The Blank Slate

I have always liked reading fantasy, from a young age. Maybe it started when I got the Dutch edition of Tanith Lee’s The Dragon Hoard? (Which is hilarious, by the way. If you have a young child in your life, this makes for a great book to read together.) I read a lot of the SF and Fantasy in the local library, especially as a teenager.

My parents put me in the “homework club” at secondary school. My grades were not good, because I was too lazy to really do any homework at home. The homework club convened every day (except the Friday I think) after school hours, and you’d sit there for two hours to do your homework. You were not allowed to leave before the end time, but if you had nothing left to study, you could read a book. I’m sure the intention was for the students to read books for their literature lists, but in the end we could just read whatever we wanted.

One of the boys at the homework club was reading something that was obviously fantasy, because it was titled “Dragonlance”. I think it was “War of the Twins”? Of course I was interested and I asked him about it afterwards. He described tabletop roleplaying games to me (which I thought was very strange and abstract) and how the books were like a description of what happened in the game. (Modern RPGs call this “the fiction”, which, in the case of Dragonlance, it literally is.) We got to talking about fantasy books and became friends in the easy way that boys can decide someone is a friend if they share an interest. Some time later, just before the autumn break, he told me that he was going to host a group to play these mysterious games at his house and that I should come too.

So I went there on the first day of the break (I think it took me two hours by bicycle to get there, he lived in a village at the other end of the city!) and I played my first tabletop RPG. So basically the Dragonlance books are responsible for getting me into RPGs — which they were designed to do, to get more people interested in Dungeons & Dragons. Except that we didn’t play D&D but Rolemaster, and it would take me another six years to play D&D in earnest. And I never read those Dragonlance books either, because I moved completely outside of the D&D “ecosystem”.

So when I came across the Collector’s Edition of the Dragonlance Chronicles, which are the first three novels to be released in the setting, I thought it would be interesting to finally read them. And it’s indeed interesting — but it’s not good fantasy. Be aware that the following will contain spoilers.

As I understand it, the books were written to sell more D&D by showing what kind of adventures you could have when playing D&D. And it is indeed a rather faithful recreation of the fiction that is created by playing D&D, if you squint you can see the rules systems operate just under the surface. That in itself is not bad, but it is also a faithful recreation of the kinds of adventures you’d have in an “epic” campaign played out by teenaged boys. It really has it all. The “you all meet in a bar…” beginning. The janky inconsistencies in background events because nobody remembered clearly what happened last session. The plot immunity, because as a GM you don’t want to kill off your PCs too easily so you have to insulate them from the worst combat results. There are all-powerful “GM NPCs” where a GM just wanted to play a cool guy (or gal) and basically used this NPC to overshadow the PCs.

The first novel, Dragons of Autumn Twilight, was written in 1984, well into the second feminist wave. But the way women are written and their relationships with the male characters is… not good. The romance (if you can even call it a romance) between Riverwind and Silvermoon make me wonder if the writers ever met two people who were in love. And for some reason they find it very important to let the reader know that all of the women are virgins. There may be a bit of fooling around, but obviously there is no sex before marriage! The single exception is Kitiara, who, to nobody’s surprise, turns up as an “evil” enemy commander. Much is made of how she takes men to her bed, and it takes only one night to turn a “good” character to her evil side. The message is obviously that sex does bad things to people!

There’s some sexual violence casually mentioned too. Some of it is in the past and not really dwelt upon (Tanis’ origin story), some of it is passed off as “just the way things are” (Tika having to deal with drunks pawing at her) and one bona fide attempt at rape that thankfully doesn’t get anywhere (when Laurana gets kidnapped). Yes, the 80’s was a different time etc, but it sure left a bad taste in my mouth.

D&D has a bad case of biological essentialism: all kender are child-like in demeanor, all dwarves are grumpy, etc. That is reflected in these books as well: Tanis is a half-elf, which means he is some kind of diplomat because he straddles two “races”, making him the leader of the group of course. And we only really see a single dwarf, and he’s grumpy… On one hand you know what to expect, on the other hand it makes the non-human characters a bit predictable and as the story progresses a bit tiresome.

The characters are supposed to be good friends, but they spend an awful lot of time full of mistrust of each other, very angry or outright fighting. Maybe this is also modeled on how teenage boys form friend groups? Raistlin deserves a special mention — we’ve all played in a campaign with an asshole who played an asshole character under the guise of “that’s what my character would do!”

