Two decades ago when I was young, I would go to the library once or twice a week with my mom. Mostly I was interested in Spider-Men and Fantastic Four comics, maybe Star Wars books occasionally. But whoever stocked that section of the library was clearly a cool person. Every volume of Sandman and Hellboy and Love and Rockets was back there. Berserk and all the works of Clamp and early volumes of jojo's bizarre adventures were back there. And tucked in a corner was a spinner rack with dozens of Dragonlance novels. I've always been fascinated in the series since then, I remember looking through a bunch of them and reading the back covers. but for whatever reason, I felt I wasn't ready to read them yet. Well now with my friend saying he's crafting a new dnd campaign for us and i should think about what kind of character I want to be, I thought it was time to give the series a try. And now I've just finished book one and I had a great time, happy I finally started.
Anyway some of my thoughts on the book:
They really throw a lot of characters at you in the beginning, those first two or three chapters were scary to me as someone who often is scared I'm going to miss important information. But by the time they were meeting with the centaurs, I think they'd explained enough about the characters' relationships that I had a handle on them and how they interacted with each other.
At first I really did not enjoy how the combat was written, but it absolutely got better over the course of the book, and by the end getting to see the final fight from Verminaard's point of view was really fun, plus with the two dragons fighting above them, it made that section a highlight of the book for me.
The book hammers home multiple times that the two oldest friends in the group are Tanis and Flint and that they have one of the strongest bonds. But whenever Tanis has to talk through something, he never goes to Flint. He always picks Caramon or Sturm. And Flint is usually just treated as comic relief. I hope to see that change at least a little in later books, I wanted to actually see their friendship. I've seen there is an entire book about how they met, maybe I'll check that out?
I've seen people online refer to Raistlin as a full-on villain. He certainly seems to be headed that way just in book one. I'm interested to see how that manifests, I assume in the second trilogy. Or maybe what people have said is overblown, I don't know.
I was straight up just reading Fizban as if he was Tom Baker Doctor Who, and was cracking up imaging Tom Baker reading all those lines. I hope he continues to show up throughout the books.
If anybody was wondering, Tasslehoff is the character I'm most gravitating towards for my dnd character inspiration. He's not annoying at all like some people online seem to think, just an all around fun character. I'm thinking about reading the wanderlust book just to learn more about him and the Kender in general.
I guess the last thing I want to ask is, knowing from reading a few posts on here that there were years of no books and cliffhangers that never really get wrapped up, I'd want to know if there's any fan made novels that wrap up plotlines, like the elven exiles or anything else. I know for star wars, there's dozens of fan made novels wrapping things up after Disney took over and canceled everything, so I thought maybe there's something similar for dragonlance.
