https://youtu.be/qNaf66i7vvU

Join me as I review The Annotated Chronicles; Dragons of Autumn Twilight, live! Share your thoughts on this groundbreaking story and enlightening edition. I share the insights I gleaned, how the annotations presented a new perspective and why I still love this novel.

Review

Welcome to another DragonLance Saga episode. My name is Adam and today I am going to review The Annotated Chronicles: Dragons of Autumn Twilight. Don’t forget to like and subscribe to this channel, ring the bell, and you can further help this channel, and pick up Dragonlance Gaming materials, using my affiliate link in the description below. This is my perspective only, and if you have any thoughts or disagree with mine, I invite you to share your thoughts in YouTube chat.

I only relatively recently became aware of The Annotated Chronicles when I started this Dragonlance youTube channel. I had wanted to share my love of this campaign world while discovering its history and setting. I never thought about creating review episodes as these books have been out for 37 years as of my writing of this review. But since it is new to me, and as it all falls under the heading of Dragonlance Readings, I thought I should share my thoughts. 

I first read Dragons of autumn twilight around 30 years ago. It propelled my love of this campaign setting and cemented my addiction to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. What I would discover over the years of reading the novels that followed, was that it made a real impact on my perspectives and hopes as a young man looking toward my future life. 

I had grown up in the LDS, or Mormon Church as it is commonly known, and after I was baptised I quickly fell out with its beliefs and while my family went to church every Sunday, I would stay home and watch fantasy films or read Dragonlance novels. I had wholesale rejected the Mormon faith as not being for me, but more, rebelled against its nonsensical history and Bronze Age ideas. This kept me away from fantasy worlds like Narnia for some time. Imagine my surprise when I discovered Tracy Hickman was a devout Mormon and some of the ideas that are ever present in Dragonlance were drawn directly from his religion. 

I was past the point of hating everything associated with my family's religion at this point, and I began to appreciate others' perspectives, no matter how different they were to mine, as we are all human and share the same rock, hurtling through space. It was the simplicity of the Dragonlance frame that Tracy drew from his faith, that made it palatable to a young Adam. The complexity grew from that initial triad of Good overcoming Evil, with neutrality trying to maintain balance.  Dragons of Autumn twilight presents a Greek form of its pantheon of deities. They engage directly with the world, and what I didn’t know at the first reading is that this is a very mormon perspective as well.

You see, deep in their religion is the idea that everyone has the possibility of becoming their own god, and in fact creating or watching over their own world. In Krynn, I believe Laura and Tracy have done just that in life. The wise old man who inspires change and opportunity in the heroes, Fizban, is said to be an avatar of Tracy himself. And after digesting the Annotations for Dragons of Autumn Twilight, I have come to understand that this was a very international if not subconscious choice on the part of the authors. It doesn’t change my love of the novel, as I am not a Mormon and I wholesale reject the ideas inherent in their religion. But rather, like everyone, I take what I like and discard what I don’t like in life.