Two of the authors who created the iconic Dragonlance setting for Dungeons & Dragons are taking Wizards of the Coast to court.
According to the terms of their lawsuit, filed against the Renton, Wash.-based games publisher in Seattle on Oct. 16, original Dragonlance authors Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman had a licensing deal with Wizards that would allow them to write a new trilogy of Dragonlance novels, which would be published through Penguin Random House.
An attorney for Wizards allegedly informed Weis and Hickman’s agents during a phone conference in August, after Weis and Hickman had already finished the first book, that Wizards would no longer approve any of their current or future drafts. As Wizards owns the rights to the Dragonlance franchise, that rendered Weis and Hickman’s planned trilogy unpublishable.
Weis and Hickman’s lawsuit (view PDF at bottom of story) charges Wizards of the Coast with breach of contract, breach of implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing, and tortious interference with contract. The amount of damages that Weis and Hickman are seeking from Wizards is currently unspecified, but the lawsuit speculates that the contract could have been worth over $10 million to Weis and Hickman on completion.
That doesn’t seem like an unrealistic number. Weis and Hickman are the co-authors of many of the best-known novels in the Dragonlance series, which was a major pillar of the Dungeons & Dragons tabletop role-playing game in the 1980s and ’90s. Weis and Hickman’s lawsuit claims that Dragonlance‘s setting, the world of Krynn, “is arguably the most successful and popular world in shared fiction,” implicitly defined as a prose-only setting with multiple creative contributors. If they’re wrong, it’s not by much.
A sudden revival of the Dragonlance franchise in 2020 could have sold quite a few books just on the nostalgia value. In addition, Weis and Hickman are best-selling authors outside of their D&D work, with multiple original science fiction and fantasy series under their belts both individually and as collaborators.
As per Weis and Hickman’s version of events in their lawsuit, they approached Wizards in 2017 to pitch the game publisher on a new Dragonlance trilogy, which would officially conclude the setting’s story. To quote the suit, Weis and Hickman viewed this as “the capstone to their life’s work and as an offering to their multitude of fans who had clamored for a continuation of the series.”
Weis and Hickman allege that they eventually reached a licensing agreement with Wizards in March of 2019, and delivered a manuscript of the first book, Dragons of Deceit, to Wizards by the following November. Wizards approved it last January, and had already started talking about foreign translation rights and the next books in the trilogy.
Then, in August, everything fell apart. To quote the lawsuit again:
“On or about Aug. 13, 2020, Defendant participated in a telephone conference with Plaintiff-Creators’ agents, which was attended by Defendant’s highest-level executives and attorneys as well as PRH executives and counsel. At that meeting, Defendant declared that it would not approve any further Drafts of Book 1 or any subsequent works in the trilogy, effectively repudiating and terminating the License Agreement. No reason was provided for the termination.”
Weis and Hickman further allege that the termination had nothing to do with Weis, Hickman, or Dragons of Deceit, but instead, was linked to various public-relations issues that Wizards of the Coast was enduring this past summer. This includes the high-profile, acrimonious departure of D&D freelancer Orion Black in July; the abrupt dismissal of Magic: The Gathering content creator Lizbeth Eden in July, over questionable code of conduct violations; the discovery in June that long-time Magic artist Terese Nielsen was basically 20 terrible opinions stacked on top of each other; and a controversy that arose in June concerning racist imagery found on several old Magic cards, particularly Invoke Prejudice.
Weis and Hickman claim in their suit that they were informed, by an unspecified party, that Wizards decided to break the licensing agreement with them in order to “deflect any possible criticism or further public outcry regarding Defendant’s other properties by effectively killing the Dragonlance deal.”
The lawsuit also states that Weis and Hickman, as they were writing Dragons of Deceit, had complied with several requests from Wizards that “proposed certain changes in keeping with the modern-day zeitgeist of a more inclusive and diverse story-world,” which Wizards was entitled to do by the terms of their licensing agreement. Weis and Hickman claim in the suit to have carried out all of Wizards’s requested rewrites, including one that reportedly took 70 pages to resolve, over issues that included the story’s use of love potions, certain characters’ names having negative connotations, and unspecified matters of inclusivity.
