Literature / Dragonlance

Dragonlance is a series of High Fantasy novels and an accompanying Dungeons & Dragons setting, devised by husband-and-wife team Tracy Hickman and Laura Hickman, and popularized via novels by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman.

The concept of the Balance Between Good and Evil is a central theme of the setting, as the stories have shown similarly dire consequences when good and evil each spiral out of control. Another theme that's prevalent throughout the books is spiritual abandonment and discovery, as the gods have a distinct tendency to run out on the world whenever they screw things up badly enough. This shows up even in the first novel, Dragons of Autumn Twilight, as the gods had abandoned the world some hundreds of years before after the first Cataclysm, and the protagonists must not only deal with the covert return of Takhisis, the Dark Queen of the evil gods, but also with the Seekers, who have invented false gods as a pretext to seize power.

Notable for taking extreme D&D influences and making them work on their own. For example, the original "Heroes of the Lance" consisted of such a generic Tabletop RPG party that they could easily be renamed according to their character classes — if it weren't for the fact that each character is given a strong and distinct personality, detailed backstory, and oodles of Character Development (for most of them) throughout the series. Also notable for mixing stock Medieval European Fantasy with a Native American flavor (the Plainsmen, and a lot of the artwork), a bevy of unique and sometimes quirky races (Kender, Gully Dwarves, Draconians, and plenty of others), a unique magic system, and a greater focus on Dragons as the primal movers and shakers of world events.

In the Planescape, Ravenloft, and Spelljammer settings, the Dragonlance setting is part of a larger universe that also includes the Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk.

The Dragonlance world has turned into a major setting with many authors writing stories for it — in total, at the time of writing there are more than 200 novels comprising it, not including anthologies, manuals, and various other extras.

In 2008, Paramount released a Direct to Video Animated Adaptation based on Dragons of Autumn Twilight.

In development since 1998, a Russian musical adaptation of the Legends Trilogy called The Last Trial was first released in 2009. The stage play premiered in 2014, and has undergone multiple alternate endings, iterations, and expansions since then.

On April 2022, during the D&D Direct event, Wizards of the Coast announced that the Dragonlance setting will be adapted for Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition, complete with an adventure module titled Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen as well as a board game titled Dragonlance: Warriors of Krynn. Both of these titles were released on December 6, 2022.

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Works that are set in Dragonlance include:

Films-Animated

• Dragonlance: Dragons of Autumn Twilight

Literature

• Dark Disciple Trilogy
• Defenders of Magic Trilogy
• Dragonlance Chronicles
• Dragonlance Legends
• Dragonlance: The New Adventures
• Dragons of Summer Flame
• The Elven Nations Trilogy
• Kingpriest Trilogy
• The Legend of Huma
• Lord Toede
• The Lost Chronicles
• The Second Generation
• The War of Souls

Tabletop Games

• Dragonlance: Fifth Age Dramatic Adventure Game
• Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen
• Dragonlance: Warriors of Krynn

Theatre

• The Last Trial

Video Games

• Dragon Strike
• Gold Box
• Heroes of the Lance

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The Dragonlance saga provides examples of:

# — G

• 2D Visuals, 3D Effects: The animated movie is a great example of this. Anything dragon-related is rendered in 3D while the rest of the movie is 2D.
• '80s Hair: Kitiara and Tika in Larry Elmore's artwork most noticeably (Kitiara's practically a Pat Benatar Expy in some of those old paintings, and Tika looks like she walked out of an Aerosmith video), but other characters may qualify as well. Of course, the first book came out in 1984.
• Absurdly Sharp Blade: The eponymous artifact is one of very few things that can penetrate a dragon's hide.
• Action Girl: The Chronicles trilogy specifically has Laurana, Tika, and Goldmoon as part of the main group of heroes, and Alhana is also a major player in the plot.
• Act of True Love: The Red Dragon Matafleur, mortally wounded and losing to the younger and more powerful Pyros, sacrificing herself to protect the children of the human prisoners that she has come to love as her own.
• Actually, I Am Him: Deliberately invoked in the The War of Souls trilogy. Morham Targonne, the Lord of the Night, is a mild, unassuming middle-aged man despite being the head of an order of Black Knights feared across the continent; when giving an audience to people he hasn't met before, he'll typically invite them into his office and keep working quietly at his desk without acknowledging them, leaving the visitor to assume that this man is the Lord of the Night's secretary. He'll watch their reactions for a while, magically read their mind a bit to steal secrets, and once he's satisfied himself only then announce to said visitor that they are, in fact, in the presence of the Lord of the Night. Cue Oh, Crap!.
• Adaptational Consent: Tanis Half-Elven is usually stated to be the result of a human warrior raping his elven mother, but a later novel The Inheritance attempted to retcon this by stating the relationship was consensual and his mother lied about being raped to protect herself and Tanis. This second version has generally been ignored by other writers.
• Addictive Magic: High Sorcery is said to be addictive for some of its users. Wizards casting spells are described as feeling as though the magic is coursing through their body like quicksilver, complete with a feeling of empty lethargy when the spell is over. There is even mention of hedonist mages who do nothing but cast Useless Useful Spells over and over just for the sensation it brings.
• Aerith and Bob: While most characters have fittingly fantastic names, most of the Knights of Solamnia have good old straight-up English names.
• Affably Evil: A good amount of evil characters and even evil gods in the setting come across as rather nice sometimes. This probably has to do with the Balance Between Good and Evil and how both sides have to work to maintain it.
• After the End: The years after the Cataclysm could be considered this sort of setting. The world gets better though. And then, between Chaos, new super-dragon demigods and the War of Souls it got much, much worse.
• Albinos Are Freaks: In one short story, there is an albino silver dragon. A knight thinks it is an evil white dragon and slays the creature. After realizing he just slaughtered a being of pure good purely on appearance, the knight decides to care for the dragon's baby.
• Air Jousting: Sort of the whole idea behind the Dragonlance to begin with, with the titular dragonlances being used by Dragon Riders in the air. In-game, dragonlances allowed the user to add their entire hitpoint total to the damage inflicted if they hit a dragon. Used mounted, you added your own hitpoints and the mounts. If you're a reasonable level, on the back of any reasonably powerful good dragon, you could one-shot any evil dragon with a single blow. (First Edition AD&D dragons were woefully underpowered and had lousy hitpoints, even the biggest, baddest evil dragon topped out at 88HP, which a 6th level fighter could reach with good rolls and a high con bonus).
• Alien Sky: Krynn has three moons of different colors, and a very different set of constellations. The single moon that was around during the early Fifth Age made for an alien sky for all of Krynn's inhabitants.
• All There in the Manual: It is a book series of course, but there is tons of information about the world in the various Dungeons & Dragons supplements across all editions that is not found in the novels.
• Alternate Timeline: The setting has multiple alternate timelines, most of which are detailed in the Legends of the Twins sourcebook.
• Alternative Calendar: There are seven days each week and twelve months each year. But each day and month have eight different names, each from a different culture. The titles of the Chronicles trilogy, in the Gregorian calendar instead of elven are: Dragons of October, Dragons of January, and Dragons of March. The War of the Lance lasts less than a full year.
• Always Chaotic Evil: There are a couple races that fit, but pretty much every "always evil" race has subverted this trope at least once by now.
  • The Draconians are introduced as this, only to have it revealed that because they inherited their draconic progenitors' intelligence and independence, they are quite capable of growing beyond their evil "programming". The most notable subversion is Kang and his band of engineers, who while starting out as evil (in the alignment sense) are nonetheless sympathetic, likable, and relatively honorable characters (they eventually ensure their race's future, found a city, and if a scene at the end of the War of Souls trilogy is anything to go by, pull a Heel–Face Turn on Takhisis).
  • Flamestrike, a senile Red Dragon general grieving for the loss of her children, was manipulated into guarding the children of slaves captured from Solace. She comes to genuinely love and dote upon them as her own, and the affection is quite mutual on the part of said children and their mothers. Her love for them was so strong that she literally flew into a rage to protect them against the younger and more powerful Ember when his rider threatened to destroy them, saving their lives at the cost of her own.
  • Minotaurs are Always Lawful, and although most of them are evil and worship Sargonnas, some turned to Good and the worship of Kiri-Jolith.
• Amazonian Beauty:
  • In Black Wings Khisanth (Onyx) human form is a muscular Head-Turning Beauty that draws the eye of quite a few people she meets.
  • Silvara's illustrations show she has a slender but toned body, and Gilthanas lusts after her figure more than once.
• Ancestral Weapon: Sturm's armor and sword belonged to his father, and the sword was eventually passed down to his son Steel. Also, Palin Majere ends up wielding the Staff of Magius that belonged to his uncle Raistlin.
• And I Must Scream:
  • A small case of this at the end of Amber and Ashes, when Mina is locked away in a magical room, where not even the Gods themselves could hear the screams of the person trapped inside. She escapes, though...
  • In the short story Into Shadow, Into Light Rennard suffers eternal torments in the Abyss after his death- constantly hunted and slain by the people he murdered only to rise again, his body ravaged by the fever and denied even a sip of water he so desperately craves. The end of the story does give him hope he might finally earn release, though.
  • At the climax of the Taladas Trilogy, Big Bad Maladar is punished for failing his god by having his soul tossed into a lake of lava, where it will be burned for eternity with no release- unless said god has need of him again.
    "Maladar screamed for centuries."
  • The Goblins in the Stonetellers Trilogy believe that if a body is left whole then the spirit of the deceased will return to its old body and be trapped in it. This is why the Goblins burn the body, or even just cut off a limb. The Goblins believe in a form of reincarnation, and that the body must not be whole so that the spirit can find a new body(which will also be a Goblin, as they believe that members of each race will always be a member of that race no matter how many times they reincarnate) to inhabit.
  • At the end of the Ogre Titans Trilogy Golgren casts Xiryn into the depths of the Fire Rose he coveted so desperately, doomed to burn for all eternity and never to die.
  • And, of course, Raistlin's ultimate fate in the timeline where he succeeds in becoming a god: eternity floating alone in the void above a dead world.
  • Lorac Caralon is also this after his mind is enslaved by a dragon orb, and his nightmares are turned into reality in Silvanesti. Later averted when the Heroes of the Lance free him and Silvanesti from the dragon orb's nightmare.
• And Man Grew Proud: The Time Travel storylines that reveal the truth behind such legendary events as the Cataclysm and the Fall of Istar, and such mythologized historical personas as Huma Dragonbane. Often a Deconstruction.
• Angst Coma: Subverted by Laurana while a prisoner at the Council of Highlords. She seems to go catatonic after hearing what Kitiara has planned for her and seeing Tanis serving Kitiara, but she is actually just feigning numbness to get Kitiara and Tanis to drop their guard, so she can make her escape.
• Animated Adaptation: The first book has been adapted into a cartoon film by Paramount.
• Animate Dead: A common tool of villains, given necromancy is the go-to "evil wizard style" of the greater D&D continuity.
• Anti-Hero: Raistlin in Chronicles is a perfect example. Dhamon Grimwulf from the Dragons of a New Age trilogy, the Dhamon Saga and The Lake of Death.
• Anti-Magic: Tol from the Ergoth Trilogy had an Irda Null Stone that completely nullified all magic near him.
• Anyone Can Die: Pretty much the entire central series from Dragons Of Summer Flame onwards.
  • The fates of the cast of the original trilogy: Sturm is killed by Kitiara in Winter Nights, Flint dies of a heart attack in Spring Dawning, Raistlin and Kitiara both die at the end of the Legends Trilogy (although this doesn't stop Raistlin from showing up a few more times), Tanis is shot from behind by a mook in Summer Flame, Tasslehoff is squashed by Chaos' foot in Summer Flame (although he comes back for awhile, he eventually returns so he can die when he's supposed to), Riverwind dies in between books when the Dragon Overlords come, Laurana died during the battle against Beryl in Qualinesti, and Goldmoon died in Mina's arms in the War of Souls. Gilthanas and Silvara can die according to the adventure path Price Of Courage, that wasn't committed to a book. Caramon and Tika both died peacefully of old age, and Alhana Starbreeze is the only one left alive (Laurana's brother Porthios is also still alive but may or may not count as one 'of the cast' depending on your point of view.)
  • Any of Richard A. Knaak's books. Special mention goes to the Minotaur Wars trilogy. Even being immortal doesn't save you!
• Apocalypse How: There's the main Cataclysm, in which a "mountain of fire" (explained in the Kingpriest Trilogy as the hammer of the god Reorx) annihilated the Kingdom of Istar and killed millions outside of it with fire, earthquakes, etc. On the same day, Taladas, the continent to the northeast of Ansalon, suffered the "Great Destruction," in which an earthquake wiped out the mighty Aurim empire and filled the interior of the continent with molten lava and poison gas. In Adlatum, the third continent the Cataclysm came in the form of the Great Drowning in which massive tidal waves flooded large parts of the land and never receded.
• Artifact of Doom:
  • The dragon orbs, powerful magical crystals imbued with the powers and essences of chromatic dragons, are very powerful but even more dangerous. When Lorac Caladon, King of Silvanesti, tries to use one, it enslaves him and turns his nightmares into a reality that engulfs his kingdom. Raistlin later seizes Lorac's orb and initially dominates it, but it later nearly enslaves him until he smashes it in frustration.
  • The Sword of Miracles gets a passing mention in the Legend of Huma as the very same sword that was used to cause the downfall of the Ogres, turning them into the twisted creatures they are now. That it tried to get Huma to wield it before he realized its peril speaks to a malevolent nature.
• Artificial Limbs: The Silver Arm of Ergoth is a legendary artifact from the Metallic Dragons that is used to construct dragonlances. The arm itself resembled a human arm from the shoulder blade down to the hand and could magically shift to become either a right or left arm. The arm contained the ability to heal wounds or regenerate lost limbs. In Dragons Of Winter Night, Silvara gives it to Theros Ironfeld after she's convinced to help the heroes craft dragonlances.
• Artistic License – Economics: Post-Cataclysm, steel becomes the most valuable metal instead of gold, so steel coins are used as the highest form of currency. However, steel armor and weapons were still widely used, and their value in steel coins was actually a lot less than the amount of steel used to make them: it was possible to make money by buying steel longswords, then melting them down and forging them into coins.
• Ascended Extra: Tika Waylan (later Majere) in the original trilogy. Starts out as a barmaid who serves the party in Dragons of Autumn Twilight, ends up learning to fight and becoming a member of the party through the final events of Dragons of Spring Dawning.
• Asskicking Leads to Leadership: Any Minotaur used to be able to challenge their emperor to a fight to the death, and if they won, they got to be emperor. It is said that this has changed after the War of Souls, though.

