Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman are officially returning to the Dragonlance franchise. Weis announced today that she and her writing partner will be writing a new trilogy set to follow their classic fantasy novels with Del Rey Books, with the first installment to tentatively hit stores later this year.
If you browsed a bookstore in the 1990s and early 2000s, you likely came across rows of books bearing the Dragonlance logo: the long-running franchise of Dungeons & Dragons tie-ins ran for nearly two hundred volumes, led by Weis and Hickman’s original trilogy, which was first published back in the 1980s.
At the time, Hickman was a game designer for Tactical Studies Rules (TSR), and devised an epic campaign setting that pitted its characters against dragons. He and TSR recognized the potential that the setting had—it could be more than just a game setting, it could also be the basis for a series of novels. He and Weis went on to write three novels between 1984 and 1985, Dragons of Autumn Twilight, Dragons of Winter Night and Dragons of Spring Dawning, following the inhabitants of the world of Krynn. (These three books were also the focus of a detailed Dragonlance Reread on Tor.com a few years ago, headed by Mahvesh Murad and Jared Shurin.)
The books were immediately successful, and TSR would go on to set up other multimedia franchises within various campaign settings, most notably Forgotten Realms. Weis and Hickman published more than 30 additional installments of the series, the last of which hit stores in 2006.
Now, they’ll return to the franchise, but not without a couple of bumps along the way. The pair began writing the trilogy in 2018, but last year, word broke that the pair had sued Wizards of the Coast for $10 million for breach of contract, over some issues with the publication process. Back in December, they settled and withdrew the lawsuit, allowing the book series to move forward.
— Margaret Weis (@WeisMargaret) January 25, 2021
According to Weis, the new books will return fans to the world of Krynn and will bring “our beloved characters to a new generation of readers.” There isn’t a firm release date just yet, but Weis and Hickman say that they’re anticipating the first installment will hit stores later this year.