That does raise an obvious follow-up question, however. In the version of events presented in Weis and Hickman’s lawsuit, which is the only version we have access to at time of writing, Wizards of the Coast had already approved at least one draft of the manuscript for Dragons of Deceit before abruptly reversing course in August. That suggests that someone at Wizards had read the novel. Wizards then decided to break a written contract with two legends in its industry in order to keep Dragons of Deceit from being published.
Even in Weis and Hickman’s side of the story, that implies that there’s something in Dragons of Deceit that could potentially cause yet another significant controversy for Wizards of the Coast, and that it was still there after multiple requested revisions. Is Wizards just gun-shy after a particularly brutal summer, or did Weis and Hickman somehow write something so controversial with Dragons of Deceit that Wizards decided to take the hit rather than release it? There are some pieces missing here.
This wouldn’t be entirely out of step with Weis and Hickman’s track record. While their previous work on Dragonlance isn’t known for featuring particularly questionable content, they do tend to have George R.R. Martin-sized protagonist body counts. Still, even if Weis and Hickman turned in a book where a bunch of beloved signature characters got humiliatingly murdered, as they do, that seems out of step with Wizards’ reaction.
Wizards of the Coast told GeekWire that it does not comment on pending litigation.
Hickman co-created the original concept for Dragonlance with his wife Laura in 1982, just before he took a job as a writer for Dungeons & Dragons. Hickman later pitched the setting to TSR, D&D‘s original publisher, and got the go-ahead to develop Dragonlance as an official D&D campaign world. Hickman’s team on the project included D&D writers Jeff Grubb and Harold Johnson, and go-to D&D artist Larry Elmore (see above). Weis was employed at TSR at the time on a different project as a book editor.
TSR soon decided to make Dragonlance the focus of a franchise. This included a series of 12 dragon-themed adventure modules, starring a cast of pre-generated player characters that became known as the Heroes of the Lance, and TSR’s first foray into publishing novels. Weis and Hickman, after an initial abortive attempt to supervise another author, eventually ended up writing the first novels themselves.
Their first book, both in the Dragonlance line and for Weis and Hickman, was 1984’s Dragons of Autumn Twilight, based upon the first few Dragonlance modules that Hickman’s TSR team had written, and taking many cues on characterization from the players at TSR who had run those modules. Autumn Twilight became a sales success despite tepid reviews, easily selling out TSR’s first tentative print run. The next two books in the trilogy, 1985’s Dragons of Winter Night and Dragons of Spring Dawning, secured Dragonlance‘s hold on fantasy fandom.
Soon, the Dragonlance franchise featured tie-in comics, video games, artbooks, and board games, in addition to becoming a popular official campaign setting for Dungeons & Dragons. Many of the Heroes of the Lance became iconic signature characters for D&D itself, including the crippled magic-user Raistlin Majere.
Naturally, Weis and Hickman kept writing novels in the Dragonlance universe, and soon, because that’s what you did with licensed fiction in the ’80s, Dragonlance became a massive shared fantasy universe. While Weis and Hickman’s work still formed the backbone of the setting, a couple of dozen other authors came aboard to add their own contributions, with Weis and Hickman frequently serving as line editors. Between 1984 and 2007, more than 190 Dragonlance novels and anthologies had been published, 31 of which were written and/or edited by Weis and Hickman. The franchise eventually ran out of steam and was quietly put on an extended hiatus in 2007, save for a notoriously flawed animated direct-to-video adaptation of Dragons of Autumn Twilight in 2008.
TSR went bankrupt in 1997, and its intellectual properties, including Dungeons & Dragons, were subsequently acquired by Wizards of the Coast. Wizards itself was bought by the Rhode Island-based toy giant Hasbro in 1999.
View the lawsuit, Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman vs. Wizards of the Coast:
