Tracy Hickman Presents: The Anvil of Time is a new DragonLance trilogy. Book one is The Sellsword, by Cam Banks.

The prologue of the story introduces us to the mysterious Journeyman. He is tasked with using the Anvil of Time to watch history but not to interfere. Our tale then begins 71 years earlier. The War of the Lance has ended but all is not roses in the land of Nordmaar. Highmaster Rivven Cairn, disciple of Emperor Ariakas himself, and her Red Wing of the dragonarmies still rule these lands.

Our central character is Vanderjack. We know he’s the central character because he is mentioned in the first sentence of every chapter of the novel except two. I don’t say that as a criticism. It was obviously done intentionally. Vanderjack is a sellsword. He’s The Sellsword. At the beginning of the story he’s low on coin and seemingly cursed with a haunted sword, the magical Lifecleaver given to him by his mother.

But circumstances find Vanderjack. He’s a man of action and he’s always in the middle of things. Thus, it became something of a matter of intrigue to see what he was going to be in the middle of at the start of a chapter. It wasn’t uncommon for Vanderjack to be surrounded. When he DIDN’T lead off the chapter, that break in the pattern was significant as well.

The Sellsword finds himself in the employ of a noble who wants him to recover something of great value to him. Vanderjack’s plans begin to go awry when he has to take the Baron’s assistant with him. Things become more complicated when they are joined by the gnome warrior and inventor (like all gnomes are) Theodenes, a former adventuring companion of Vanderjack’s. Things went sour the last time they saw each other though, and Theodenes had a score to settle.

After Vanderjack, Gredchen the Baron’s assistant, and Theodenes set off, things got more and more complicated as the group came under attack in their travels, and made enemies. When one makes an enemy of a dragon Highlord, things become more complicated indeed. Vanderjack also learned that the job he was doing wasn’t exactly what he’d thought. However, the need to settle some scores, some old and some new, continued to drive The Sellsword, as his assignment become more than just doing the work and collecting the money.

Through it all, Vanderjack was a sarcastic, trash talking “action hero”, who had a one-liner for every occasion. The dialogue was not classic fantasy. It featured back and forth banter between adventuring companions, between heroes and villains, and between villains. That term is rapid-fire dialogue and I enjoyed it here. Personally it reminded me of the way our characters interacted in my years of playing D&D, rather than the more formal and stylish manner of speaking from The Lord of the Rings.

I could easily imagine Vanderjack saying “Yipee-Ki-Ay Mu…” ahem…you know the rest, Bruce Willis style as he cleaves into a draconian with Lifecleaver. I ate it up, I admit. I loved Vanderjack. He is a very different type character than what I’m used to reading in DragonLance. He’s a man of questionable morality, as much interested in profit as anything else. However, in the spirit of DragonLance, some people are destined for greater things. Sometimes they just need a nudge in the right direction. While this was a bit of a grittier DragonLance, it didn’t turn the principles of the franchise on their ear.

At first I wondered how interesting a gnome character could be. But I liked Theo. His character worked very well with Vanderjack. I did wonder at times exactly why the gnome would travel with his old sellsword companion given how badly their last encounter ended. Don’t think Cam Banks left a plot hole in there. He left some mystery and intrigue in the story, and held some cards up his sleeve until the very end.

Our interesting heroes also had interesting villains to play off of, the determined Highlord and the devious Dark Robed Mage. No, not THAT Dark Robed Mage, but another one.

It appears that book two of the series is not going to focus on Vanderjack. That’s unfortunate, but never say never I suppose. There is a thread that links the books though. That would be the Journeyman. We got a little bit of a flavor of him in book one. Enough to be intriguing. I expect that we’ll learn even more as other authors pick up the series

I will admit that I had some doubts coming into this book. Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman ARE DragonLance. Every one of their books that I’ve read have been gold. Once other authors began writing books in the series, they definitely became hit or miss.

Cam Banks definitely hit with The Sellsword however. I learned that Banks has been a managing editor with Margaret Weis Productions. So in a manner of speaking The Sellsword was kept “in the family”. That’s a good thing.