The trilogy compares itself to the Lord of the Rings: the back flap even has a quote from Dragon Magazine, which names it “…a trilogy that should at last satisfy the old demands for ‘something to read after the Ring books.'” They don’t name the books by name, perhaps because TSR (the publisher of both D&D and these novels) had been sued by the Tolkien estate 7 years earlier for using names from Tolkien’s works and they tread more carefully after that. And of course Dragon Magazine is full of praise for the trilogy, because that was published by TSR too!

But that’s where any comparison has to end. Tolkien’s works are epic in the classic sense: there is a rich world with a rich history, some of which we get a short peek at. Things are going on just out of sight and the characters make a plan on how to achieve their goals in the middle of that. In these novels, by contrast, everything is just a set piece that is there, waiting idly for the characters to arrive. At no point did I have the feeling that there was a world off-screen (if you can call it that for a book) that was believable and in motion. It’s all so… pedestrian.

The scale certainly is meant to be epic: a world-spanning war with the evil side using dragons! And the first dragon we meet is terrifying! But soon, they’re relegated to being merely flying mounts with teeth and an attitude, and the whole thing feels cheapened. It’s like “oh, yeah, the dragons are also around somewhere…” and I feel that if you call your novel cycle “Dragonlance” there should be more dragons and more lances in it than this cycle has. We only see a dragonrider using a lance against another dragon, and it’s turned into some kind of slapstick with a kender and a dwarf crawling all over their dragon mount…

And yes, there are “funny” moments in there as well, whole scenes turned into some kind of slapstick. That certainly doesn’t help with setting an “epic” mood! Another gripe is how whole episodes are just skipped. “Oh, when we re-join our heroes they went to the ice wall and retrieve a piece of a dragonlance from a dragonrider encased in ice, and are now on their way back.” I mean, how is that not a big part of the story!?

Is it all bad? I mean, it’s not good, but I did read the whole thing and gave it 2 stars. Because it is interesting. You want to know what happens next, how the story develops, what new set piece is next. I did not read the whole thing through in one go — I had to read a little ‘palate cleanser’ in between the second and third book because it was getting to be a bit much. But if you frame it as pulpy fantasy aimed at teenaged boys, then it’s enough to keep your attention. That being said, I will not seek out any of the other books in the Dragonlance setting. Once was enough for me.

Around here, you can’t put a spade in the earth without finding traces of Romans. So when a dairy factory was demolished in Cuijk, one of the larger towns in our municipality, they found traces of Roman activity. But not just anything, but a field of graves! This is extra interesting because you can expect lots of artefacts that were given as grave goods to the dead, which gives a good image of what people used and what they thought was important.

Today, they had an open house at the dig, and we visited it. It was very interesting to see the archeology in action, and the volunteers and professional archeologists were on site to give explanations.



The ‘dig’ is almost finished, or at least: it’s going to end. Because I think they can just keep digging and keep finding stuff.

A volunteer of the local archeology group showed us pottery shards from a Roman-era factory in France, which had 600 potters working there at its height. It really shows how far people traveled and how far commerce was spreading these wares all across Europe.

The top find of the dig was a completely intact Roman oil lamp. It is in the shape of a face, with the mouth opening to the oil reservoir. We bought the keychain and a tote bag with a drawing of the oil lamp to support the local archeology volunteer group. (“Ceuclum” being the Latin name of the town of Cuijk, so if I remember my Latin correctly, “CEUCLUM REVIVISCIT” means something like “Ceuclum revived”, or “Ceuclum herleeft” in Dutch.)

There was also a little ‘market’ with stands of the volunteers showing the finds, but also more generic “Roman-themed” stands with information on Roman culture.

It was fun to hear about Roman medical instruments, and there were re-enactors that gladly posed for photos in full regalia. We also talked to the lady who went through burned plant matter in the graves to identify plants that were cultivated in the area.

There was also a pile of sand where they had hidden metal bits and pieces, and a metal detector for kids to find these! When we were there, two kids were really going for it, and their mother and grand-mother were getting cold and bored standing around for a long time. So mother said: “Well, we’ll come and pick you up later!” Daughter asked when, and where they would go in the meantime, and the answer was something like “In a few hours, after we had lunch or something…!”

The children objected, but they also wanted to keep digging… For all we know, they are digging still!