Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman published their first novel in the Dragonlance Chronicles series, Dragons of Autumn Twilight, in 1984. More than thirty-five years later, they have collaborated on more than thirty novels together in many different fantasy worlds. Hickman is currently working with his son, Curtis Hickman, for The VOID, creating stories and designs for whole-body, fully immersive VR experience. Weis teaches the competitive dog racing sport flyball. She and Hickman are working on future novels in this series.
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Dragons of Autumn Twilight first published by TSR , Inc. 1984
Published in Penguin Books 1986
Dragons of Winter Night first published by TSR , Inc. 1984
Published in Penguin Books 1986
Dragons of Spring Dawning first published by TSR , Inc. 1985
Published in Penguin Books 1986
This edition first published by TSR , Inc. 1988
Reissued in Penguin Books 2024 001
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Foreword
here was a point in my career as an actor where Warner Brothers “opened their books,” to me. I had just come off of co-starring in two very successful films for them and due to a previous commitment, I had missed out on starring in one of their biggest franchises. The heads of the studio called me in and showed me their extensive slate of projects in various stages of development and everything they owned the rights to and asked, “What do you want to do next?”
I said, “You just won that big lawsuit with Universal over the Dungeons & Dragons rights, right? I want to make Dragonlance.”
“What’s that?” they asked. “Do we own that?”
“Yes,” I replied. “It’s a part of D&D. It was my favorite series of books growing up. I was obsessed. They were New York Times bestsellers and have some of the best characters in all of fantasy. The books are about love, and loss, and death, and family, and the moral repercussions of genocide, and the existential questions raised by living in an atheistic world in which there is concrete proof that there are no Gods, and mankind has been left to fend for itself in a Spartan, xenophobic world where every race across the planet has retreated back into their respective homelands. Now imagine that world except, for the first time in 300 years, a God returns . . . except it’s evil . . . and it wakes up all of the dragons that have been sleeping for a thousand years and commands them to choose generals and then obey them until she returns. And there is a prophet who is sensitive to the Goddess’ power and followers surround him and they worship him as he seeks to expose the world to the Goddess’ power and then subjugate them to his rule. And the only hope for this world is a small group of friends who all return to their hometown after five years of being apart, who all have secrets now, and have grown in separate directions, but have to put down their differences and work together to save the world.”
They replied, “That sounds amazing, but we already have plans for a D&D movie.”
But shortly thereafter, plans for that movie fell through.
So, an old drama school playwright friend and I wrote a Dragonlance script on spec (without payment), but as soon as we finished it and were ready to turn it in, Warner Brothers decided to write off their attempt at developing a D&D movie, chalked up their losses, and sold off the property to Paramount. vii
Dungeons & Dragons moved to another studio and took Dragonlance with it. I followed it there and cashed in a favor to get a meeting. Somewhere along the line, I had caught the attention of the executives at Paramount and they were interested in doing something with me, so I leveraged my way into the office of the new people in charge of Dungeons & Dragons. I pitched my vision for what Dragonlance could be and then fielded every question and misperception they had about it. Which amounted to a lot because sadly they had no idea what D&D or Dragonlance was. They never played it and they never read any of the novels and apparently they had just said yes to the pitch right before me and committed to a D&D movie, the one that would eventually come out in theaters in 2023, and furthermore, they didn’t see a universe in which Dragonlance could exist separately. I left dejected. I was exhausted and I wanted to let it all go.
But . . then, a year later, I caught wind that Paramount had bought a company called eOne that I had a previous deal with to write and develop a graphic novel for, and apparently my old boss at HBO had just been named the new head of it. He was the one who oversaw True Blood, and green-lit Game of Thrones, two of the most successful and premium book adaptations of all time. So, I called him up and poured my heart out . . . thirty years of passion flowed out of me during that conversation. I talked about the Twins, and described their codependent sibling rivalry and related it to Elvis and his still-born twin whose soul he believed he absorbed at birth, thus gaining the power of a second soul. I talked about Tanis, and how his multi-racial background mirrored the difficulties my Grandmother had to live through, having been born in Turkey in the wake of the Armenian Genocide, as the product of my Armenian Great-Grandmother being impregnated by a German officer in a relocation camp during the War. My Grandmother was a tall, skinny blonde girl who grew up in a sea of dark-haired, dark-complected Armenians and never truly felt like she belonged anywhere. The books had so masterfully used fantasy in its highest form to help a kid like me understand how difficult that must have been for my Grandmother, and like True Blood, there was a subversive social commentary that was woven into the fabric of the fantasy. I talked to him about how unlike the Hobbit films, we didn’t need to shoe-horn in female characters, the books were written in the mid-late 80s and echoed the great female heroines of that period like Valeria from Conan the Barbarian, Sarah Connor from Terminator, and Ellen Ripley from Alien. Laurana and Kitiara, among others, were built-in fan favorites already.
