Dragonlance Chronicles

Dragonlance Chronicles

Introduction

Dragonlance 40th Anniversary Edition

It 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 began selling our handbound creations of Rahasia and Pharaoh to game distributors. Decades later this would become known as a side hustle.

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 threeset 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 when 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 had been impressed by the fact that it encouraged people to use their imaginations to 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. What resulted is a lifelong 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 experiences, 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 wondrous journey that you have made possible.

Pick up your staff, shoulder your pack, for we set out again together.

Tracy Hickman