Question about the War on Souls

[Memnoch]

I'm reading the first book of this new Dragonlance Trilogy, Dragons of a Fallen Sun, and I have to say I'm as confused as hell. I was disappointed with the last Weis/Hickman book, Dragons of Summer Flame, where it seemed to me that they drove a stake through Krynn's heart (maybe TSR's dying twitches had something to do with that). So I haven't picked up a DL book since, until the War of Souls Trilogy came out.

But this book is damn confusing!! It's gotten some really rave reviews but I have yet to find out why (I'm only 100 pages into it so maybe that's why). It is TOTALLY different to the Chronicles and Legends Trilogies, I don't understand what's happened to the world and it's only been 50 years since the War of the Lance and 30 since the Chaos War.

I knew there was no more arcane magic. I knew there was no more divine magic. I knew the gods had left Krynn AGAIN (20 years after returning after a 400-year absence). But dragon overlords?? WTF?? What are they, dragons on steroids? The book doesn't seem to explain what the hell they are, though it appears that they are more powerful than normal dragons - they keep being called great dragons and it now appears that ONE of them is powerful enough to hold Qualinesti in thrall when flights and flights of them could not even invade Qualinesti during the War of the Lance. Or were those "pipsqueak dragons" compared to these ones?

The entire world just seems really muddled. If anyone knows anything about this, please put me out of my misery!!

[jabidas]

Well I havnt read the books but I can help you with the dragonlord question, several times even in the making of the origal dragonlance chronicles the names of the dragonlords changed. This was for legal reasons someone had a product with dragonlord so they changed to High dragonlords or something like that in boo k2.

Its been a long time since then, so all the names were probably lost in legal land somewhere and instead of a long argument it was probably just decided to use Dragon overlords.

Actually you might find this interesting but they had a legal problem with the word Dragonlance as well but were able to get around it with some leapfrogging and declaring it a noun not an adjective. Bizarre stuff, too many Dragonwords me thinks.

[Memnoch]

I worked out what the hell happened. Here are some snippets.

Dragon Overlords/Dragon Purge - After the Second Cataclysm when the gods left, 5 great dragon overlords came from another land, or perhaps another dimension. They are chromatic in color (1 per each of the chromatic colors). When they came to Ansalon, they dwarfed the regular dragons, and began eating them up left and right (Dragon Purge). The great dragons became overly large and obese.

Magic - After arcane and divine magic left Krynn, sorcery and mysticism came about. Both are facets of primordial magic, or the magic of the world. Sorcery affects non-living things and mysticism affects living things.

War of Souls may have an effect on how magic is perceived in the world.

The Dragons of a New Age series gives additional information on both the primordial magic of Krynn and the Dragon Overlords/Dragon Purge. I didn't care much for the writing style of the books and for some of the plot elements, but it does have some useful information. One note that I would like to add to Dragon Helm's reply pertains to the dragon purge. The dragons killed one another and fed upon the magical energy of their defeated foes to become more powerful than they were before (very Highlander like). The skulls of the defeated dragons were collected by the dragon overlords to construct skull totems that magnified their power and allowed them to alter huge areas of land to fit their tastes (I.E. Malystryx turning the forests of Kendermore into a volcanic wasteland and Skie turning Solamnia into a desert).


Give you a tip - DON'T read the War of the Lance Trilogy and go straight into this as it is totally different! [img]graemlins/wow.gif[/img]

[Virgil]

Hi Memnoch. I read Dragons of the Summer Flame and agree with your assessment. Seems like they killed off all the likeable characters and destroyed everything that made Krynn an interesting place.

Let me know how the new series goes and if it's worth picking up. I loved the Chronicles and Legends series and reread them every few years.

[AzureWolf]

The thing that confused me was that there was some quite obvious differnces between the Dragons of a New Age trilogy and the War of the souls.
Another thing that was wrong is that to my knowledge only Malystryx had come from overland. The other powerful dragons were from Ansalon and they learnt the techniques off her. I.e Skye (Khellendros) which was Kitiaras dragon before she was killed, and is now one of the great dragons. There are many of these dragon overlords but five more powerful ones.
I think personally while confusing that the Fifth Age is quite a good thing as it sort of refreshed the world of Krynn which was getting rather stale.
But it did annoy me that War of the Souls and the trilogy by Jean Rabe had many conflicting storylines in it almost seeming like two branches of reality that could have happened after the gods left Krynn.
But IMO I think that what has happened is a good thing.

[Grojlach]

War of Souls is still the first and only DragonLance novel I've ever read, so I can't let conflicting storylines bother me that much. Yet.
But I liked it. I liked the writing style and the story and coming from someone who has yet to read any of the other DL novels, it was good.

[Memnoch]

<blockquote>quote:</font><hr>Originally posted by Grojlach:
War of Souls is still the first and only DragonLance novel I've ever read, so I can't let conflicting storylines bother me that much. Yet.
But I liked it. I liked the writing style and the story and coming from someone who has yet to read any of the other DL novels, it was good. <hr></blockquote>

You know what? what stuffed me up is that I just finished rereading the Chronicles Trilogy (which along with the Legends Trilogy is the best ever) and then read Dragons of Summer Flame which was the last one I read before Dragons of A Fallen Sun. I missed the entire Dragons of A New Age and Bridge of Time series, so I had NFI on dragon overlords and all that stuff. I feel like I've used Tasslehoff's time travel device and jumped into a future totally different from the one I left. There is NOTHING remotely similar - not even the geography! [img]graemlins/wow.gif[/img]

[Grand-Ranger]

I dont know if I am going to read anymore DL books...

I mean whats DL with out Raist threating to turn Tas into a bug and eat him??