The plot was fast paced and action packed. However it wasn’t a one-dimensional creampuff either. Maybe not as deep and layered (yet?) as the original DragonLance Chronicles, but it was no slouch. I enjoyed how every chapter began with a “Vanderjack moment”. That made me laugh. I got a good chuckle out of the fact that one of the major cities is named “Wulfgar”. I appreciate a good tip of the cap to R.A. Salvatore, being a fan of his work as well.

If I have a complaint it’s that the book was too short. It came in at 307 pages. Give us a bit more of Vanderjack cracking jokes and putting on a cocky façade in the face of danger. We got sword battles, aerial battles, gladiatorial arenas, magic and more, all packed into 307 pages of an “action movie story” Give us 400 pages, and give us even more I say.. Or maybe the plan was to leave them wanting more.

I’m going to give The Sellsword by Cam Banks a very solid 7.5 stars. I hope we haven’t seen the last of The Sellsword. I also want to see how these events play into the events in the other two books. I certainly hope the other two books are published, given the state of affairs, or lack thereof, with the DragonLance license and Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman.

There were high hopes, hell people were looking to take a ride back to their childhood (tweenhood?) where we could see one of our favorite fantasy books come to life on the screen. My first thought was, this would have been real cool as a live action movie, but I sure do love cartoons as well, so no hopes were dashed…yet.

The Good, the Bad, and the ugly CGI.

There really was a lot of good in this movie. I have heard of lot of comments based on the trailers and how people did not like the animation, but I thought the animation was real good. Yes it has a nostalgia feel to it (ala the Hobbit), but isn’t that the audience it is intended for? Regardless of the intended audience, the animated versions of some of my favorite characters are all well done and I enjoyed watching them.

The voice acting was also top notch with Michael Rosenbaum as Tanis, Kiefer Sutherland as Raistlin, Lucy Lawless as Goldmoon, and star filled for the rest of the cast as well. The only iffy one was Jason Marsden as Tasslehoff, not that Jason was a bad voice actor, its just his voice just did not work for me as Tasslehoff.

Another positive was the fact that the script kept true to the storyline. For the die hard fans this is very important and I feel that in many movies things that a fan would find integral to the story are often left out or glossed over. Now, they can not put everything from a few hundred page book into less then two hours, but they did a damn good job.

Then...

There was a decision to make the dragons and draconians CGI (Computer Generated), and this is where the problems begin. To sum it up, they just do not fit in with the animated work. It is like you are watching two different movies that fell on the cutting floor one on top of the other. The other issue is during the battle scenes the CGI and animated characters interaction is “off”. Animation gets lost behind CGI, swords plunge through CGI characters from further away then they should. A scene that describes it all is when we see what are supposed to be monks on the road by Solace, well the monk robes are CGI, so guess what is under them? A spoiled moment for the audience. Reading some interviews, it seemed that Weis and Hickman thought the 3D would make it more exciting...no...it did not.

Another overall issue I had with the transition from the word to the animated were the little enjoyable nuances of the characters that gave them personality in the book. They are overdone in the movie, ruining that aspect of the characters. A few particulars that I will point out are Raistlin’s coughing from his time at the tower, the way Caramon reacts to Tika when they come back to Solace, and Flint being afraid of the water during the escape. These are all very subtle in the book and in the movie are taken to the extreme and therefore look rather silly. I also thought the violence was a tad bit overdone (people hanging from trees during Solace attack), but maybe I am just nit picking now.

Overall, cut out the CGI, tone down the quirks and we have a great animated movie. Problem is I do not see this happening for the next part of this classic saga turned animated movie. It is like the pearl still stuck in the oyster, pretty surrounded by ugly. Fans of the series would be better served by the Graphic Novels that Devil's Due put out, and people unfamiliar should read the books, they are classics.

From the back cover of the paperback book (blurb) -

Now the people know that the dragon minions of Takhisis, Queen of Darkness, have returned. But the races have long been divided by hatred and prejudice. It seems the battle has been lost before it begins.

The companions are separated, torn apart by war. A full season will pass before they meet again—if they meet again.

It is always a pleasant surprise to find out that book that you loved, got turned into a graphic novel. That said though, visiting a world that you know and love in graphic form, it has to live up to some healthy expectations for the reader. Devils Due and their team brought it to life, and everyone should be very pleased by their work. Dragons of Winter Night, has the dark feel one would think it should and it comes across in the artwork and layout.