My old boss and his colleagues loved my pitch, which was only supposed to last twenty minutes but went on, at their request, for ninety.
viii
EO ne called the next day and told me that the job was mine and to get started immediately. I was hired. But as I was finishing up the script for the pilot episode, another director jumped the line and got his pitch for a D&D series greenlit and so here we are, caught up to the present. Thirty-five years of chasing my ultimate dream of using my lifetime of experience to breathe life into this incredible world that Margaret, Tracy, and Laura created . . . and now I have to wait. We . . . have to wait.
But I will say this . . . the feedback on my script has been unbelievable. A huge literary agent called it, “the best fantasy pilot script he’d read since the original Game of Thrones.” A former studio executive called it, “one of the best fantasy scripts he’d ever read.” And another executive has since read it and reached out to my agents, wanting me to develop other properties for him, at a very prominent production company .
So, as I write this, I HAVE FAITH . Faith that like the Heroes of the Lance, one day I will get the call to come home, and on that day, all of you who have been waiting patiently like I have, can all come home too. When that day comes, and mark my words, it will, I will meet you all in Solace, one more time . . . for the first time.
Joe Manganiello
Dragonlance 40th Anniversary Edition
t began – as many adventures do – with desperate journeys. I could not admit how truly scared I felt. Laura was in the front passenger seat. Our two small children in the back seat. We had packed what we hoped would be enough clothing to make the trip east. Our ancestors generations before had fought their way westward to find opportunity and a new beginning. Now, in our cramped Volkswagen Rabbit, we were going to attempt the same thing going the other way.
I was a dreamer who loved to make up stories and games. My wife and I were well matched in that regard. She had been the one who introduced me to Dungeons & Dragons. Together we had even started our own little cottage industry – blissfully unaware of copyright laws – where we wrote and published D&D game adventures on our own. We grandly stylized ourselves as “Daystar West Media Productions” and selling our hand-bound creations of “Rahasia” and “Pharaoh” to game distributors. Decades later this would become known as a “Side Hussle”.
I had managed the local movie theater in Logan, Utah but quit that job to create a networked multiplayer arcade experience of space combat and exploration. It was a proto-multiplayer-online game that in 1980 was, unfortunately, years ahead of its time. The Pegasus Project, as I called it, was a disaster. The “financial wizard” who talked me into it turned out to be a con man who was kiting checks. The software designer sued me for payment on work he never did.
I had been out of work for over a year. I could not even get a job as a bus driver. I was an enigma to my father – a professional who taught at a university – and a source of worry to my mother who just wanted me to get a steady job to take care of my family. We were on church welfare that winter. We could not take our children to church because we could not afford shoes for them.
But we had heard that TSR , Inc., the great company far to the east in Wisconsin, would pay maybe $500 for a good adventure. So, to buy shoes for our children, Laura and I sent off our adventures to the land of D&D.
I recently found a copy of the letter I sent to Harold Johnson accompanying the game modules we were looking to sell. In part, this fabricated and overblown piece of writing bravado said, “In addition
to the two previously produced items, we currently have several other FRP modules designed but have not had the time to do the production work on them. These include: ‘EYE OF THE DRAGON ’, ‘VAMPYR ’, ‘ARENA’ and a three-set adventure . . . still adhering to the Nightventure concept . . . tentatively titled ‘DRAGONBACK ’, including ‘SANCTION ’, ‘STONEHOLD ’, and ‘CYTADEL’ . . . all concerning the capture and raising of dragons for the defense of the land . . .”
There, in this desperate attempt at redemption, was written the initial spark of our journey.
TSR responded by saying that it would be easier for them to purchase these adventures if we agreed to work for them. They offered me a job as a game designer.
So, with fear and trepidation I did not dare show, we packed what little we owned into part of a moving van and began our Volkswagen journey. It was somewhere in the vastness of Kansas that Laura and I decided that “Dragonback” just wasn’t strong enough as a name. That was where “Dragonlance” was born.
Margaret, too, began her journey out of troubled times. Recently divorced, with two children in her care, she heard from her agent that a game company called “TSR ” in Wisconsin was looking for a book editor. She had played D&D only once and been impressed by the fact that it encouraged people to use their imaginations and tell stories of their own creation. She met with the head of the TSR book department, who hired her on the spot. She borrowed money from her parents, packed up her children, and moved to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.
Our journeys converged in the office cubicles of that game company and the first Dragonlance novels came into being. It has resulted in a life-long friendship and collaboration with new journeys to take and characters to meet.
But it is not just our journey alone. A book does not live until it is read. Each reader who picked up the pages performed them anew. Down the years, the tales from our readers of their experience, of finding solace in the world or courage to face their problems, have bound their journeys to ours . . . and to millions of others who joined us on this path.
Now, you hold this book in your hands. Your journey through these pages will breathe life anew into Krynn. We are grateful to you – you who are reading these words right now – for this wonderous journey that you have made possible.
Pick up your staff, shoulder your pack, for we set out again together.
