Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, ‘Dragonlance Chronicles’ (1984-85)

 Three key D&D weapons: Bow, Boobs and Blade

Not having been a player of D&D in the 1970/80s (I played a fair bit of Star Fleet Battles back in the early 1980s, but not the other), nor a reader of D&D tie-in novelisations, I approach the phenomenon of Dragonlance novels with dismay. Dismay because the series really is extraordinarily popular—since 1984 some 190 titles have been published, with global sales in excess of 22 million copies, which makes it a major event in the tradition of Fantasy writing. It's clearly a phenomenon which, writing a ‘History of Fantasy’ as I am, I cannot ignore. Then again, the prospect of reading two hundred bloody novels, extruded out of the Tactical Studies Rules, Incorporated (TSR Inc) megacorps machine, fills me with a sensation approaching the heebying geebies.

Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn describe Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis, and by extension the many other D&D and Dragonlance ‘official’ authors of tie-material, as ‘hacks’, pointing to the tired shuffling and reshuffling of overfamiliar generic counters and tropes in which these many, many novels indulge, their exhaustion-by-repetition of the ‘quest narrative’ format across so very many titles. [Farah Mendlesohn and Edward James, A Short History of Fantasy (London: Middlesex University Press, 2009), 123-4]. Hack is perhaps harsh, although the novelisations, in lacking the element of individual engagement, reaction and in-story feedback of actual gameplay, are bound to be a more procrustean and limited matter. Of the first Dragonlance book, Dragons of Autumn Twilight (1984) David Langford said it was ‘inspired by an AD&D campaign full of chunks ripped bleeding from Tolkien’, and he lamented the ‘deadly predictable questing, with stock D&D characters in familiar encounters’ [‘I couldn't finish this one’ he confessed; Langford, ‘Critical Mass’, White Dwarf (Games Workshop, May 1985), 10].

Sword & Sorcery is by its nature a more playful, ludic mode than the more formal Heroic Fantasy. In the case of the game Dungeons and Dragons—developed in its first iteration by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, and published in 1974 by ‘TSR Inc’—play is actualised in the social iteration of the sword-and-sorcery text. Players adopt characters, and embark upon adventures that may involve a board, pieces, dice and other gameplay paraphernalia, or may simply happen in the players' imagination. There is also a quasi-author, a ‘dungeon master’, who coordinates and narrates the adventure. Adventures can happen anywhere within a capacious and expansive imaginative realm, and players can encounter any manner of monsters, wizards, fantasy creatures, magical weapons and artefacts, but often D&D ‘campaigns’ will focus on the titular dungeons, explored at length and mapped-out in great subterranean detail. The game quickly became immensely, and globally, popular, hugely influential both on later tabletop games and, in time, video games.

D&D's success fed the format back into literature. The first tie-in novelisation was Andre Norton’s Quag Keep (1978), a book in which a group of D&D players find themselves projected into an ‘actual’ fantasy realm. Since the early 1980s TSR(Inc) and their successor corporation Wizards of the Coast have published or licensed many hundreds of D&D novelisations. In the early 1980s two D&D-licensed authors, Laura and Tracy Hickman, developed an adjunct game called ‘Dragonlance’. Reportedly the TSR(Inc) marketing department believed (in Hickman’s words) ‘that the company should do more with dragons. We had plenty of dungeons, they said, but very few dragons’. [Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, Realm of Dragons: The Worlds of Weis and Hickman (New York HarperPrism 1999), 46]. As for the main inspiration for the game and then for the novels, Hickman is upfront: ‘I remembered McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern. There it was. I wanted to create a world where fighters on dragonback fought other fighters on dragonback’. The Hickmans helped developed the game, and, as with ‘original’ D&D, its popularity swiftly led to tie-in novelisations, many of them written by Tracey Hickman and his longterm collaborator Margaret Weis.