• Attempted Rape: When Bakaris tries to rape Laurana in Dragons of Spring Dawning. First Cloudcuckoolander Tasslehoff Burrfoot comes to her defense, stabbing Bakaris right when he has Laurana at his mercy. Then with Bakaris distracted Laurana attacks him in a frenzy and succeeds in killing him.
• Author Tract: The blatant insistence that the viewpoint "the gods were abandoned by mortals" is right and "the gods turned their backs on mortals" is wrong takes on some rather interesting undertones when one remembers that both of the Hickmans, the creators of the settings and one-half the authors of the original trilogy are devout Christians (well, specifically Mormons).

• Axe-Crazy: Gair Graymist from The Silver Stair does a Face–Heel Turn and becomes this after delving into magic that deals with spirits.
• Back from the Dead:
  • Tas in the War of Souls trilogy.
  • Raistlin comes back from the dead several times in different books.
  • Goldmoon is also killed by Dhamon Grimwulf in the Fifth Age trilogy only to be resurrected later in the trilogy.
• Badass Boast:
  Huma: I am a Knight of Solamnia. I am the hand of Paladine, of Kiri-Jolith, and of Habbakuk on this world. You are on Krynn. You are mine, Queen of Darkness.
• Badass in Distress: In Dragons of Spring Dawning, the Golden General, Laurana, is captured by her Arch-Enemy, the Dragon Highlord Kitiara, and put on display at the Council of Highlords in Neraka as Kitiara's gift to the evil goddess, Tahkisis.
• Badass Normal: Arguably, anyone who cannot use magic but holds their own in combat against supernatural threats—which is to say, a lot of people. The list includes Caramon, Tanis, Laurana, Kitiara, Flint, Tasslehoff, Faros Es Kalin, Golgren, Gerard, and Rhys.
  • Tol from the Ergoth Trilogy is perhaps the greatest example, he never used any sort of magical weapon, but was able to go against supernatural foes and win.
  • Huma. A mere Knight of the Crown who defeated the Dragonqueen.
• Balance Between Good and Evil: One of the core concepts of the setting. Palin Majere even lets followers of evil deities set up temples in Solace as long as they do not commit any evil acts. The background material (especially the Kingpriest of Istar) seems to show that good inevitably becomes Lawful Stupid if it's not balanced by evil. After Huma wielding the eponymous weapon defeated and banished the evil goddess Takhisis, things improved quickly, but with no real bad guys to fight, the Church of Paladine began persecuting anyone who wasn't good enough. Then, their Pope-analog decided that to purge evil from the world completely, he needed to become a god. The gods' answer to this was to throw a mountain down on Ishtar, causing the Cataclysm, sending Ishtar to the bottom of the sea and reshaping much of the world. The gods then disappeared from the world. In short, if there's no Evil, some of the Good becomes Evil to compensate. If there's too much Evil, then the Evil turns on itself and kills itself off. It's a kind of self-maintaining balance. There are also forces of Neutral that work to maintain that balance, most visibly the neutral gods of the pantheon and the red-robed wizards of the towers of high sorcery.
• Bad Moon Rising: The red moon Lunitari is actually associated with Neutral magic rather than Evil; Nuitari, the "Evil magic" moon, is black and sheds a black light seen only by beings that use such dark magic.

• Battle Strip: Caramon has to fight a half-ogre bandit chief. Since he doesn't have any armour, he strips naked to deny his opponent a potential handhold, and his opponent likewise strips down to a loincloth.
• The Beautiful Elite: The ancient High Ogres were said to be even more beautiful than the Elves. Elves get this treatment too, especially in Chronicles, but it is not as prominent for Elves in most later novels.
• Because You Were Nice to Me: When Raistlin is nice to a gully dwarf, she becomes quite loyal to him. (He did cast a Charm spell on her, but that's supposed to wear off ... eventually. Based on Intelligence, so in her case, it lasted a long time.) It's reciprocated, however, and Raistlin drops everything to try to protect her, even when his friends abandon the gully dwarves. It also leads to his Heel Realization in a sequel series, as his lust for power led to her death. He willingly condemns himself to an eternity of torment to avoid this.
• Berserk Button:
  • It is not a good idea to call a Minotaur a "Cow".
  • Also not a good idea to hurt Talon Leader Huzzad. The first-generation female draconians will literally rip you apart for hurting the closest thing they have to a mother.
• Betty and Veronica: Tanis Half-Elven is in the middle of a Love Triangle between his Childhood Friend Laurana, a sweet, innocent blonde elven princess, and Kitiara, a sultry brunette human warlord. After a great deal of indecision, Tanis finally chooses Laurana, mainly because he feels responsible when Kitiara tries to resolve the triangle by kidnapping Laurana and attempting to have her killed.
• Beware the Skull Base: Skullcap, a cranium-shaped structure that served as an ancient evil wizard's stronghold.
• Big Bad: Normally Takhisis for most major story arcs (until she dies at the climax of War of Souls), but depending on the era other dark gods, Chaos (Dragons of Summer Flame and the Chaos War novels), Fistandantilus (Kingpriest Trilogy), or the Dragon Overlord Malystryx (most of the early Fifth Age material, until she ends up in an Evil vs. Evil conflict with Takhisis in War of Souls and loses) can take over the role.
• Big Boo's Haunt: Dargaard Keep, being the home of Lord Soth, is one of the setting's most prominent examples. There's actually not that many undead present; Soth himself, his thirteen Skeleton Warriors, and the three Banshees. Of course, as all seventeen are high-level undead in a generally low-level world, that more than makes up for any lack in individual numbers.
• Big Eater: Caramon eats a lot in the "Chronicles" series, and is miserable if he's deprived of regular (and very large) meals. Despite this, he never gets fat, presumably due to his active lifestyle. In the "Legends" series after Raistlin abandons him, he becomes so depressed that he ceases to be active and takes up drinking heavily. That, combined with his big eating, soon turns him into a tub of lard.
• Black-and-Grey Morality:
  • The Rise of Solamnia trilogy. The protagonist, Jaymes Markham, is a Utopia Justifies the Means warlord who murders prisoners, breaks truces and uses a Love Potion to get a useful princess to fall in love with him (see What the Hell, Hero? below). The villains are (marginally) worse.
  • The Minotaur Wars trilogy has this in spades too, with a choice between a quite possibly psychotic, merciless and vengeful rebel leader with a penchant for murdering prisoners, leading his followers on pointless death marches and fantasizing over the deaths of friends and enemies alike, or a Corrupt Church led Empire that enslaves the dead and makes any who speak out against it mysteriously disappear. Most half-decent characters have a habit of dying.
• Blood Bath: Maladar's backstory contains a few details about slaughtering thousands of noble's sons just so he could bathe in their blood.

• Blood Magic: The Ogre Titans used Elven blood and other ingredients to fuel their transformation from normal ogres into Ogre Titans, and to remain as Ogre Titans they must get new infusions of the elf blood potion periodically or turn into hideous degenerate monsters.
• Bohemian Parody: An old issue of Dragon magazine included the cast of Chronicles singing one.
• Bond Villain Stupidity: Verminaard, the Big Bad in Dragons of Autumn Twilight, manipulated Flamestrike, a Giant Red Dragon mother grieving for the loss of her children during the War Against The Gods, into guarding his prisoners' children because in her senility and grief she came to regard and love the human children as if they were her own, and would willingly watch over them at all times. When he had the Heroes of The Lance, the escaping prisoners and their children cornered and dead to rights, Verminaard somehow believed it was a bright idea to shout on the top of his lungs "I will destroy the children!" within earshot of said Red Dragon who has come to love said children. Cue Flamestrike bursting out of her lair in motherly-rage to protect her beloved "children", turning the tide of the battle in the Heroes of the Lance's favor.
• Borrowed Without Permission: One common excuse kender use to explain their thefts is that they were just borrowing the item and intended to return it. Sometimes they will claim that the victim left before they could give it back.
• Brainless Beauty: Destina Rosethorn, the protagonist of Dragons of Deceit is a downplayed example. She is noted as being extremely beautiful in universe and has book smarts and some genuine skills but she is also impulsive, a poor liar, an even worse judge of character and frequently comes across as inept.
• Brains and Brawn: The Majere brothers, with Raistlin being the highly intelligent wizard and Caramon being the slow-thinking physically strong fighter. Also a case of Brains Evil, Brawn Good since Cameron is a good guy while Raistlin is morally ambiguous at best.
• Breaking the Fellowship: In the initial trilogy, the main group is split onto two separate paths after the city of Tarsis is attacked.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: Fizban sort of does this when he makes reference to a "21 Gun Salute"; there are no guns in any Dragonlance timeline (although there probably are lots of gun-like Tinker Gnome inventions), but a "21 Gun Salute" is a concept from Earth. Cue the Epileptic Trees.
• Brother–Sister Incest: Apparently not a big deal among Dragons. In at least one point in history, it was necessary to keep all five varieties going, since only one male and female of each metallic color survived the destruction of the the Grotto during the Second Dragon War. Dragons: The Lost Histories, however, seems to show that it's considered acceptable even if there's a wider gene pool available. Gwyneth/Heart had a brother named Lectral who had shown interest in her as a mate. She rejects him, but her rejection comes from the fact that she's in love with Huma and the fact that Lectral doesn't share her compassion for the mortal races. There's nothing to suggest that mating with a "nestmate" (as they refer to each other) is seen as incestuous or abnormal.
• Brought Down to Normal:
  • All Wizards and Clerics lose their powers for a while after the Chaos War. Some picked up Primal Sorcery and Mysticism when they are discovered.
  • The ultimate fate of Paladine and Takhisis when the former gives up his divinity to bring about the final defeat of the latter. Normal here for Takhisis though being the gigantic, five-headed (but still mortal) dragon form she'd been in when Paladine had made his decision.
• Bungling Inventor: This is the racial hat of the Tinker Gnomes. Exactly how they bungle things up is a case of Depending on the Writer; the Hickmans crafted the classic portrayal of obsessives fixated on overly complicating their devices and believing that failure is greater than success, but other portrayals have included a more Absent-Minded Professor depiction.
• Byronic Hero: Raistlin. He's arrogant, ruthless, cynical, emotionally troubled, and ultimately evil. He's also highly intelligent, strong-willed, and capable of extraordinary bravery.

