Tracy Hickman

Social media has revealed the D&D Icons Dragonlance project in progress.

So Tracy Hickman and Joe Manganiello both drew attention on social media after posting pictures of their recent meeting to outline a new Dragonlance book.

The pictures included a whiteboard with an outline of various ideas for the book chapters and contents with a heavy emphasis on War of the Lance and the cornerstone concepts suggested by the writing of those novels.

And Margaret Weiss chimed in last week saying, Since Monday, Tracy and Joe Manganiello and I have been meeting with the WOTC team led by Dan Ayub to develop the new hardback Dragonlance World book due out in 2029.

Though you might like a look at the initial planning.

We're all very excited about it.

As you can find in our show notes, I put it, you can find it online if you look up Tracy Hickman, Margaret Weiss.

So yeah, we also got pictures of Tracy Hickman posing with Wizards of the Coast staff, including Justice Arman.

The Dragonlance Design Group got together.

We got to see Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weiss and Joe Manganiello and the WOTC team together, and they actually took pictures of their big planning board.

So we're going to dig into that.

Wes Schneider and James Wyatt had an interesting discussion at Gen Con, which was recorded on the D&D YouTube channel.

I think it showed up on Blue Sky.

I think there was some stuff on Facebook as well.

So in a few different places where Margaret Weiss, Tracy Hickman, Joe Maganello, and the D&D design team were showing off a big meeting that they had where they were talking about Dragonlance.

And some of the stuff that you get, which you don't typically get, as far as I can recall, and talking to some friends of mine, it's the first time we can ever recall that you could see their design notes for a book that's coming out in the far future.

Hope you enjoyed it.

Come back next week and we will be doing some more stuff from The Death Gate Cycle by Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman.

Hope to see you then.

Thanks, I hate it, was the answer I gave to this when it came out.

We will get into the wild pivot from AD&D to Saga, the commercial face plant that followed, and the delicious twist where the original creators, Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weiss, came back years later to reveal that the ending was actually a lie the whole time.

Wow.

I know.

The gods and the magic disappeared, and a total system change to a card-driven engine with no dice.

All three of these things happened, and this was all developed without any creative input from the original creators.

Margaret Weiss, Tracy Hickman were like, okay, okay.

They were actually working on a new trilogy.

But basically talking about this is a long-term repair project, essentially, right? So, okay, again, I'm reading this stuff, and I know some people are just, like, have...

a complete vitriol or just venom but again you know to each their own but for me i'm like okay i'm listening i'm listening um in talking about having outside creators return so not just keeping it like keeping on the you know the blinders for example right so external partners back into official D&D we have we know we're going to get some new Ravenloft adventures Eberron Forgotten Realms books and that's all going to be due to third parties jumping in again which is that's a good thing I think at least to start and obviously the big thing that I like is the collaborations with some of those classic creators and bringing out Tracy Hickman, Luke Gygax, Ari Salvatore at D&D Beyond, and even having Joe Manganiello getting involved with a more decidedly old-school, grimmer sort of project.

Again, all this is talk and sort of posturing right now, so...

I can understand why some people think, hey, this is all a bunch of BS.

And he was generally talking about this franchise thing.

He talked about things like reconnecting with classic D&D creators like, you know, at Gen Con they announced they were going to be working with Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman again and Bob Salvatore and Guy Gax and stuff like that.

Bringing on new partners and things like that.

So he talked a little bit about that, but I think that's all stuff we kind of know anyway.

So come back next week and we will be continuing to talk about fantasy series.

I will be continuing with another book out of the Deathgate cycle by Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman.

Come back then for more bite-sized nuggets of truth.

See you then.