Jared Shurin, who put his teenage years to better use than I did by reading many Dragonlance books, acknowledges the limitations of the series (derivative conceits, clunking prose) but praises them for what they innovated: viz., an ensemble cast of characters, some of whom die—the death of the virtuous and noble knight Sturm Brightblade, in volume two of the original series, caused consternation and shock amongst the books' fans—war and politics represented as, sometimes unchivalric and cruel In The War of the Lance, Shurin says, ‘the book's central conflict, touches every corner of the continent. Civilian populations are uprooted, cities are occupied and destroyed, refugees are chased from one hostile land to another, innocent people are enslaved, assaulted, the whole horrible nine yards … [a] quaint pastoral forest home is levelled by dragonfire. The noble elves are evicted by the high fantasy equivalent of nerve gas. People—innocents—are maimed, tortured, raped and killed, all because of some mysterious greater conflict, about which they know virtually nothing’, although by the same token ‘big epic battles’ are ‘never shown’). There are ‘flawed’ Elves (‘out of touch, jingoistic and arrogant; reactionary, isolationist and overtly racist’) and morally-ambiguous protagonists.

Some of this is perhaps less original than Shurin suggests. Much of this is already there is Leiber and Moorcock. Multiple ‘point-of-view’ characters, or a gang who get together and have adventures, are also in Lord of the Rings, The Worm Ouroboros, Conan and others. The spin with Dragonlance is the extra-textual premise: playing D&D is having fun with your friends: hanging out and enjoying yourselves together. The novelisations replicate that in fictional form. As for the rest, whilst they are features of the Fantasy writing here, isolating them perhaps puts too great an emphasis on just how artificial and trope-y the books are: how, as Mendlesohn and James say, they flog the ‘quest’ format to death.

The first trilogy of novels—Dragons of Autumn Twilight (1984), Dragons of Winter Night (1985) and Dragons of Spring Dawning (1985), collected in one vol in 1988—opens with a group of friends: Tanis Half-Elven, Goldmoon, Sturm Brightblade, Caramon, Raistlin, Flint, Tasslehoff Burrfoot (a hobbit in all but copyrighted name: in the story his ‘race’ is called the kender) and the beautiful Kitiara Uth Matar meeting in an inn. The group is reuniting, as they had promised they would, after all had gone off on various individual quests. Soon enough they are tangling with a puritanical religious cult called ‘The Seekers’ who, in league with the Dragon Highlords, are themselves questing for the magic Blue Crystal Staff with which they can rule the world. The friends battle lizardmen (the ‘draconians’), befriend centaurs, fight off undead zombies, fly on the back of Pegasus-y flying horses, locate the magical ‘Disks of Mishakal’, are sold into slavery, are freed by elves (the beautiful elven princess, Laurana Kanan is in love with Tanis and wants to marry him, although it turns out Tanis is in love with Kitiara). They fight dragons, ally themselves with dwarfs, encounter a mysterious figure called ‘the Everman’ who flees almost as soon as spotted, they travel to the port-city of Tarsis, watch as a dragon army entirely destroys Tarsis (Weis and Hickman claim they based this scene on documentary footage of the Luftwaffe bombing London during the Blitz), split up, come back together, encounter certain magical orbs, artifacts capable of controlling dragons, and afterwards break these, fight in a dream dimension (in which they have visions of their own deaths), get involved in an elf civil war, and take possession of some newly forged ‘dragonlances’ with which the dragonic armies can be fought and afterwards do ... well, nothing very much with them. The group goes by sea, visits an underwater city inhabited by sea elves, meets mages, encounters a rare group of ‘good’ dragons, and end-up fighting over the magical ‘crown of power’ in the ancient city of Neraka.

The books aren’t quite as hectic or pinball-jerky as this summary perhaps suggests, but it’s not far off. Insofar as the readers invest-in and identify the characters, in the intragroup interactions, the soap-y on-off love affairs, in their plans and hopes and fears, then the peripatetic to-ing and fro-ing will hold their attention. But the events are repetitive-with-minor-variations, characterisation is rudimentary and the writing bad. Writerly tics are abundant. Take Caramon, twin-brother of the wizard Raistlin, a beefy warrior. The writers, looking to characterise him, lay their collective finger upon the word clanking. His armour and weapons, and by extension his personality, all clank.

