A Review of Dragons of Fate
The Middle Volume of The Latest Dragonlance Series
The second installment of the latest Dragonlance adventure was everything I hoped and dreaded: an adventure focused on the original characters which captivated me as a child, but rushed through due to the unnecessarily long set-up in Dragons of Deceit. The first half has the three characters with arguably the most fans meeting their heroes in the distant past of Ansalon, while the second half has blur of two-to-five page chapters skipping through the actual plot. The ending, however, is exactly the way Dragonlance started off (and many hated it for this). The twist seems like something straight out of a campy ‘80s cartoon. And really, it is. As I stated, many grognards bemoan Dragonlance for its predictability, its cutesy and whimsical lore some might find annoying, and all-around kitchen sink nature. But that’s exactly what D&D needs right now, a return to roots. The trade-off of setting in a mulatta ‘protagonist’ who becomes entirely irrelevant except as a plot device in this second volume might be worth appeasing the WotC overlords. I can count on one hand the chapters from Destina’s perspective, the rest are almost entirely from classic Dragonlance characters. Now, who knows if this trend will continue or if this will end up being the best volume of a failed attempt to revitalize one of the original D&D settings. The ending is unclear as to whose perspective will take up the majority of the next volume, but it did leave me wanting more. Either way, I’m looking forward to the final volume next year.