• Canon Discontinuity:
  • The Appendix that was in the hardcover version of Dragons of a Vanished Moon is now considered non-canon.
  • A lot of things are brought out in one novel, only to then be officially banned from continuity in another. Two of the most famous examples; the short story implying that Raistlin was courted by, and fathered a daughter upon, a female Irda (a member of the Ogre race before their fall to Takhisis), and Lord Soth being a Darklord in Ravenloft.
• Can't Hold His Liquor: Raistlin fakes this in Dragons of the Hourglass Mage.
• The Caretaker: Caramon. His name is literally derived from "Caring man."
• Cast from Hit Points: The 5th Edition feat "Adept Of The Black Robes" allows a spellcaster to spend some of their hit dice to inflict extra damage to an enemy that has failed a saving throw against one of the caster's damage-dealing spells.
• Celibate Hero: Raistlin. The annotated version of War of the Twins specifically states, "Raistlin must resist sexual passion in order to preserve his power."
• The Chains of Commanding: Laurana is under great stress while leading the Whitestone Army as the Golden General.
• Chaotic Stupid: Kender can be (and often are) viewed in this light, particularly those whose experience with them comes more from players of the RPG then the actual novels.
• The Chosen One:
  • Goldenmoon is the first mortal chosen by Mishakal to be her Cleric since the Cataclysm. Likewise, Elistan is chosen by Paladine in the same way.
  • Shadow of the Dragon Queen has the Divine Classes (Druids, Paladins, and Clerics) be chosen by one of the gods as one of the first of their class in 300 years. If they aren't Clerics of Mishakal or Paladine, they're that god's first chosen in 300 years.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder:
  • Raistlin is the king of this trope.
    • He betrays his brother, as well as Tanis, Goldmoon, and Riverwind when he saves himself with the dragon orb when they are trapped in the Maelstrom.
    • He betrays the conclave of wizards by switching from Red robes to Black without consulting them.
    • He betrays Ariakas by aiding Tanis in assassinating him.
    • He betrays Takhisis by allowing Berem to seal her away in the abyss by impaling himself on the stone column.
    • He betrays Fistandantilus when he was under his apprenticeship in Istar by turning the tables on him, and using the bloodstone to consume his soul.
    • He betrays Tasslehoff by making him break the magical time traveling device as the fiery mountain is about to fall on Istar, sending him to the Abyss.
    • He betrays Caramon again by promising the Dewar his head in exchange for their help in taking over Pax Tharkas.
    • He betrays Crysania when she has outlived her usefulness to him.
    • He betrays himself when, on the cusp of victory, he is dissuaded by a vision of a dying Bupu, which was symbolic of the last dying shreds of his humanity and empathy. When the vision dissolves, revealing Crysania, he has Caramon take her back through the Portal and stays behind to thwart the Queen.
    • Fortunately, dying cures him of his disorder. He spends the remainder of his appearances (and there are a lot of them) acting for the greater good. Or some odd definition of it. Apparently he's just waiting for Caramon to die so they can go to the next life together, but he shows up an awful lot. "I didn't do it for you mages, I didn't do it for this conclave - I had one debt left and it is paid".: The debt is to magic itself.
  • If Raistlin is the king of this trope his half-sister Kitiara would have to be its queen. In order, she betrayed her mother when she succumbed to magic-induced insanity, Tanis when she used him like a dirty half-elven whore and threw him aside like a dirty dishrag, Sturm Brightblade when she seduced him into breaking his vows of chastity and walked away laughing, her friends when she failed to show up at the Solace Inn after their five year pact, Laurana when she lured her to a false parley and had her kidnapped, Raistlin and Iolanthe when she tried to have them assassinated, Tanis again when she tried to grant Laurana's soul to Lord Soth, Dragon Highlord Ariakas when he was assassinated by Tanis and she made her play for ultimate control of the Dragonarmies, Lord Soth when she allowed Tanis and Laurana to escape, Raistlin again when she had Lord Soth attack Lady Crysania, Dalamar when she literally backstabbed him during his vigil to keep the Portal closed, and finally either Raistlin yet again or the Dark Queen when she invaded Palanthas, depending on who was winning; if Raistlin was winning when he came back through the Portal, she would offer him her army in exchange for power when he became a god, but if he was on the ropes, she had an army ready and waiting to bring down the most powerful archmage of all time in service to her Queen. Quite honestly, when it comes to Kitiara, there are two kinds of people: those who have made it their life's work to slice her open like a halibut, and those she hasn't slept with yet.
• Church Militant: Any church that is devoted to a martial deity like Sargonnas or Kiri-Jolith can be like this, but the last Kingpriest of Istar formed the Knights of the Divine Hammer to eradicate all evil through military force.
• Citadel City: The books enjoy deconstructing this trope. After all, defenses such as stone walls are little good against attacks from dragons...
• Climb, Slip, Hang, Climb: In Dragons of Autumn Twilight, this happens to Goldmoon, who's terribly afraid of heights, when she needs to climb down a vine-encrusted cliff.
• Cloning Splits Attributes: Draconian Measures of the Kang's Regiment subseries introduces the Heart of Dracart which is capable of turning one Draconian into about thirty. The problem is that this is achieved by splitting the Draconian's soul, which causes the individual clones to have a marked loss of such things as willpower, aggressiveness, intellect, magical power, and skill. They also lose their after death attack, as there's not enough magic present to activate the spell. Kang himself observes the resultant clones also look like low res versions of the original, a fact that prevents him from realizing one of his own Draconians was subjected to the process as well. Additionally the cloned Draconians have a marked decrease in vitality, only able to survive for about a thousand days before simply turning to dust. Sadly, this was being used by a mad (and narcissistic) Draconian general in an attempt to stave off his One-Gender Race's eventual extinction, a plan he wanted to move forward with despite Kang finding the other gender.
• Collector of Forms: Sivak Draconians have the power to shapeshift into anyone they've killed, allowing them to sow confusion amongst enemy ranks. They can only hold the form for a short while, but the timer resets if they kill again. Similarly, when they themselves are killed, they shift into the form of the person who killed them before dissolving into a pool of acid.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: As in standard D&D, metallic-colored dragons are universally Good and normal colored ("chromatic") dragons are universally Evil. Sometimes played with in some stories, like one story where a knight slays what he thinks is an evil white dragon, only to find out it was actually an albino silver dragon.
• Color-Coded Wizardry: The three Orders of Magic might as well be the Trope Codifiers as far as Dungeons & Dragons is concerned. Each Order is defined by its philosophy towards magic (which also works out as determining their Character Alignment) and also its magical focus. The White Robes believe in using magic for philanthropic purposes, and so they focus on Abjuration and Divination magics. The Red Robes only really care about magic as a whole, and so focus on Illusion and Transmutation magic, to represent what they consider the most reality-defining attributes of magic. The Black Robes seek to advance magic, whatever the cost, both for its own sake and to make themselves more powerful — as a result, their expertise lies in the most evil of D&D magical schools; Enchantment magic and Necromancy. Their robe colors also honor the patron God of Magic whose teachings they most align with; Solinari of the White Moon, Lunitari of the Red Moon, and Nuitari of the Black Moon.
• Continuity Drift:
  • The Gods of Magic were originally just meant to be power batteries and in Dragons of Autmun Twilight even Raistlin was not aware of the existence of Nuitari. The Gods of Magic later gained personalities and are now full deities.
  • The Lost Chronicles contradicts some stuff established in the original Chronicles in the process of fleshing out plot-lines only briefly touched on in the original books, thanks being written decades latter. A glaring case is the prologue to Dragons of Winter Night where Strum's clash with Tanis over giving the Hammer of Kharas to Thorbardin makes little sense with what Dragons of the Dwarven Depths revealed, namely he'd been in on a scheme with Flint and Raistlin to switch out the Hammer of Kharas for a a fake and regretted his involvement with the scheme after it fell though. Dragons of the Highlord Skies account of Laurana and the Companions' journey to Ice-wall also overrides other material that had been written previously on the topic.
• Continuity Lockout: To just get up to date to the current timeline requires reading fourteen books, three of which are out of print. There are also lots of other novels written by different authors that detail important aspects of the world and its history.
• Continuity Nod: Silvara makes an unnamed appearance in The Legend of Huma: she was the silver dragon ridden by Avondale.
• Continuity Snarl: Multiple things in the setting contradict each other.
  • One of the more well known issues is whether or not Sturm and Kitiara visited Lunitari or not. Some fans say they did, others that they did not. The visit was a crossover with Spelljammer, a setting that WOTC has mostly ignored for years.
  • Trying to piece together exactly what happened in the Third Dragon War can be...challenging. Dragons: The Lost Histories states that the war began when Deathfyre, the sole surviving dragon of the Second Dragon War, dug up his dead comrades' eggs and spread them around the world while posing as a dwarven jewel merchant. In the Legends trilogy, Raistlin states that it started due to the fact that the Towers of High Sorcery used a Portal Network which Takhisis used to trick a Black Robe into setting her free. The events of The Legend of Huma could be taken either way, though they do seem to vaguely reference the latter. The Dragons of a New Age Trilogy offers a third version, claiming that Takhisis sent the Bakali (lizardmen) to hide the chromatic dragons' eggs beneath a mountain range and they grew to maturity in secret underground.
  • In the original version of the timeline, the Second and Third Dragon War were the same event. It can be a bit jarring to read The Elven Nations Trilogy, where they talk about Huma 1000 years before he was born and centuries before Solamnia would even exist!
  • The relationship between White Magic and illusion spells. In Vinas Solamnus, Vinas' army nearly loses a major battle due the fact that the Ergothian rebels' White mages create a powerful Mirror spell that makes the loyalist expedition force massacre each other by making their own soldiers appear as the enemy. But in Dalamar the Dark, the Silvanesti mages, when told that they need to create illusions to make a plan work, protest due to fact that this will require learning Red magic, when Elves are supposed to only use White. Given the millenia between the books, however, it's possible that the White illusion spells were just lost at some point.
• Corrupt Church: The Church of Paladine under the last Kingpriest of Istar became one of these. The Kingpriest himself was a notable aversion, never becoming corrupt in the traditional sense. Of course, things might have been better if he did. We actually see a world where the Kingpriest overthrows the gods in a short story. It's... not pleasant.
• Creator Cameo: Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman show up in the animated movie as background characters.
• Crossover:
  • Dragonlance has had Crossovers with both Spelljammer and Ravenloft. The Tinker Gnomes have a strong presence in Wildspace, and Lord Soth has been to Ravenloft for a while. The setting has never really crossed over with Planescape, possibly because of Dragonlance's ties with the Spelljammer setting in 2E, and in 3.5, the Dragonlance setting has its own cosmology separate from the Great Wheel.
  • Not official canon, but Dalamar made a series of cameo appearances in the "Wizards Three" Dragon Magazine articles by Ed Greenwood, meeting to trade magical secrets, gossip, and junk food with Mordenkainen and Elminster.

