The all Dragonlance all the time thread!

but drizzt, yeah!

My Secret Cheesy Fantasy Love -- The Iron Tower Trilogy by Dennis McKiernan. Here's the deal in brief:

MCKIERNAN -- "Hey, I've got this great idea for a sequel to The Lord of the Rings talking about how the Dwarves eventually take back Moria a century or so after the Fall of Sauron."

TOLKIEN ESTATE -- "Die and rot."

MCKIERNAN -- "Erm." *changes all the names but writes it anyway, shops around to various publishing houses*

SIGNET -- "Fantasy book eh? Yeah, looks good, sure...but you know, this seems like it's following on from some other story first. Could you write that one instead?"

MCKIERNAN -- "Erm." *makes a few...SLIGHT...changes*

And so if you ever wanted to read a version of The Lord of the Rings minus the Ring, the Nazgul, Gandalf and Gollum but otherwise pretty much is almost exactly like the original story but with all the names changed, The Iron Tower Trilogy is for you. The actual 'sequel' was eventually published -- The Silver Call Duology (oh brother) -- and as a piece of dedicated fan-fiction which essentially DOES imagine that Dwarf reconquest of Moria under another name, it's not all that bad. Not GREAT but it's cool. But The Iron Tower Trilogy makes The Sword of Shannara seem like the most original book ever written anywhere.

(ten or eleven times.)

Oh, you don't know the half of it. The Elven names alone should be taken out and shot.

I don't believe you.

I forget about the "Twins" trilogy.

_____________
*loved, as in the preterite.

I'm reading the first chunky book of George R R Martin's Song of Ice & Fire series at the moment (someone at my local library is an enormous geek and stocks the SF&F section well) but it's a bit dull. I think I may finally be over dodgy fantasy.

OTM fer sure.

His sci-fi stuff's shite, though.

Most definitely not OTM. His Otherworld series, though very craptacularly titled, is rock fucking SOLID.

-- nickalicious (nickaliciou...), August 9th, 2004.

I read the first two Otherworld books and found them dreary, meandering and lacking in original ideas. Slow-building, picaresque stories are fine for fantasy, but I like my sci-fi quite punchy.

Otherworld gets much more rewarding the longer you stay with it. I lost the will to live after wading through the first book, then the ball started rolling down the hill as the strands started to come together. Still not as tight as Memory, Sorrow and Thorn though - that trilogy is the cod-Arthurian bomb. And I got my (one-volume hardback, heavy as hell) copy of To Green Angel Tower signed when Mr Williams did a talk at the crappy local library near where I was living at the time. I was 15 and agog.

That I admit I liked.

Nick, for me the problem was -- I sorta mumbled this up above, but to repeat -- that Williams' treatment of the historical analogues throughout didn't get as really involved or interesting as I hoped it would in comparison to Kay's similar efforts. And I read Kay first, which might have also had something to do with it. For me, the interest with Kay is the balance of historical what-if mixed with fantasy then further mixed with that moral ambiguousness I found so striking in his stories. It's very heady stuff.

Nick, that's the Chronicles trilogy, get it STRAIGHT dude!

Those are pretty hazy in my mind, actually, I mostly remember Raistlin befriending the gully dwarf and wanting to eat spicy fried potatoes.

Every time we actually tried to play a Dragonlance module, it would devolve into arguments as to where the best fried potatoes could be found should Otik not be available.

The draconians were great because they were all about GENETIC MUTATION via magic. Also because of that great unsettling scene describing a dragonlet born of a corrupt egg that maintains its shape for a second or two before bursting and turning into draconians.

i thought it was interesting how much he harped on the unoriginality of krynn as a setting as i find krynn to be much more amorphous and suggestively drawn than say the lazy 1-to-1 mapping of the forgotten realms or something (tho i did prefer FR to dragonlance once upon a time tbh as i came of age during the drizzt do urden era)

Bump

Cataclysm time?

Of a sort

I named my tabby cat Tika.

I'm playing my first ever d&d game this weekend and bought Autumn Twilight for prep, to get et into the spirit.

I'm pretty sure I read one of these as a kid but god knows which one, there were 1000s by the time I got there. I wouldn't call it great so far, but it's super fun and readable. I lasted longer with this than Glen Cook, say.

shout-out to Dragonlance for predicting the entire 2000s nerd-jock dichotomy with Raistlin and Caramon including the nerd's slow descent into bitterness and evil

— sads mikkelsen (@corgzone) January 31, 2019

Figured we'd end up here:

Fantasy writers Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman (of Dragonlance fame) have sued D&D publisher Wizards of the Coast. Complicated allegations, but the gist is they were writing a new Dragonlance trilogy and WoTC said it would not approve further drafts, "no reason was provided."

— Cecilia D'Anastasio (@cecianasta) October 19, 2020

Weis and Hickman's complaint references rewrites following controversies around WoTC re: cultural insensitivity/bias in content and corporate culture. If anyone has more information, my DMS are open. https://t.co/jIeK7Yk4sH

— Cecilia D'Anastasio (@cecianasta) October 19, 2020

hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

I expect that once the details of this come to light, there will be plenty of facepalms for everyone

Although as the person who posted Taz Takes A Tentacle upthread, I am no position to judge the poor choices of others

We're all in this together.

I don’t really understand the background here – fuckery at WOTC aside, why did the problems with one product (magic the gathering) result in the cancellation of another?

as I said, I expect facepalms all around

Annnnnd all is resolved

https://io9.gizmodo.com/that-new-dragonlance-trilogy-from-the-series-classic-au-1846125826

Although as the person who posted Taz Takes A Tentacle upthread, I am no position to judge the poor choices of others

― shout-out to his family (DJP), Monday, October 19, 2020 11:25 AM (three months ago)

dying

A legend that lives on.

give me Otik's spicy potatoes STAT

Rob Bricken's (very great) column on old D&D novels, which has mostly been looking at Forgotten Realms stuff and a few side notes too, has, after dispatching one of the first spinoff novels, gotten around to starting the original trilogy:

https://gizmodo.com/dungeons-dragons-novels-revisiting-dragons-of-autu-1847446582

Unsurprisingly he says it's the best of the books he's read so far, which, yes.

Everything about the Raistlin bullying is OTM

Really is!

i'm sure i've mentioned this before, but just to reiterate, I once read a Margaret Weis series that was, if anything, a *more* fascist take on Star Wars

also the protagonist was named Dion Starfire

Bricken gets around to book two of the original trilogy

https://gizmodo.com/dungeons-dragons-novels-revisiting-dragons-of-wint-1847942044