By Nelson Schneider - 11/03/24 at 02:13 PM CT
It’s hard to believe that it has already been two years since we first learned that the DragonLance Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting wasn’t permanently dead. Rather, we learned that the series progenitors, Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, were coming back to the series, perhaps in a cynical and legalistic attempt to maintain copyright and trademark ownership of their original IP, perhaps in a genuine effort to rekindle the light of THE definitive Fantasy series of the 1980s.
Volume 1 of the new DragonLance Destinies left me cold, as it appeared that Weis and Hickman were bending the knee to Woke influences in tabletop gaming and pop media in general. However, in hindsight, I think that may have been some deadpan satire played a bit too closely to the chest. After all, Volume 2 completely redeemed the shortcomings of Volume 1 while also fleshing out the details of one of the series’ most famous historical battles… which didn’t previously have a lot of narrative coverage. However, Volume 2 left us on a cliff-hanger, though, dangling from a precipice in which time-traveling shenanigans had changed the history of the world of Krynn at such a fundamental level, the events of the core DragonLance novels that started it all – the DragonLance Chronicles, “Dragons of Autumn Twilight,” “Dragons of Winter Night,” and “Dragons of Spring Dawning” – would, couldn’t, and didn’t happen.
Thus we come to the third and final Volume in the DragonLance Destinies series, “Dragons of Eternity,” in which we finally learn just how badly broken the world’s history is, and whether or not it can be restored to any semblance of what we all know and love… and anyone reading a new DragonLance novel in 2024 obviously knows and loves the setting… and that’s really the primary shortcoming of the ultimate Volume in the trilogy. “Dragons of Eternity” is written very much for people who are already familiar with the characters and can fill-in appearance, voice, and mannerisms that are mostly left out of the actual text.
In order to provide backup for the time-traveling Mary-Sue, Destina Rosethorn, Astinus of Palanthas, the Great Scribe, decides it would be best to rope more Heroes of the Lance into time-traveling nonsense in order to act as ‘bait’ and be a distraction for the protagonists’ immortal and all-seeing foe. Fortunately, Astinus doesn’t go overboard and recruit everyone, but just brings series lead and inexplicable fan-favorite, Tanis Half-Elven, into the fold, dropping him off in a dark and bleak version of the DragonLance Chronicles, where he meets up with a similarly time-lost Sturm, Raistlin, and Tasslehoff, who join forces with native temporal variants of Flint and Caramon. Our time-lost heroes and their alternate-self companions are tasked with reversing the world’s fortunes in a scenario in which the Dark Queen and her Dragonarmies have already won, as a failsafe scenario in the event that Destina and her monastic-scribe-turned-lover fail to undo the utter disaster she caused in an even earlier time.
As a result of having two different efforts to fix the River of Time running simultaneously, “Dragons of Eternity” can be a bit of a nailbiter at times. I found myself constantly wondering whether we would get a simple reset, where everything went back to default, or if we’d be given an all-new DragonLance campaign setting where heroic underdogs are forced to fight with everything they have against an oppressive global Government of Evil. Unfortunately, in my opinion, Weis and Hickman went with the simple reset option, denying many characters some important post-mortem development, and making the three Volumes in their latest series feel like inconsequential churning, spinning the world, its characters, and its history round and round, while resulting in practically nothing and ending up (almost) exactly where they started.
Of course, I must say “practically” nothing, as there is one major change that takes place at the very end of this trilogy: The Graygem of Gargath – the chaotic, capricious McGuffin at the center of the trilogy’s action, and the cause of so much awfulness within the DragonLance series as a whole – is definitively neutralized in a way that it never was before. This change leads me to believe that not all of the DragonLance setting’s literature has been reset to the default, but rather that the “good” DragonLance novels that everyone liked have been preserved, while everything starting with “The Second Generation” and “Dragons of Summer Flame” has been rendered canonically impossible.
Overall, DragonLance Destinies Volume 3, “Dragons of Eternity” is a competently written, competently edited, and ultimately inconsequential conclusion that subverts the epic build-up of its preceding Volumes – and itself – with a narrative reset. This trilogy may or may not bear fruit if Weis and Hickman are able to wrestle more control of their IP away from Hasbro Wizards of the Coast and produce a new set of tabletop RPG books – be they under the Dungeons & Dragons imprint (doubtful) or some third-party D20 competitor. If not, we may just have to settle for DragonLance Destinies providing us the Good End that the series deserves.