• Cthulhumanoid:
  • The Yaggol are Dragonlance's version of Mind Flayers. They live in the Jungles of Taladas and use Mysticism instead of Psionics.
  • The real thing does show up in the short story "Through the Door at the Top of the Sky" A gnome builds a prototype technojammer (a jammer powered by technology rather than magic) and encounters a Mindflayer nautilus ship that follows him back to Krynn. They're never referred to as such, though.
• Curious as a Monkey: The entire Kender race.
• Cursed with Awesome: Wizardry in general, with the Test always asking a steep price.
  • Raistlin's in particular; attaining his magic left him with ruined health, golden skin, white hair, and golden eyes with pupils shaped like hourglasses that see the world and everyone in it perpetually decaying around him.
  • The Test also doubles as a Curse That Cures, the curse being in this case death by failure. Often the Test will find a would-be wizard to be skilled but lacking in some way. The Test will let them live and the wizard will pass, but the Test will find a way (often traumatically) to remove whatever is keeping the applicant from being fully devoted to the study of magic. Justarius, the Master of the Conclave after the War of the Lance, was in his youth a very skilled athlete; his Test left his leg permanently crippled, so that he had to abandon that aspect of his life in favor of full magical study. Other examples include a charming dandy having his face deeply scarred, or a woman deeply desiring of starting a family being left barren. Anything the applicant might prioritize over the magic is fair game to be targeted.
  • Also, Lord Soth: his betrayal of his wife and abandonment of his Gods-given mission left him an immortal undead knight who can terrify even the 'fearless' Kender race and kill people by pointing at them and saying 'Die'. Cool. This is subverted in that, while Soth was miserable as a Deathknight, just about every other 'fallen knight' cursed to become one has enjoyed it immensely. Mostly because they were horribly corrupt to begin with, rather than easily manipulated.
• Damsel out of Distress: Laurana, when put on display as a prisoner before the Council of Highlords in Neraka, breaks free on her own, beating down her Arch-Enemy Kitiara and then setting off an Enemy Civil War as she escapes.
• Dangerous Forbidden Technique: How Wizards view Primal/Wild Sorcery, this is due to the fact that three Sorcerers ended up accidentally creating magical storms that wracked all of Ansalon at the end of the Second Dragon War when they were fighting dragons. Interestingly, these three Sorcerers became the first Wizards after the Gods of Magic taught them High Sorcery so that they would not end up losing control of Primal/Wild Sorcery again.
• Darker and Edgier: This is what the Fifth Age was likely meant to be. The heroes of the Dragons of a New Age trilogy only succeed in stopping the Big Bad's plan, but at the loss of one of their companions. It also marked the first time that a kender's antics directly resulted in getting them killed.
• Dark Is Not Evil: Iolanthe from the Lost Chronicles is a Black Robe Wizard, but she is actually quite nice.

• Dead Guy Junior: Caramon and Tika named one of their sons Sturm. Didn't end well either.
• Deceptive Disciple:
  • Raistlin. After having gained power and knowledge from the ghost of the undead evil archwizard Fistandantilus, Raistlin became the next Master of Past and Present. He then traveled into the past to usurp all of Fistandantilus' powers by going back to a time when the man was still mortal and posing as one of Fistandantilus' own apprentices. When Fistandantilus tried to suck out Raistlin's lifeforce and take over the young man's body to extend his own life (as he used to do with his apprentices), Raistlin killed Fistandantilus instead and took his place in history.
  • Dalamar also made a career out of betraying Raistlin, his master. Of course, Raistlin knew about it the whole time.
• Defeat Equals Explosion: Both Aurak and Bozak Draconians explode when they die.
• Defector from Decadence: The Irda are an entire race of them, having defected away from the high ogre race: just before the ogres devolved into the big, dumb, ugly brutes they are today.
• Defensive Feint Trap: The Blue Dragonarmy uses this to wipe out Derek Crownguard's troops at the High Clerist's Tower. Later on Laurana returns the favor by using the same tactic to crush the Dragonarmies at the Battle of Margaard Ford.
• Depending on the Writer: This can cause very different portrayals of members of different races. Elves, for example can be portrayed as being vegetarian in one book, and having no problem with eating meat in another.
  • The world can also either be depicted as being a gritty medieval one, to being about as gritty as a Renaissance Festival.
  • Fistandantilus is portrayed by Weis and Hickman as sneering and humorless, but he's a snarky Magnificent Bastard in Chris Pierson's Kingpriest Trilogy. Probably justified in that the Fistandantilus Weis and Hickman usually show is the undead version who made a deal with Raistlin- his, er, situation at the time would have had him a little stressed.
  • Likewise Weis and Hickman depict Toede as a bootlicking and pompous cowardly buffoon while Jeff Grubb wrote him as a cunning schemer and fast talker who also has a good line in snark (though he is still a coward).
  • Another very noticeable one concerns gnomes and their building abilities. The gnomes in books by Weis and Hickman talk extremely fast, are completely incapable of building anything that functions even remotely correct (except in special cases, such as Gnimsh), and all have names beginning with "gn". On the other hand, gnomes in Paul B. Thompson and Tonya Cook's Darkness and Light talk normally, are excellent inventors and buildings who are experts in their field of practice, and have names describing what they do, such as "Cutwood" and "Roperig". The differences in gnomes might make one think that they're two completely different races.
• Determinator: Huma. His eventual heroic death bordered on the Rasputinian.
  Takhisis: You still live! What does it take to kill you? You are only mortal!
  Huma: I belong to Paladine. I belong to Gwyneth. Neither will ever let you have me.
• Did You Just Flip Off Cthulhu?: Atta (A dog) bites Chemosh (The god of Death) in the ankle in the Dark Disciple trilogy.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?:
  • When Raistlin kills all of the gods in the alternate future.
  • The Kingpriest also does this in an alternate universe short story entitled "There Is Another Shore, You Know...Upon The Other Side" in which he absorbs the power of all of the deities of Krynn. The deities now reside on the mortal plane, stripped of their power, but unable to die. They are tortured by the Godking's followers: Zeboim, the Goddess of the Sea, for instance, is tied to the back of a boat and dragged along the water almost drowning all the time, but unable to die. And the three moons have been replaced with a single, all-seeing eye.
  • Huma Dragonslayer assaults Tahkisis with nothing more than a broken Dragonlance... and wins without aid from an immortal. Raistlin is the only other mortal to even attempt this. This leads to him being resurrected as a Steel Dragon (Paladine's personal entourage in the afterlife) in the RPGA 3.5 Edition Dragonlance setting of Dungeons & Dragons.
• Dinky Drivers : Tasslehoff runs into this problem when he tries to control the flying citadel: the captain's chair (which allows someone to mentally direct the citadel's movement) is just too big for him. (Un)luckily, there's a gully dwarf nearby ready to help...
• Disappointing Promotion: Sturm Brightblade has been masquerading as a Knight of the Rose (the highest level of a Knights of Solamnia) since his first appearance, wearing his father's armour to sell the illusion. ^note  Part of the reason he did so was because the order itself had taken to hiding out in their various castles rather than going out and doing good, and he didn't want the order's Heroic Legacy to die out He's finally knighted for real by a member of the order shortly before a major battle against the forces of Takhsis, but it's an extremely unpopular decision amongst the other members and is done with the bare minimum of ceremony. ^note  When he dies gallantly in battle, his friend Laurana harangues the remaining knights because while they clung to the ceremony of being knights, Sturm actually went out and acted like one.
• Disciplines of Magic: Being based off of Dungeons & Dragons, the setting has the traditional arcane schools of White, Black, and Red magic, and said wizards become known respectively as White Robes, Black Robes, and Red Robes, each influenced by a different moon of Krynn's. There is also clerical (divine) magic derived from whatever god you're currently backing. There were other minor forms of magic, but the two that rose to prominence after the War of Souls were Wyld Magic (magic that was powerful but unpredictable) and Death Magic (magic gained with the help of dead souls gathering it up for the caster). The different Robes have been known to seek out and destroy wizards who are not one of the Robes.
• Disk-One Final Boss: Verminaard in Dragons of Autumn Twilight. He is presented throughout the book as the chief commander of the Dragonarmies. It is only after he is defeated that the heroes learn that he was only the commander assigned to their particular region, and that there are at least four other armies that have launched invasions in other parts of Ansalon.
• Distress Ball: Laurana gets stuck with this in Dragons of Spring Dawning when after having previously been shown as a brilliant military commander she suddenly and inexplicablycompletely falls for Kitiara's rather obvious trap.
• Distressed Damsel- Laurana after being captured by Kitiara. Though it is partially subverted in that she does end up largely escaping on her own.

• Does This Remind You of Anything?: The Disks of Mishikal bear a strong resemblance to the Mormon Golden Plates, which is not unsurprising given the author's religion.
• Door Stopper: The Annotated versions of both Chronicles and Legends.
• Downer Ending:
  • The ending of Dragons of Winter Night, when Sturm dies.
  • Also the ending to Dragons of a Lost Star, when not only Laurana and Goldmoon die, but the entire city of Qualinost literally has a dragon fall on top of it, causing the nearby river to flood the whole place, turning it into a "Lake of Death". But on the other hand, you get to blame the whole thing on Mina and/or Takhisis!
• Draconic Humanoid: The Draconians are a race of draconic humanoid that start off Always Chaotic Evil, and usually appear as some variety of mook (either regular or improved, depending on the story) for the dragonarmies. They have five subraces, Baaz, Kapak, Aurak, Bozak and Sivak. All the races have scales of different color. Other differences between them include whether they turn to stone, dissolve into acid or explode after death. In Dragons of Spring Dawning, Gilthanas and Silvara find out they are created by corrupting eggs of actual dragons with dark magic.

• Dreaming of Things to Come: The Silvanesti dream that the companions share foreshadows future events in the story.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him:
  • Most of the deaths of the original Heroes. The character mentioned in Downer Ending above is killed in a noble Heroic Sacrifice that perfectly suited his character, but that doesn't always happen. The others? SPOILERS AHEAD:Flint's sudden heart attack, Tanis getting stabbed in the back by a random Mook just after recognizing Steel as Sturm's son, Laurana and most of Qualinost literally having a dragon so huge that she frequently ate other dragons dropped on them, and Goldmoon has the life drained out of her by Takhisis after she defies the goddess.
  • On the other hand (or not) Caramon and Tika pass away peacefully of old age. And right before Caramon goes, he realizes that something is terribly wrong and makes a Last Request to Gerard that sets him and others on the path to making it right. Raistlin decides not to usurp Takhisis' godhood after seeing the terrible future that would come to pass if he did, and ends up in a magical sleep for most of the rest of his life (waking up and visiting Krynn a few times to make things more interesting). Tasslehoff gets stepped on by Chaos, but manages to cut his foot a split second before that, which allows the heroes to get the drop of Chaos' blood required to defeat him. Riverwind is mortally wounded while fighting in Kendermore, but his actions buy enough time for a lot of kender to escape the dragon Malystryx.
• Dumb Muscle: Caramon in Chronicles. Less so in Legends. An interesting example in that throughout the Legends trilogy, he is shown thinking things through quite thoroughly and logically, showing that he's a perfectly intelligent person but only appears dumb next to his genius brother. Since they are usually joined at the hip, Caramon ends up taking a mental back seat to Raistlin, and since he never has to speak up whenever there's a dilemma at hand, this led to most of the party, especially Raistlin himself, having a low opinion of his intellect. Eventually, Caramon came to believe it, too. A large amount of his Character Development deals with him realizing that he can think for himself without using his brother as a crutch.
• Early-Bird Cameo: In Kaz the Minotaur, it's established that the glowing green orb that the rogue wizard Galen Dracos used to summon Takhisis to the mortal plane to battle Huma in The Legend of Huma had a mysterious power from beyond even the Abyss. What was this power called? Chaos. This took place five years in real-world time before Dragons of Summer Flame had Chaos waking up and attempting to destroy Krynn.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: The early years of the setting had some oddities because not everything about how the setting worked had been worked out yet. So, in some instances readers can see references to "Drow", which do not exist on Krynn (Ansalonian Dark Elves are Elves who have been banished from their homeland, not dark-skinned elves who live underground). Exactly how many wars Takhisis and her dragons waged to try and conquer Krynn before Huma banished her also took some time to pin down; the novel The Dragons eventually confirmed Huma's war as the Third Dragon War.
• Earth All Along: The dark future portrayed in the Legends Trilogy, created after Raistlin destroys all of the other gods and is left to devour himself over an ash-choked wasteland, having no power to create anything new. Caramon and Tasselhoff think they've been stranded in another world until they discover the ruins of their hometown, complete with the Caramon's own skeletal corpse lying in front of Tika's gravestone. Fun for all the family!