I thought the artwork was beautiful, and where it really seemed to shine was in the outdoor scenes and the artwork of the dragons. The characters were also depicted well for my personal tastes, whether or not they live up to what you envisioned them to be is something you have to look at for yourself. My favorite representation though was Kitiara, you can feel the evil bubbling below the surface, in her facial expressions. I always thought she was a great anti-hero to the group, and I can feel that in the artwork. I also enjoyed the depiction of Fizban as well; the humor of the character still shines through in the drawings. Overall the artwork had pretty big shoes to fill, if you go by the covers of the books done by Larry Elmore, and I think for the medium (a graphic novel can not be of the level of a single piece of canvas) the team of Kurth, Ruffino, Narvasa, Bradley, Rauch and Crowley, did an excellent job. They put together the perfect graphical companion to Weis and Hickman’s novel.

The adaptation by Andrew Dabb stayed pretty faithful and the overall feel and storyline stayed where they needed to be due to the restraints of the graphic novel medium. I personally find the graphic novel to be a nice companion to the book, but it still needs to stand on its own if one has not read the book. It worked for me on both of these levels as I had read this sometime in the 1980’s I believe. It does not hold the same weight as the book, but I do not believe it is supposed to. There is no way they can include everything and I found it to be a fun visualization after reading the books. Even if you are not familiar with the books though it is still very enjoyable just not of the same level I believe as someone that has read the books.

DDP always brings us something new for the fantasy crowd looking to dip their toes in the graphic novel and comic market. I think once you feel the temperature you will want to dive right in. Dragons of Winter Night, the graphic novel, is a great piece to own; visually telling what I consider a classic story in the fantasy book market

Dragons of the Highlord Skies is Volume II of the Lost Chronicles. Again it’s set between books 1 and 2 of the original DragonLance Chronicles. We get more of the viewpoint from Kitiara and the forces of Takhisis. Kitiara and Lord Soth occupy one sub-plot of the story, and a knightly quest occupies the other sub-plot.

We do get to see some of the Companions during the course of the book and that is always enjoyable since those characters are always the high point for me. I enjoyed the focus on the Solamnic Knights as well, and the interplay between three knightly friends and their differing interpretations of honor, duty, and even The Measure, by which they conducted themselves as Knights, was very well done. I often see depictions of knights that are one-dimensional. They’re honorable, loyal, duty bound, rigid and unyielding in their beliefs, and often stereotypically done. It was nice that to deviate from that in this book.

In Volume 2, Sturm was the Companion who stood out and shined for me. I was glad to see that, as I was disappointed with him in Volume I. That was addressed though. The character grew from that and was now more of the character that I remember him being in the originals. His nobility and honor shined through in this story.

The story did actually pick up where the previous story left off. So where I did expect to have to spend time acclimating to another snipped in time as we peered through the looking glass at a portion in time from the War of the Lance, I was able to get right back into the timeline of the story, since Volume I was still fresh on my mind. If it is for you too, that’s great. If it’s not, Weis and Hickman get you back up to speed in short order before they move on.

It took me maybe 20 pages to get into the story and get interested in the non-Kitiara characters. So maybe slow starting, but just long enough for the story to draw me in. I think maybe in the back of my mind some characters weren’t interesting right off the bat because in the back of my mind I knew how things were going to end. Their fates were sealed. But this series is more about the journey than the destination, since that destination was already written 20 years ago.

The one other thing I will note, just so I can review this book and not just say “Bravo! Bravo! Perfection! Write more books!” is this. I thought Kitiara’s climactic moment for this book built up wonderfully and dramatically throughout the book. Then right at the apex, boom it was over. I was surprised. I thought that could have played out for a couple more pages? “That’s it? Just like that?” I thought. I read it a second time to see if maybe I was just so sucked in and flipping pages at a furious pace that I just lost the overall sense of the build up and the payoff in the scene. I still had the same sense of abruptness the second time. But then maybe I’d build it up in my mind over the course of the book (because I really was sucked in. I like Lord Soth, what can I say) so however it played out couldn’t match my imagination. So maybe that scene was a bit of a victim of its own success. I’m not sure on that. But my feeling was “Great scene, could have been a couple pages longer in its resolution.”

