, as the physical collected trilogy is a bit to large to really be comfortably held.

Anyways, just going over the insides a bit, this first page of the novel begins with a character introduction

Tanis Half-Elven, leader of the companions. A skilled fighter who detests fighting, he is tormented by love for two women—the tempestuous swordswoman, Kitiara, and the enchanting elfmaiden, Laurana.

What if Aragon was really whiny? I might be being unfair, but even though Tanis is listed as leader here, I don't really remember much about him.

Sturm Brightblade, Knight of Solamnia. Once revered in the days before the cataclysm, the knights have since fallen into disgrace. Sturm's goal—more important to him than life itself—is to restore the honor of the knighthood.

I could call him a Boromir type, following along the LotR comparison, but he really isn't, IIRC. His description is a bit one-note, but I remember more about him, and more fondly, than I do Tanis, although its possible that will change as I read more.

Goldmoon, Chieftain's Daughter. Bearer of the blue crystal staff, her love for a tribal outcast, Riverwind, leads them both on a dangerous quest in search of the truth.

McGuffin bearer.

Riverwind, Grandson of Wanderer. Given the blue crystal staff in a city where death flew on black wings, he barely escaped with his life. And that was only the beginning.…

Literally who. I hope that the depiction of Goldmooon and Riverwind and their people isn't too racist, as I don't think I would have noticed that as a kid, and that would really sour this book, as while I recall very little of their characters, I know (okay, I think I know that) they're fairly important to the story.
Five bison dollars to the first person who can guess what "death flying on black wings" refers to in a series called Dragonlance, and the first two guesses don't count.

Raistlin, Caramon's twin brother, magic-user. Though his health is shattered, Raistlin possesses great powers beyond his young age. But dark mysteries are concealed behind his strange eyes.

Yo.
Yooooo.
Yoooooooooooooooooo.
I'm probably going to hate him, knowing how my tastes have changed, but this man, this legend, this is The Wizard. This is the actual main character, the real protagonist, the primary caster who carries the party. Note the yellow skinned man with a staff prominently displayed on the centre of my physical copies cover, summoning the lightning while his party members....strangle goblins? I'll be honest, I only have the slightest idea who that man with the silly winged hat is supposed to be, I think it's Caramon, but I could be wrong.

Caramon, Raistlin's twin brother, warrior. A genial giant of a man, Caramon is the exact opposite of his twin. Raistlin is the one person he cares for—and the one person he fears.

People don't talk much about Caramon, and, I'll be honest, I don't really remember much about him at all myself, but this description gives him more depth than I thought he ever had,

Flint Fireforge, dwarf, fighter. Tanis's oldest friend, the ancient dwarf regards these youngsters as his "children."

I'll be honest, I couldn't remember anything about Flint other than "is dwarf", and I have no idea if he ever gets more character than that, but the detail at the end there, similar to Caramon's, really adds a lot. Having an older party member in A D&D group who is super old, and treats everyone else in the party like their kids sounds like it would be (if done well) incredibly charming (as well as heartbreaking, depending on how things go).

Tasslehoff Burrfoot, kender, "handler." Kender—the nuisance race of Krynn—are immune to fear. Consequently, trouble just seems to follow them home.

People shit on kender a lot, but I've never had one in a party of any D&D game I've played, and I doun't remember him being much worse than, say, Merry and Pippin were in Lord of the Rings.

After the brief character bios, my physical copy has a map (obnoxiously cut in two) showing all of Krynn, or at least its msot important continent. The digital one has a smaller, much rougher map showing a much broader area. My physical copy has a really pretty little illustration (I believe it has a couple of those) of the treetop inn I'll describe tommorow, and then it catches up to the digital one, and both have a poem, entitled

THE CANTICLE OF THE DRAGON said:
Hear the sage as his song descends
like heaven's rain or tears,
and washes the years, the dust of the many stories
from the High Tale of the Dragonlance.
For in ages deep, past memory and word,
in the first blush of the world
when the three moons rose from the lap of the forest,
dragons, terrible and great,
made war on this world of Krynn.

Yet out of the darkness of dragons,
out of our cries for light
in the blank face of the black moon soaring,
a banked light flared in Solamnia,
a knight of truth and of power,
who called down the gods themselves
and forged the mighty Dragonlance, piercing the soul
of dragonkind, driving the shade of their wings
from the brightening shores of Krynn.

Thus Huma, Knight of Solamnia,
Lightbringer; First Lancer;
followed his light to the foot of the Khalkist Mountains,
to the stone feet of the gods,
to the crouched silence of their temple.
He called down the Lancemakers, he took on
their unspeakable power to crush the unspeakable evil,
to thrust the coiling darkness
back down the tunnel of the dragon's throat.

Paladine, the Great God of Good,
shone at the side of Huma,
strengthening the lance of his strong right arm,
and Huma, ablaze in a thousand moons,
banished the Queen of Darkness,
banished the swarm of her shrieking hosts
back to the senseless kingdom of death, where their curses
swooped upon nothing and nothing
deep below the brightening land.

Thus ended in thunder the Age of Dreams
and began the Age of Might,
When Istar, kingdom of light and truth, arose in the east,
where minarets of white and gold
spired to the sun and to the sun's glory,
announcing the passing of evil,
and Istar, who mothered and cradled
the long summers of good,
shone like a meteor
in the white skies of the just.

Yet in the fullness of sunlight
the Kingpriest of Istar saw shadows:
At night he saw the trees as things with daggers,
the streams
blackened and thickened under the silent moon.
He searched books for the paths of Huma,
for scrolls, signs, and spells
so that he, too, might summon the gods, might find
their aid in his holy aims,
might purge the world of sin.

Then came the time of dark and death
as the gods turned from the world.
A mountain of fire crashed like a comet through Istar,
the city split like a skull in the flames,
mountains burst from once-fertile valleys,
seas poured into the graves of mountains,
the deserts sighed on abandoned floors of the seas,
the highways of Krynn erupted
and became the paths of the dead.

Thus began the Age of Despair.
The roads were tangled.
The winds and the sandstorms dwelt in the husks of cities.
The plains and mountains became our home.
As the old gods lost their power,
we called to the blank sky
into the cold, dividing gray to the ears of new gods.
The sky is calm, silent, unmoving.
We have yet to hear their answer.

I think all GMs making a new setting should try and see if they can fit all the neccessary information about their world into a song or poem of some kind. Hell, it'd probably be useful for a lot of fiction writers period. This is a great way, at least in my opinion, of getting a bunch of otherwise tedious exposition out of the the way, and I think it's a lot more elegant than the shit we let Star Wars get away with.

Anyways, I'll get to the 1st chapter tommorow (or, tonight, I guess). It's almsot 2:30 AM, and I've got an appointment in the morning I need to be awake for.

Tearknack (Re)Reads the Dragonlance Chronicles

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