Margaret Weis
Margaret Weis came to fantasy through the game industry rather than around it. Working at TSR, she teamed with Tracy Hickman to build Dragonlance, a role-playing setting that arrived with novels attached, and the novels turned out to be the part that travelled. Krynn came fully furnished, with its own gods, moons and a war already in progress, and readers who had never rolled a die followed it anyway.
What she and Hickman were good at is character over cosmology. The Chronicles books gave the world a doomed magic-user with an hourglass stare and a warrior brother who cannot save him, and that pairing did more for the series than any amount of dragon lore. The Legends trilogy that followed is a straight character study wearing a time-travel plot. The prose is unfussy and moves, which is what a shared world needs and rarely gets.
She built the business around it too. Weis founded Sovereign Press and Margaret Weis Productions, licensing television and film properties into role-playing lines alongside original ones, which makes her one of the few authors in the field who owns the pipeline as well as the books. She turns up as herself in the fandom documentary Done the Impossible.
Movies (1)
Books (15)
- Dragons of Summer Flame (1995)
- Brothers in Arms (Dragonlance (1999)
- The Dragons of Krynn (1994)
- Doom of the Darksword (1988)
- Triumph of the Darksword (1988)
- Amber and Blood (2008)
- Bones of the Dragon (2009)
- The Doom Brigade (1996)
- Warrior Angel (2007)
- Time of the Twins (1996)
- War of the Twins (1986)
- Test of the Twins (1986)
- Dragons of Winter Night (1985)
- Dragons of Autumn Twilight (1984)
- Dragons of Spring Dawning (1900)
Where to start with Margaret Weis
Begin at Dragons of Autumn Twilight, the first Chronicles book, because the series was designed as a front door: a party of old friends meets in an inn, and the world explains itself as they walk through it. Follow with Dragons of Winter Night and Dragons of Spring Dawning to finish the war.
Then go to Legends, the better trilogy and unreadable in isolation. Time of the Twins, War of the Twins and Test of the Twins take the two brothers from Chronicles and spend three books on the question the first series only implied, and the writing is at its sharpest there.
Outside Krynn, the Darksword books, Doom of the Darksword and Triumph of the Darksword, are the interesting oddity, a world built on one hard rule about magic and birth. Dragons of Summer Flame is for readers already invested rather than arriving.
The Dragonlance Chronicles
The trilogy that turned a Dungeons and Dragons setting into a publishing category, written alongside the modules rather than after them. Autumn Twilight is where everyone starts and the pacing still holds up.
Beyond the Chronicles
The Twins books are the ones readers argue about, and the Darksword trilogy is the series she and Hickman wrote away from Krynn entirely. Test of the Twins is the reason Raistlin has the following he does.