• Elite Mooks: It's implied in the Dragonlance prequel books that the mentally limited white dragon are treated like this in the dragon army.
• The Empire:
  • The Dragon Highlords (early on) and the Knights of Neraka. Also the Minotaur empire.
  • On a more historical basis, Ergoth was a large and highly oppressive empire before Vinas Solamnus' rebellion reduced it to a vestige of its former power.
  • By the time of the Cataclysm, Istar had become an empire that stretched across most of Ansalon and had wiped out all but a few scattered strongholds of resistance.
  • The Taladas continent had the Aurim Empire, which unlike the civilizations of Ansalon, had been the sole major power of the continent since time immemorial. The empire was destroyed when the Cataclysm exited out the opposite side of Krynn from Istar and created a gigantic inland sea of magma. The spirit of Maladar, the last emperor of Aurim, attempted to use the power of Hith (Hiddukel) and his own mastery of dark magic to raise the empire during the Taladas Trilogy but he was foiled.
• Enemy Civil War: The battle between the Dragon Highlords at the end of Dragons of Spring Dawning, a foretaste of which can also be found in the prequel Dragons of the Highlord Skies.
• Enemy Mine:
  • Raistlin's post Face–Heel Turn intervention at the end of Dragons of Spring Dawning. He enables Tanis's assassination of Ariakas and helps Berem to seal the temple stone, preventing Takhisis from entering the world, so he can go forward with his own master plan of becoming a god.
  • This also occurs when the Knights of Solamnia and the Knights of Takhisis team up during the Chaos War to fight off Chaos.
  • Also at the end of the Third Dragonwar the Black Robes ally with Huma and the Knights of Solamnia when it becomes apparent Takhisis intends to replace them with Galan Dracos and his cabal of renegades. Their first loyalty is to Nuitari after all, not Takhisis.
• Enemy to All Living Things: In the Kingpriest trilogy, Fistandantilus is shown to have a constant aura of darkness around him. Another character notices that the air becomes colder when he is nearby, plants wither, and animals die.
• Establishing Character Moment: Raistlin's intro in Dragons of Autumn Twilight is a great example. He is sitting in a dark corner of the Inn with his hood over his head. When he greets his friends, his appearance is startling to them due to his gold skin and hourglass eyes. It's worth noting that Stephen King and R.A. Salvatore have claimed that the character introductions of Dragons of Autumn Twilight is the greatest opening to any novel made after either H. P. Lovecraft or J. R. R. Tolkien in SF/Fantasy.
• Eternal English: "Common" doesn't seem to change at all over 300 years and characters from different times in the Legends trilogy make no comment on having to try to understand each other.
• Everybody's Dead, Dave: Done remarkably well in Test of the Twins when Caramon jumps forward through time into the future Krynn, after his brother has ascended to godhood.
• Evil-Detecting Dog: Rhys' dog, Atta, can sense if somebody is a Beloved of Chemosh. When she does she begins growling and barking, and will attack them if they don't back off.
• Evil Matriarch - The Dark Queen Takhisis, a tyrannical evil Goddess, (usually) the Big Bad, and appearing in a variety of forms: including an ominous, armoured Dark Lord, a voluptuous raven-haired seductress, and an apocalyptically-huge five-headed dragon with one head representing each of the evil dragon races. She also rules the Abyss, is the mother of all the evil dragons, the instigator of the War Of The Lance and the two great dragon wars preceding it, the creator of the Draconians, Ogres, and other evil races, and The Chessmaster behind Mina's rise to power.
• Evil Sorcerer: Fistandantilus. And Raistlin after his Face–Heel Turn. There are tons of others, this being a fantasy book series with over 200 novels.
• Evil Will Fail: One of the main themes of the setting is that evil often fails because of its own inherent flaws.
  • Takhisis does end up learning from her mistakes, however; after the War Of The Lance she looks for servants who are Lawful Evil and are thus not prone to the Chronic Backstabbing Disorder that derailed her plans the first time. It works out better and actually results in her taking over the entirety of Krynn. Fortunately for all of the mortals living there, she eventually gets her comeuppance.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: The Saga is called 'Dragonlance'. Every so often there is this weapon mentioned in the series called a 'Dragonlance'. The Final Jeopardy answer is, this is what type of weapon it is and this is what creature it should be used to fight. It's a tough one, I know. Don't hurt yourself. We'll wait.
  • For a bonus, guess the race of Tanis Half-Elven.
• Exact Words: At the end of The Legend of Huma, Huma forces the Dragonqueen to swear by the Highgod to take her dragon children and leave Krynn. She swears to do so and never to return "so long as the world is whole". Then the Cataclysm happened...
• Expy: Drow don't exist on Krynn but in The Dargonesti a breakaway civilisation of sea elves led by a mad queen functionally occupy a similar narrative role.
• Faint in Shock: In the novel, Dragons of Winter Night, the elven princess Laurana faints at a public banquet after her father calls her a whore, and her older brother gives her a "The Reason You Suck" Speech.
• Fake Faint: In Dragons of Spring Dawning, when the elven princess Laurana is threatened with rape by the Dragonarmy officer Bakaris, she pretends to faint, and then when he moves in to catch her, punches him hard in the stomach.
• Fake Wizardry: There was a funny variant on this in the series... during Raistlin's time-traveling tutelage under the Great Big Bad Evil Wizard Fistandantilus. At one point, he and several other apprentices are asked to demonstrate their magical proficiency in a room heavily warded with anti-magic - allowing them to rattle off the right incantations without actually blowing anything up.
  
  That is, until Raistlin shows off by producing an actual fireball along with his incantations. Everyone is terribly impressed, since it seems like he's managed to break through wards set up by Fistandantilus himself, but as it turns out, it was all just sleigh of hand - he palmed a small alchemical firecracker and threw it to coincide with his spell. A skill hailing back to before he learned actual magic, when he practiced stage-magic for kicks. (Those skills also turn out to be very, very important later on, but that's another story.)
• Fallen Princess: Laurana lost all standing with her people and was disinherited by her father after she ran away from home to chase after Tanis.

• Fantastic Race Weapon Affinity: Kenders use hoopaks (think of a pointy staff with a slingshot on the top), minotaurs are proud of using weapons like katars and shatangs (a type of one-handed spear), and Nerakian warriors (evil humans) prefers scimitars.
• Fantastic Racism: Most every race hates another race. Minotaurs hate everyone, Kender are universally despised, Dwarves don't trust Elves, Elves look down on everyone, etc...
• Fantasy Gun Control: Theoretically, the tinker gnomes could easily invent working guns, but they don't, because, well, they're pretty much incompetent bunglers as a rule. And because they're the only ones who have really mastered technology, other races are put off of the idea of learning it.
  • In a short story called "Boom", a gnome actually invents an atomic bomb. It is quite blatantly thus, too, being fuelled by the splitting of the fundamental particles of reality (which he calls "atomies") and with it being mentioned that an area in which it detonates will be rendered barren and lifeless for several human generations. His fellow gnomes thought that this idea sounded so dangerous that they confiscated and tried to bury all his research. Driven mad by this, he built an atomic handgrenade and tried to offer it to a Dragon Highlord. Between questioning just how they would be able to actually use the thing and quailing at the sheer destructive potential it held, the Highlord refused, ultimately hiding the bomb away in the impenetrable mountains and sending the creator into slavery.
• Fate Worse than Death:

• While awaiting his execution, Vinas Solamnus was tortured by Stygia's minons to an extent that would have broken most people's sanity, i.e. having rats devour his entrails only to be healed instantly by the priests so that he could suffer it over and over.
• Debatable. Soth himself is thoroughly miserable being a Death Knight, and for added lulz, the gods cursed the Elven women who manipulated him into killing his wife with undeath as well and Soth makes a habit of wallowing in his misery by forcing them to endlessly recite the entire tale over and over again.
• At the end of Test of the Twins Raistlin almost had this happen to him, but because of his Heroic Sacrifice Paladine saved him from Takhisis' eternal torment.
• Kitiara's plan for the captured Laurana: To have her tortured and then made into the undead bride of Lord Soth.

• Fearless Fool: Kenders. At least until Malystryx burned Kenderhome to cinders. A lot of the survivors became "Afflicted", which made them morose, nervous and paranoid. It's not entirely clear whether being Afflicted is purely psychological or partly magical.
• Fictional Constellations: The gods each have their own constellation in the night sky - Paladine's is a platinum dragon, Reorx's is a hammer, and Takhisis's is a multiheaded dragon, for example. When a god is active on Krynn, their constellation vanishes from the sky. In the bad future where Raistin defeated the gods to take a place among them, his new constellation (an hourglass) was dominant in the sky, pushing the constellations of the remaining gods aside.
• Fictionary: The language of magic, which is based off of Indonesian's grammatical structure. However, most of the actual words are just gibberish.
• Final Solution: One reason the Cataclysm happened is the Kingpriest had become so radical in his Knight Templar insanity that he desired to become a god and wipe out everything he deemed evil. Which in this case, included any species not directly created by the Gods of Good.
• The Final Temptation: The Sword of Tears works on Huma's ego, initially convincing him that it will let him defeat the Dragonqueen and the making him fantasize about using it to gain personal power. Huma rejects the sword when it tries to force him to kill an innocent who refuses to allow him to pass while he carries it, but will not defend himself. Overcoming the sword is the final test he must pass to be worthy of the Dragonlance.
• Flat-Earth Atheist: In an interesting example, Chemosh the God of Death, and the one who watches as souls pass out of Krynn, encourages his followers to preach that there is no afterlife and that Undeath is the only way to become immortal. He is lying, but he still gets some people to believe in him.
• Flaw Exploitation:
  • Kitiara does this to Laurana in Dragons of Spring Dawning. By using Laurana's love of Tanis, Kit tricks her into being captured by Lord Soth.
  • Raistlin is quite skilled at this, most notably when he uses Crysania's unacknowledged arrogance and ambition to make her go along with his Evil Plan.
• Florence Nightingale Effect: Silvara and Gilthanas first start falling in love when she first helps him heal.
• For Science!: This is pretty much the main motivation for any Tinker Gnome.

• Formula-Breaking Episode: Lord Toede was a Blackadder-like comedy about the eponymous minor villain who had been previously killed and had later returned.
• Four-Star Badass: Laurana as the Golden General.
• Freudian Excuse: Raistlin's childhood is responsible for him becoming the main antagonist of the Twins Trilogy.
• Friendly Enemy: White Robe and Black Robe Wizards can find themselves on opposite sides of a conflict, but will gladly talk about magic if they are both in a Tower of High Sorcery.
• Frying Pan of Doom: One of Tika's more memorable scenes in the original Chronicles, when she bashed in a Draconian's skull with a large - not to mention hot off the stove - cast iron skillet. Her stat blocks in the 3.5 editions of the roleplaying supplements list her primary weapon as "Iron Skillet. (Treat as Heavy Mace)".

• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • Dragonlance is based off of Dungeons & Dragons, in which there are spells that can cure any illness or even resurrect the dead. Characters in novels almost never consider trying to resurrect a character who has died, although it can be justified, especially in times when Clerical magic is not around. Diseases often end up simply being incurable, even by a powerful Cleric. It is sometimes averted, such as when the Kingpriest of Istar resurrects a recently dead character, but it is generally played straight. Of course, most uses of this trope are for Rule of Drama. This is actually justified ingame as well, Dragonlance is a low magic setting so it might be possible that the only character high level enough to be capable of resurrecting a character was the Kingpriest (and indeed, in-universe the fact that the Kingpriest was capable of performing a resurrection was considered proof that he was The Chosen One).
  • Dragonlance Adventures from AD&D openly states that resurrection magic is almost unknown except to the highest-level clerics. It's stated in the modules that Chemosh has repeatedly tried to remove knowledge of resurrection from Krynn itself - so successfully that the only location of any "Anti-Death Magic" (as it's colloquially known) is in the tomes of Fistandantilus and the Platinum Disks of Mishakal. The only problem with using it is it holds the exact same penalties as a Wish spell — the caster ages five years and five days of becoming comatose, a loss of one constitution point to the recipient, a loss of a level and the inability to restore those abilities without the Restoration spell... which is only in Fistandantilus' books and Mishakal's disks. The spells are also moved from Level four (which is already a High-Level Campaign level) to Level six — the highest level of magic usable outside of The Night of The Eye. It's been stated that at that level you're already close to becoming a demigod under the Dragonlance rules: Raistlin, for example, was a 13th-level magic-user when he attempted to usurp Tahkisis. This changes somewhat in the 3rd Edition setting updates, as stats and levels for characters such as Raistlin, Fistandantilus, and others are updated to 20+ to more properly reflect their abilities and importance, as well as to make their exploits more feasible from a gameplay standpoint.
  • In the annotated versions of the original trilogy, the authors sometimes remark on phrases they wrote where they could "hear the dice rattling in the background" when they read them. For example, when they talk about a group of people in an inn who are "dressed like rangers", clearly meant to invoke images of the character class, but to a non-gamer reader would interpret as all rangers having a uniform dress code.
  • Averted when it comes to arcane magic-users, most notably Raistlin. D&D makes heavy used of the Vancian Magic system, and this carries over to the books, when he struggles to learn advanced spells, even when he has the proper spellbook in front of him, as well as having a limited amount of spells per day and needing to reread his own books in order to replenish his supply. One notable example of this trope is that in the books, memorizing a spell explicitly allows you to cast that spell only once before it vanishes from your memory and you have to re-read your spellbook to memorize. Even in the 1st edition rules, however, a character can memorize the same spell multiple times. It seems like the authors were trying to come up with a less wonky explanation for spell memorization.
  • This has actually bit the tabletop game in the butt quite hard as the game evolved. The books were heavily influenced by the 1st Edition rules, and there are a number of times where the characters describe concepts tied to the game rules, like the above-mentioned Vancian system, or Wizards being limited to use only daggers as weapons. However, as the game went through subsequent editions, the campaign world either had to severely limit normal player options (many new Classes were disallowed or heavily nerfed) or the setting had to awkwardly retcon some of these elements into the story. For example, the setting goes out of its way to show that most magic by mortals is heavily regulated by the Towers of High Sorcery and only Wizards who pass the tests are allowed to cast anything but basic spells, later editions have almost every class possessing an option to gain magical abilities through one way or another.

• Genre Turning Point: Dragonlance was TSR's first attempt to go beyond a simple Dungeon Crawl and create a plotline reminiscent of epic fantasy novels, with the fate of the world at stake. And speaking of novels, it was the also the first instance of tie-in novels for a game setting.
• Giant Foot of Stomping: Chaos stomps Tasslehoff at the end of Dragons of Summer Flame.
• Girls with Moustaches: Female dwarves have "sidewhiskers" or beards that are less full than those of male dwarves. Male dwarves seem to find this attractive.
• Gladiator Games:
  • Caramon is forced to become a Gladiator in Time of the Twins.
  • Very prominent in many of Richard A. Knaak's books involving the Minotaur empires.

• God-Emperor: The last Kingpriest, Beldinas Pilofiro tried this but it didn't work out so well for him.
• God Save Us from the Queen!: Queen Uriona, the insane monarch of the sea elves in The Dargonesti. She's a ruthless megalomaniac who considers herself literally a goddess and dreams of conquering the surface elves. She is also a Karma Houdini.
• Godhood Seeker: Raistlin Majere, Fistandantilus, Galan Dracos, Beldinas Pilifiro, Malystryx.
• Gods Need Prayer Badly: Downplayed; the gods do not need people to believe in them to survive, but getting active worship does give them more direct influence over the mortal plane.
• God Was My Co-Pilot: Fizban turns out to be Paladine.
• Godzilla Threshold:
  • In the short story ''There is Another Shore You Know, Upon the Other Side," an alternate version of Krynn where Istar never fell is ruled by the Godking, the Kingpriest having ascended and stolen the power of all the gods. The protagonists from the normal version of Krynn, witnessing how he has committed genocide against dragons, Irda, and kender (with many others in-progess), subjected the depowered gods to a Fate Worse than Death, enslaved and conquered every nation/continent and has sealed off all of the exits to Krynn's crystal sphere, decide they have only one option that might improve things: Summon Chaos by breaking the Graygem.
  • The Cataclysm was also this, as the gods tried many other options (including the 13 Warnings and sending Lord Soth and other heroes), and they all failed, so chucking the flaming mountain at the Kingpriest's face was the only way to stop the above from happening.
• Goggles Do Something Unusual: Tasslehoff's magical glasses allow him to read the words of any language.
• Good is Not Nice: Metallic Dragons have a strong tendency to be this. Duranix from The Barbarians Trilogy is an especially good example. He has no problem with meting out harsh punishments to those who have committed crimes.
• Götterdämmerung: Twice; once in the Back Story, when the gods agree to leave the world alone in the wake of the Cataclysm, and once when Takhisis steals the world from all the other gods and tricks the mortals into believing the gods abandon the world altogether after the Chaos War.
• Grand Theft Me: Fistandantilus would steal the bodies of one of his apprentices. He was tricked by Raistlin during the ritual to steal Raistlin's body and was instead absorbed by Raistlin.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Takhisis may also take this role in books like the Kingpriest Trilogy where she's alive and plotting, but not directly active. The Biggest Bad in the whole 'verse is Chaos, but mercifully he's only been active during the Chaos War.

• The Greatest Story Never Told: Subverted. One of the big lines for writing stories featuring the original characters from the first trilogy is taking up mentioned events or questions about what happened to various characters off-screen. Want to know what happened to Sturm and Kitiara when they went off together after the first meeting of the Heroes of the Lance? Want to know how and why Flint was captured by gulley dwarves? How Flint and Tanis met Tasslehof Burrfoot? There are novels answering all of these.
• Green-Eyed Epiphany: Tanis only realizes he still has feelings for Laurana after seeing her become close to Elistan.
• Grey-and-Grey Morality: Minotaur Wars trilogy begins as this, with sympathetic motives and actions on both sides. After Nephera and Ardnor try and murder Bastion and actually murder Hotak and Faros encounters Sargonnas it becomes pretty clear who the good guys are and who the villains are but one sympathetic character remains on the 'evil' side till the end.
• Grim Up North: Inverted, at least on Ansalon, it is Grim Down South, where Icewall is located. The northernmost land, Nordmaar^note A bit of a non-indicative name if there ever was one is a tropical jungle. This makes sense as Ansalon is in the southern hemisphere of Krynn.

H — N

• Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: Laurana at the start of the series, though as the War of the Lance progresses she loses her naivety and eventually becomes a Four-Star Badass.
• Half-Human Hybrid: Humans can crossbreed with many races on Krynn. In addition to the Dungeons & Dragons classic, the Half-Elf, and the somewhat less-common but still well-known Half-Ogre, mentions in the various novels have been made to Half-Dwarves, Half-Kender, Half-Goblins and Half-Gnomes.
  • The "Preludes" novel Kendermore, set before the Companions meet up again at the start of the first book, has a Half-Orc, despite Orcs not existing on Krynn. Also, a rather lusty she-dwarf temporarily falls in love with said half-orc, at least until she realises that he's a cold, cruel, ruthless assassin... and ends up killing her. However, later in the book they meet up with an unusually friendly ogre who's the one to identify the assassin as a half-orc (it wasn't something he admitted himself) claiming "I know my own species". Possibly Mary Kirchoff, the author of Kendermore, assumed "orc" could be used interchangeably with "ogre" on Krynn, considering that Krynn ogres are considerably different from the fantasy standard.
• Handicapped Bad Ass:
  • Golgren, who only has one hand, but is a very capable fighter.
  • Steeltoe (another half-ogre, a human/ogre hybrid) has (surprise surprise) a peg leg made of steel, which he uses as an extra weapon. He gives a fully-functioning, gladiator-mode Caramon a major run for his money.
• Hard Work Hardly Works: Coryn Brinewater from the novel Wizards's Conclave very quickly masters High Sorcery to the point that she is only just below Dalamar(who is currently the most powerful Black Robed Wizard, and had to study for decades to get to where he was) in terms of power. She caused a lot of divisiveness amongst the fandom as it had previously been established that High Sorcery took years and even decades to even begin to get skilled at it, and Coryn masters it in about six months. She WAS a user of Primal Sorcery before she became a Wizard, but she was only a little skilled at it.
  • In fact, when it came time to convene the Conclave and elect new leadership, Coryn was made Master of the White Robes. She protested at this, claiming that she had a legitimate claim at being Master of the Conclave after coming out of her Test strengthened, rather than handicapped. The remainder of the Conclave disagreed, as her previous use of Primal Sorcery had left her tainted in their eyes, and despite her promises, they could never be sure she wouldn't fall back on using it in the future. Being made the Head of her order was the best they could do, and they flat out told her that she had no chance whatsoever of being made Head of the Conclave and that she should be happy with the position she has.
• Harmless Lady Disguise: In Dragons of Autumn Twlight, the male heroes disguise themselves as women to infiltrate the slave-mine Pax Tharkas. This causes some issues for Riverwind whose people have a cultural taboo about males dressing in female clothing.
• Have You Seen My God?: Happens several times throughout the timeline. The first was after the Cataclysm; the gods weren't actually gone, but the mortals believed they were. Second, the companions notice during the War of the Lance that the constellations of Takhisis and Paladine are missing from the sky. Third, after the conclusion of the Chaos War, the gods are missing because Takhisis stole the world and shrouded it from the other gods, so that she would be the one and only god on Krynn.
• Head-Turning Beauty:
  • Laurana. The first time the Companions see her they are completely mesmerized and can do nothing but stare at her and babble on about how she is the most beautiful woman they have ever seen. Even Raistlin is affected by her beauty. Later on her Arch-Enemy, Kitiara, can do nothing but bitterly complain about how everyone raves about Laurana's beauty.
  • Many characters notice Silvara is extremely attractive, which is actually an annoyance for her since she doesn't want to stand out she usually purposedly stays covered in layers of grime and filth to downplay this, with limited success. And while she's Silver Dragon and thus a Voluntary Shapeshifting she actually can't take a form that isn't considered attractive by whatever species she shapeshifts into. Her body as Arlena Plata is the closest she got to a normal human woman, after years of practicing and she's still considered far above average.
• Hellish Pupils: Raistlin's hourglass-shaped pupils.
• Hermetic Magic: Used often in the novels, even though the world is officially under Vancian Magic. Authors like to use this type of magic because it is easy to justify whatever magical effect they need to happen for the story.
• Heroic Bastard: Tanis Half-Elven is the product of a Human Warrior raping his Elven Mother.
• Heroic Lineage: Silvara's the sister of Heart / Gwynyth, the silver dragon who was the lover of Huma Dragonbane. Ironically Silvara herself ends up falling in love with a mortal.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • Sturm Brightblade performs a heroic sacrifice in Dragons of Winter Night when he buys the Knights time to activate the Lost Superweapon, which resulted in his death, and giving the Knighthood an example to strive for, pulling them from their slide into corruption.
  • Raistlin also fits here at the end of the Legends trilogy. He sacrifices his own life in order to save his brother, Crysania, and the rest of Krynn from Takhisis entering their world.
  • And Tasslehoff, who sacrifices himself, allowing a drop of Chaos's blood to be captured in the Greygem, sealing him away and ending the Chaos war.
  • In "By The Measure" in Love and War, a single exhausted Knight of Solamnia takes on an entire Dragonarmy, is captured, withstands three days of torture, demands death by combat with the army's general, puts up a remarkably good fight, and finally drops dead: of plague, which proceeds to wipe out almost the entire army in the following four days.
  • Word of God from the Annotated Edition of the original trilogy was that Flint's death by heart attack was a specific aversion of this trope. They wanted to show that a hero doesn't have to die in battle but can live a good long life and die naturally. He was even given a noble send off in honor of how he lived, not how he died.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: Kang and Slith, Kang even lampshades it in his thoughts. Caramon probably wanted to have this sort of relationship with Raistlin, but it did not turn out that way because of Raistlin's ambitions in the Dragonlance Legends Trilogy.
• Hidden Depths: Laurana is initially regarded as just a Brainless Beauty but when tested by war she proves to be a skilled warrior and great leader.
• High-Altitude Battle: Any battle between Dragonriders. Battles on the Flying Citadels too.

• Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act: Humans, Elves, and Ogres cannot alter the past while time traveling. As for Other races: In the Legends trilogy, Par-Salian goes over the extensive set of instructions that goes along with the time travel spell they plan to use on Caramon. It includes a very stern warning that time travel cannot be used to alter history to prevent the Cataclysm, something which has been learned at great loss of life.

• Hobbits: The Kender are basically your traditional D&D halflings, but defined by Curious as a Monkey tendencies combined with a pathological inability to feel fear and a naïve and innocently poor grasp of the concept of personal property - a stereotypical Kender will rifle through your bags and pick your pockets to stave off boredom and then be genuinely hurt and offended when you accuse them of being thieves. Canonically they are treated as a Chaotic Good race and their manic kleptomania is treated as almost childlike curiosity from a position of not knowing any better, which is why killing them is treated with the same moral gravity as child murder. Saying "I'm going to roll a Kender!" is an insta-ban offence in many tabletop groups. After the world was nearly destroyed by the Chaos War, some Kender became "Afflicted"; effectively suffering from race-wide psychological trauma, they lost their immunity to fear and kleptomania and became sullen and paranoid to a degree that seemed disturbing for other races.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: In the Ogre Titans trilogy, a group of freed Elven prisoners maul to death an Ogre Titan (who was holding them prisoner) who is helpless, but he is only helpless because he tried to attack them after being forced to free them by other characters. One of the other characters put a medallion on the Titan that would make his spells backfire on him if he tried to harm anyone.
• Holding Out for a Hero: Silvara is actually a silver dragon living in secret amongst the elves, trying to assist mortals in secret to maintain the Metallic dragons Oath of Neutrality. She's constantly on the watch for those with the courage to stand up to the dragonarmies so she may assist them by imparting them with the secret of forging the dragonlances. She promptly inserts herself into Laurana's party when she finds out they have been fighting in the war and have both a broken dragonlance and a dragon orb.
• Honor Before Reason: The Knights of Solamnia. And how! Their absurdly strict code of honor for dictating their every action was criticized numerous times throughout the setting, and they could spend hours debating over the most minute of clauses in the Oath and Measure, to the point where they are utterly bewildered when someone made an action that wasn't dictated by it. These problems were partially rectified when Lord Gunther released a revised Measure (the knighthood's code of laws) that was far more flexible in how it dealt with certain protocol, ironically taking a page from the Knights of Takhisis, who steamrolled across Ansalon in a matter of weeks due to a unity in purpose and became surprisingly tolerated in occupied lands due to their stern-but-fair brand of justice and ability to (sometimes literally) cut through red tape. But before then, literally centuries went by where a vast majority of the knighthood's higher offices were vacant due to a requirement in the Measure that a minimum number of knights be present to vote in candidates. But the Measure never took into account that in the wake of the Cataclysm, such a quorum didn't exist. So the knighthood could not elect new leaders because of an unfeasible requirement of the Measure, but could not alter the Measure because there existed no provisions within the Measure for it to be altered. The knighthood's darkest hour came when their final stronghold was under siege by the dragonarmies and the various faction heads continued to struggle for the leadership under parliamentarian points of order.
• How Do I Shot Web?: It took a little while for the wielders of Mysticism and Primal Sorcery to get the hang of how to use it.
• Hyperspace Is a Scary Place: In the Age of Dreams, the Wizard Conclave created five portals to link the five Towers of High Sorcery. Unfortunately, in creating an extraplanar means of rapid transit between them, they also unknowingly created a link to the Abyss. Takhisis, never one to miss an opportunity to come into the world, gave a black-robed mage a dream in which she told him that she was a beautiful woman trapped in another plane and that he was the only one who could save her. He fell for it completely. Ever wonder how the Third Dragon War that Huma fought in started? Well...
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: Dragons of X, Y of the Twins, Amber and Z, etc.
• Ignored Epiphany: We see Raistlin having one in the storyline when Caramon goes to the future and Raistlin has become a god and defeated all the others one by one. Lord Soth's Backstory contains several.
• I Have No Son!: Solostaran does this twice. Once with his daughter Laurana after she leaves Qualinesti to follow Tanis Half-Elven, and later to his son Gilthanas when he aids the companions in stealing back the Dragon Orb from the elves.

• Inept Mage: Fizban the Fabulous, although he's more than he appears.
• Intelligence Equals Isolation: Raistlin's childhood, as detailed in The Soulforge.
• Interquel: The Lost Chronicles series.
• Interspecies Romance:
  • Gilthanas (Elf) and Silvara (Silver Dragon). Finding out Silvara was not an elf causes Gilthanas a lot of angst and he ends up rejecting her. He does eventually gets over it and spends years trying to find her again, and after some groveling she eventually takes him back.
  • In the backstory Huma and Gwyneth. Interestingly, Gwyneth and Silvara were sisters.
• I Shall Taunt You: "The Taunt" is a special ability of kenders, where they insult someone until that person attacks in a rage (with their stats lowering to reflect their lack of self-control).

• Jacob Marley Apparel: Justified in that the spirit's physical appearance, clothing, and weapons, are all based on the spirit's memories of being alive.
• Jerkass Gods: The entire evil side of the pantheon, and especially Takhisis, who routinely starts wars in an attempt to conquer the world and tends to manipulate her family towards her own ends. The gods of good are not immune to this either though, as they are bound by the Balance Between Good and Evil (which the evil gods try to subvert at every turn) and their idea of "helping" usually amounts to saying, "Do what you would normally do", though they do often empower people in the process.
• Join or Die: One of the three Nerakan Knights orders' motto is "Submit or Die".
• Jumping Off the Slippery Slope: The chain of events leading into the Cataclysm. The Kingpriest of Istar started by crusading against Always Chaotic Evil monsters, then against followers of evil gods, then against the wizards of the black robes, then against less organized and powerful evildoers... then finally anybody who wasn't good enough. In the end, he decided that the only way he could eradicate evil entirely was to become a god. The gods caused the Cataclysm in a last-ditch effort to stop him.

• Karma Houdini: Queen Uriona in The Dargonesti. She invades Silvanost with her Dargonesti army after recieving a vision of herself ruling there. Her army is defeated and she captured but she is so beautiful she successfully bewitches the Speaker into marrying her (he has quasi sensible political reasons to do so, but it is clearly her looks that won him over.) Within months she is implied to be the real power in Silvanost.

• Knight In Shining Armour:
  • Sturm is this trope played straight and to the hilt. Less true of some of the other Solamnic Knights, making Sturm all the more a Tragic Hero.
  • Cathan Twice-Born of the Kingpriest Trilogy also fits this pretty well.
  • Huma Dragonbane, Knight of the Crown and Champion of Paladine.
• Knight in Sour Armor:
  • Sturm might be Lawful Good and believe in chivalry, but he's quite bitter about it.
  • The Knights of Neraka as a whole might be like this. They serve evil and have negative views of the world, but are actually fair and decent rulers. Basically, Lawful Evil with a heavy dose of Lawful. The 3rd edition rule book actually points this out.
• Knight Templar: The last Kingpriest of Istar and his own Knightly order, the Knights of the Divine Hammer.
• Lady and Knight: Sturm rescues and protects Alhana in Dragons of Winter Knight, a brief interaction that changes her perceptions of humans.
• Lady of War:
  • Laurana becomes a deadly and stylish fighter with sword, bow, and lance.
  • Also, Kitiara, though Paladine help you if you call her a lady. Not that Kitiara has a problem with being called a lady; she's been known as both the "Dark Lady" and the "Blue Lady" and never seemed to mind.
  • Silvara in her Arlena Plata persona looks like a stern, dignified Solamnic knight.
• The Lady's Favour: Elf princess Alhana Starbreeze gives Sturm Brightblade a jeweled token in Dragons of Winter Night. The book later reveals that the token is a Starjewel, pairs of which are traditionally exchanged by elven lovers upon parting, creating something of a psychic bond between them. Sturm, however, remains ignorant of its significance.
• Language of Magic: The language Wizards use if often described as being "spidery". It is also supposedly based off of a language spoken in Indonesia.
• Last of His Kind: Riverwind and Goldmoon are the last surviving members of the Que-Shu tribe.
• Last-Second Chance: As the creators pointed out during build up to Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen, the gods gave Krynn a lot of chances to avoid The End of the World as We Know It, and all of them failed. They sent Lord Soth as the final chance to stop the Kingpriest and avert the Catacylsm, and he failed.
• Lawful Stupid: The Knights of Solamnia are often portrayed as being unable to act effectively because they are overly dogmatic towards their order's regulations known as "The Measure". They are usually portrayed as being a hindrance to the real heroism of the motley adventurers.
• Legendary in the Sequel: Most of the main characters from the original Chronicles trilogy are referred to as "The Heroes of the Lance" in the later books and everyone seems to know their stories.
• Lesser of Two Evils: The gods had two choices by the time the Cataclysm happened: allow the Kingpriest to win, become a God-Emperor, and rule the world as a genocidal despot who would wipe out countless races, or cause the Cataclysm and kill many people, but stop the Kingpriest's plan. They chose the Cataclysm.

• Living Legend: Many. As an epic fantasy series, this is to be expected.
  • Huma was famed for his exploits and piety even before his Heroic Sacrifice, though he became Shrouded in Myth eons later.
  • Most of the main characters from the original Chronicles trilogy are referred to as "The Heroes of the Lance" in the later books and everyone seems to know their stories.
• Lizard Folk: The Bakali is a race of 6-8 feet tall that resemble humanoid crocodiles. They have strong tails which they use in battle and webbed hands and feet. Bakali are relatively intelligent and can speak several languages, including their own lizardfolk dialect. They are predominantly known to be fighters, however some Bakali have been known to serve as druids or clerics to Krik'k lettz (Chislev) or occasionally Sirr'ushush (Sirrion).
• Locked into Strangeness:
  • Raistlin, as a result of the Test of High Sorcery, which allowed him to become a full-fledged Red Robed Wizard, left him with metallic golden skin, white hair and cursed eyes sporting hourglass-shaped pupils.
  • In the Dragonlance The New Adventures books, Nearra got a streak of black (the "possessed" hair color) in her normally blond (the "normal" hair color) hair after the events of the first book, in which she came dangerously close to having her Superpowered Evil Side takeover.