The locations that we saw on Krynn were rich and vivid as they always have been. Weis and Hickman took great care in establishing the history of the world, and making it clear that there was a deeper history than the pieces that we were seeing at that moment. That creates depth, which makes the reader (or at least me) care more about what’s happening. You’re not just seeing a dusty library that the characters are walking into, will then use to suit their needs, then move on from. Or a generic icy castle, which must be taken because the heroes of light will defeat the villains of darkness.

It seemed to me that Weis and Hickman took great care to maintain continuity with the original series and to continue that same standard of excellence. I have too high of a regard for them to ever think that they’d just “mail it in” so to speak and let the DragonLance name alone sell books, but I suppose things like that have been done before. There was one thing at the end of the book that made me smile in regards to the level of attention that they paid. In the Author’s Notes (of the Advanced Reading Copy at least) they addressed a point from the previous book, which some readers have apparently been pointing to as a continuity error. They knew exactly what they were doing they said and the point noted was done deliberately. It was a catch that I admit that I didn’t make. But even in having readers catch that point, they’d intended to use that as a subtle plot point to make the reader learn a little something that they hadn’t known before. It’s almost as if they knew they’d be leaving us in suspense for 20 years then come back for an encore performance.

As an encore, I for one give it a standing ovation.

The next book will be Dragons of the Hourglass Mage. I don’t think I need to tell you who is central to that story. It will be a long year waiting for that book. But I sure hope it’s me who gets to review that one as well.

Good things are worth the wait. I’m very excited to be able to review this book. It’s been over 20 years since Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman began The DragonLance Chronicles. It’s been about 17 years since I read the series, which was the first fantasy series to take my breath away. It set the stage for all the fantasy and science fiction I have read since.

Over the past 17 years DragonLance has become a name brand, so we’ve had many stories, written by many authors, set on the world of Krynn. The quality of those other stories has varied, especially those written by other authors. This though is a reunion of Weiss and Hickman, and a return to the Heroes of the Lance, the “flagship” of the franchise.

The original Chronicles hold a special place in my heart so, while I was extremely excited to see it on the shelf at the bookstore, I also had a high level of expectation.

I did wonder how riveting the story would be since it is billed as a “untold tale from the War of the Lance”. Anyone who’s read the original knows ultimately how the tale will end. So how engaging could a story tucked in between Books I and II of the series be?

The answer is “very”. This novel captured the essence of the originals and captivated me in that same way, and it did it right from the beginning.

I thought this was the best DragonLance novel since the Legends series. What I always liked most about the Companions was that they all had flaws so they seemed complex and real. Many of them had their own agendas. Raistlin certainly wasn’t moved to save the world, or even travel with the Companions, for the pure purpose of saving the world. Still, heroism with an agenda is still heroism, and that’s intriguing. All those complex characters and interactions were back for this book.

I didn’t expect any bombshells in the story given its place within the DragonLance timeline. I very much enjoyed the character interaction, which I thought was at the forefront as there weren’t many action sequences for a book of this size. Tasselhoff Burrfoot played a very prominent role in the story, and any scene he is in will always be entertaining. I felt that he’d been used more as a plot device in some of the more recent stories in the DragonLance universe, so this was very refreshing.

While working within the confines of the established story, it still did a good job of supplying answers to a few questions within the story, and used the foreshadowing of established events as a driving force in the plot. That brought Flint Fireforge’s quest and motivation to locate the dwarven kingdom of Thorbardin and the Lost Hammer of Kharas to the forefront.

If there was one thing that troubled me, it was the fact that Sturm Brightblade seemed to be portrayed as being more of a selfish character than an honorable character. He wanted to find the Hammer of Kharas as well, but he was more concerned with using it to restore his family’s lost honor. To use it to forge dragonlances seemed to be secondary. His portrayal didn’t seem to match what we had previously seen from the character. Tika Wayland’s role in the book was reduced to that of a lovelorn maiden, with one little bit of character development.

Those points aside, I still highly recommend this book to any DragonLance fans. It fits very well into the original Chronicles. Effectively it’s the fourth book that fills in the blanks. I’d rather read this than read about second and third generation characters in the ever expanding world of Krynn.