‘Trying to be silent in spite of his clanking armor, he soon stood by a slender ladder that ran up to an iron grating’ [197]; ‘But Caramon was already shoving past him eagerly, his sword clanking against his thigh’ [199]; ‘Caramon who was having trouble squeezing his body and his clanking arsenal through the shaft.’ [199]; ‘Caramon trudged through the snow, his arsenal of weapons clanking around him,’ [393]; ‘Caramon nodded reluctantly, then he walked ponderously up the stairs, his weapons clanking around him’ [405]; ‘He heard a clanking sound. Caramon was getting up’ [432]; ‘The big man ran into the room, his sword clanking at his thigh’ [476]; ‘Caramon followed clumsily, his sword and armor clanking’ [656]; ‘Now Caramon ran through the darkness, his armor clanking.’ [895]; ‘Raistlin heard Caramon clanking down the corridor’ [1007]

Clanky clanking. Clank clank clank. Caramon is occasionally capable of greater daintiness:

Sitting down at the small drop-leaf table Caramon had constructed for him, Raistlin carefully withdrew from the very innermost pocket of his robes an ordinary-looking sack, the sack that contained the dragon orb. [605]

That eminently medieval-era piece of furniture, the drop-leaf table! Excellent. 

Raistlin, the mage, undergoes a strange transformation: ‘the flesh had melted from the face, leaving the cheekbones outlined in dreadful shadows … the eyes were no longer the eyes of any living human Tanis had ever seen. The black pupils were now the shape of hourglasses!’ [21]. These physiologically improbable eyes, combined with his newly engoldified skin, mark him out:

“When I awoke,” the mage said, “my skin had turned this color—a mark of my suffering. My body and my health are irretrievably shattered. And my eyes! I see through hourglass pupils and therefore I see time. Even as I look at you now, Tanis,” the mage whispered, “‘I see you dying, slowly, by inches.”

I see the same thing every morning, when I look in the bathroom mirror. Then there’s Sturm Brightblade, the series’ archetypal noble paladin. As a name ‘Sturm’ is Germanic enough, and the reader, or at least this reader, might be struck by the fact that the bright ‘blade’ of the stormtrooper was a key Nazi symbol. The ‘Olbrecht’ sword (that is, ‘all-bright’ blade) was a piece of SS ceremonial gear, and Hitler’s paramilitary ‘Sturmabteilung’ (‘storm-division’) takes its name both from Sturm and that which a blade does (teilt, cuts, divides, hence: division). Then again: a medievalised Fantasy kingdom rigidly divided between good and evil, in which fair-skinned warriors battle monstrous evil? We could hardly call such a conception Nazi! No Nazi would be called Sturm Olbrecht. Nobody who speaks German could be an evil man. Etc.

The captain turned immediately, whipping his spyglass out of the pocket of his fur parka and placing it to his eye. [500]

Parka, first attested in English in 1924, is actually from the Tundra Nenets парка, via Russian па́рка and so, despite the word’s Quadrophenia associations, isn’t impossible in a Fantasy setting. It's not as if Weis and Hickman have their captain mount a moped and zoom away.

The wind of momentous events was starting to swirl into a huge vortex. [950]

That's the thing about history. It's basically meteorological. To quote Thucydides: “the wind of the war's momentousness was now huge-vortex-whirling.”

What remained of Riverwind no longer resembled anything human. The man’s flesh had been seared from his body. The white of bone was clearly visible where skin and muscle had melted from his arms. His eyes ran like jelly down the fleshless, cadaverous cheeks. [143]

Ugh!

Without a word, without even pausing in his stride, Lord Ariakas swung his gloved hand. The blow caught Garibanus in the ribcage. There was a whooshing sound, like a bellows deflating. [829]

Oof!

He saw the blue [dragon] open his hideous fanged mouth. Tas ducked behind the shield… grabbed hold of the dwarf’s beard and yanked his head downward, behind the shield. [810]

Nothing like a bit of climactic beard-grabbing to add to the dramatic tension.

Laurana raised her hands and her eyes to heaven. [707]

Her hands are ... holding her eyes? Eww. And whilst we're on the subject of eyes:

Raistlin nodded and melted back into the shadows. His eyes were abstracted.

Abstracted [adj] Separated or disconnected; withdrawn; removed; apart. Separated from matter, not concrete. OK then!

The elves parted, and out of their midst came an elfmaiden who walked forward to stand beside the Speaker. Her hair was honey pouring from a pitcher; it spilled over her arms and down her back, past her waist, touching her wrists as she stood with her arms at her sides. [266]

Ah, gloopy hair! Is there anything sexier? Gloopy-sticky. Clang! Clang!