• Long-Running Book Series: The series has been releasing novels since 1984, and there are now over 200 novels and numerous Dungeons & Dragons sourcebooks as well. The last official Dragonlance novel was released in January 2010. As of now, the line has been shelved for the foreseeable future.
• Loophole Abuse: This is what Silvara is doing during Dragons of Winter Night. Fearing Queen Takhisis to return to the world and feeling helpless since she and the rest of the Metallic dragons are still bound by their oath to keep from revealing themselves to the people of Krynn, she assumes the identity of an elf-maid and lives amongst them in order to assist them in secret and learn about the situation in the world closely, but is frustrated at how little she can do, until she meets Laurana's party.

• Loving a Shadow: Raistlin has shades of this for Laurana in Dragons of an Hourglass Mage. Because he sees time's effects on all things and because Laurana is barely out of her teens in elf years, she is perhaps the only person Raistlin can still see as beautiful. She also treated him with a healthy dose of awe and respect, which is a lot more than the barely-restrained suspicion he got from most of the others in the party. He realizes that his crush (to call it that) is just a fleeting fancy, but that doesn't stop him from looking for ways to rescue her from Kitiara should the opportunity arise. Though it never did.
• Made of Explodium: Anything created by a gnome.

• Magic A Is Magic A: Played straight sometimes, but averted at other times. Dragonlance is based off of Dungeons & Dragons, so Vancian Magic is in effect for Wizards and Clerics, but not every author adheres to this, as many of them just have magic do whatever they need it to do in the story.
  • Primal Sorcerers and Mystics magic is more freeform (or at least it is supposed to be) so they do not have any rules to follow, aside from that initially Primal Sorcerers could only manipulate non-living matter and Mystics could only manipulate living or once-living matter under the SAGA ruleset, but that bit of flavor seems to have been dropped.
  • The Taladas Trilogy addresses how draconic magic works. A moonthief (a rogue who is able to draw magic from all 3 moons and is able to see where arcane power comes from) watches an elder silver dragon work a spell. She sees that dragon sorcery also draws from the moons, in addition to the ice of the cave, the earth beneath it, the life force of her group of adventurers, the life force of the dragon's ogre followers and the strength of the dragon itself.

• Magical Incantation: Raistlin's spells were frequently written in full, such as "Pveatherfall" for the "Feather Fall" spell. (Fizban, falling from a great height, attempted the same spell, but only got "Pveatherf—" out before he hit the ground. Suddenly, a bunch of feathers appeared to soften the landing of his friends.)
• Magical Native American: The Human Barbarian tribes like the Que-Shu, and the Kagonesti often get depicted as being like this.
• Magical Society: The Wizards of High Sorcery.
• The Magic Comes Back: The War of the Lance saw the return of Clerical magic to the world. The early Fifth Age saw the rediscovering of Primal Sorcery and the discovery of Mysticism, and finally High Sorcery and Clerical magic return after the War of Souls. Krynn's magic is a bit unstable...
• Magic Feather: A short story in the War of the Lance anthology says that this was the case for the Dragonlances.
• The Magic Goes Away:
  • The Cataclysm resulted in divine magic going away until the War of the Lance.
  • This happens in Dragons of Summer Flame, originally intended by the creators to be the Grand Finale of the saga. However, they and other writers decided to keep the story going, magic and all, though the magic isn't quite the same afterward.
• Magicians Are Wizards: Raistlin does some sleight-of-hand trick, with a vanishing coin.
• Magic Knight:
  • There's a semi-religious organization of Wizards of High Sorcery who actually try to subvert this trope. They've made all sorts of laws and social stigma against a wizard wearing armor or carrying martial weapons. Wizards who do so anyway are looked down upon, such as...
  • The Knights of Neraka faction, the Knights of the Thorn. They can cast arcane spells with a reduced chance of failure when using armor, and often resort to melee combat. They are referred to as Grey Robes, in a mockery of the aforementioned wizards of High Sorcery.
  • The main reason they even are allowed to carry daggers is because Huma made a big deal out of it after his friend the wizard Magius was tortured before being killed. The daggers are meant to be used to avoid this fate, more than for actual combat.

• Magic Versus Science: Not really a key aspect of the world, but many Tinker Gnomes believe that science is superior to magic. Interestingly, the Solamnic Knights, who do have some White Robed Wizards as part of their Auxiliary, have shown a keen interest in Tinker Gnome technology. The Solamnic Knights are often portrayed as not being too fond of magic (except for a Cleric of a good deity, and they may not even consider what Clerics do magic) and so they are interested in finding technological methods to improve their lives, and many Knights wish they did not even have the White Robes as part of their Auxiliary forces.
• Magnetic Hero: Laurana inspires thousands to join the Whitestone Army.

• Mama Bear:
  • The ancient, senile red dragon, Flamestrike.
  • Laurana Kanan and Ahlana Starbreeze also show shades of this in later books.
• The Man Behind the Man: Fistandantilus was behind the reign of the last Kingpriest of Istar.

• Meaningful Appearance: Silvara has noticeably exotic looks for a Kagonesi elf, with her long silver hair and striking Icy Blue Eyes. Naturally those are hints about her true nature as a silver dragon.
• Meaningful Name:
  • Most dragons have a true name and a "human name". Their human names tend to be something revolving around their color; a red will be Ember, a black will be Oil, etc etc etc. Notably all of Silvara's names and aliases (D'argent / Silvara / Arlena Plata) are derived from silver.
  • There is also "Caramon" which was derived from another language and is meant to sound similar to "Caring Man".
• Meanwhile, in the Future…: Raistlin uses the dragon orb in War of the Twins to contact Dalamar in the future, so he can find out how to escape the same fate as Fistandantilus. You only see Raistlin beginning to use the orb, and then you get the next chapter which takes place in the future (well, present really, but future relative to the rest of the book).
• Merlin and Nimue: Raistlin and Crysania play this to the hilt, with about the only difference being that Crysania isn't actually his student.

• The Mole: Eben in Dragons of Autumn Twilight, Rennard in The Legend of Huma.
• Monogender Monsters: The Draconians are an example of the all-male variety. Played with later on, as it's revealed that their creators deliberately kept the Draconians all-male to stop the race from being able to sustain itself naturally. The Draconians took issue with this, and eventually found the creators' stash of female Draconian eggs, which they'd planned to hold as blackmail. Then the female Draconians grew up and proved to be every bit as badass as their male counterparts.
• Monster-Shaped Mountain: The game-setting has Skullcap, cranium-shaped site of a long-ago evil wizard's stronghold, and the cover of the module Dragons of Light features a huge dragon statue carved out of a mountaintop.
• Mooks:
  • The Dark Queen's armies have many, but the Draconians are the most notable.
  • Not to mention souls. Lots and lots of souls. It's not called the "War of Souls" for nothing.

• Munchkin: Raistlin Majere, both in and out of setting. Starts off with a character build that lowered his constitution to the point that he constantly coughs blood in exchange for increased intelligence and magic-detection with the trade-off actually written into his backstory... and goes into a positive-reinforcement cycle from there, ending only when he becomes one third of the world's pantheon. At which point he stops and reconsiders since in D&D that kind of thing makes your character an NPC.
• Murder the Hypotenuse: Kitiara's solution to her romantic rivalry with Laurana.
• Mutually Exclusive Magic: Godly Magic and Ambient Magic are like this in a way. Godly magic is either magic granted by the gods to their Clerics, or magic drawn from the Moons Gods from their three moons in the sky. Ambient magic is either Wild/Primal Sorcery, which is drawn directly from Krynn, or Mysticism, which is drawn directly from the users soul. They are generally believed to be incompatible with each other.
• My Sister Is Off-Limits: The reason childhood best friends and adopted brothers Tanis and Gilthanas fell out. The twist is that Tanis actually agrees with him so he runs away. Laurana's opinion doesn't much factor into either of their thinking as they both think they know what is best for her.
• Mysterious Waif: Silvara is introduced as an exotic looking Kagonesi elf that is simply assisting the party in escaping Qualimori, but after a while it's clear she knows more than she's letting on and Laurana grows to be very suspicious of her, imagining she's a spy. She's later revealed to be an old silver dragon from the days of Huma Dragonsbane in disguise.
• Naked First Impression: In the The Black Wing the black dragon Khisanth is naked when she first takes human form and when she is found by some actual humans she is forced to come up with a lie on the spot, telling them that bandits stole her clothes. The humans draw their own conclusions on what happened and insist on protecting "the poor dear" while she doesn't entirely understand why they find her nudity so interesting.
• Nay-Theist: Mystics, due to the nature of their powers requiring that they believe in themselves.
• Necromancer: Black Robed Wizards, Clerics of Chemosh, or even Mystics can become one.
• Neutral No Longer: The Metallic dragons made an Oath of Neutrality, prohibiting them from participating in the War of the Lance. But when Silvara and Gilthanas discover that the metallic dragon eggs are being corrupted and turned into draconians, they use this information to convince them into joining the war.
• Never My Fault: The crux of why the gods and their power vanished from Krynn following the Cataclysm: rather than accept that the Kingpriest and Istar brought it on themselves, they instead grew angry and turned their backs on the gods.
• Nigh-Invulnerability:
  • Whenever there is a cleric around that is on your side, everyone else becomes nigh-invulnerable, unless their faith isn't strong enough.
  • Mina in the War of Souls trilogy because she is protected by Takhisis. Who protected who? Mina unknowingly used her own powers for Takhisis' case.
  • Lord Soth, since technically he's already dead and cursed to live a lifetime for every person his actions killed.Given he's responsible for the Cataclysm happening, needless to say, that's a lot of lifetimes.
  • Warlord Crynus, who can survive and recover from any injury, up to and including decapitation.
  • Huma, thanks to The Power of Love and Incorruptible Pure Pureness goes toe-to-toe with the supreme god of evil in Good Old Fisticuffs and wins.
• Noble Demon: Blue dragons collectively seem prone to this. They are clearly the least evil of the evil dragons, and any who have any sort of characterization at all are given at least one sympathetic trait, most commonly tremendous loyalty to their riders (see Kitiara and Skie or Medan and Razor).
• No Budget: The animated movie was made with a budget of roughly one million dollars.
• Non-Mammal Mammaries: Averted with Draconian females, but played straight with Dragonspawn females, but Dragonspawn are the result of experimenting on Humans, so a Dragonspawn female would have once been a Human female.
• Noodle Incident: A somewhat famous one was mentioned when Par-Salian was sharing details of the time travel spell with the other Heads of the Conclave from his Tome of Eldritch Lore. One of the restrictions was that time travel cannot be used to prevent the Cataclysm, "something we have learned at great cost, to our sorrow". The other two wizards treat this as a stunning revelation, while Par-Salian says that even trying was a desperate, foolish act. This incident has never been mentioned, before or since, and the Annotated edition has the authors declaring, "Who is this mysterious time traveler? We'll never tell!"
• Nothing Up My Sleeve: Raistlin carries a dagger in a leather thong up his sleeve that is rigged to drop down into his hand with a flick of the wrist.
• Not Quite Dead:
  • In Dragons of the Hourglass Mage Raistlin assumes that his brother, along with Tanis, Tika, Goldmoon, and Riverwind died in the maelstrom after he abandoned them to save himself, but they were actually saved by sea elves. He later finds out they are alive and visits them as Flint dies, although he was invisible at the time, so they never knew he was there.
  • This may also be the case with Fistandantilus, who apparently managed to revive himself in a short story, but nothing has been made of it since.
• Not That Kind of Mage: A Wizard might be annoyed at being mistaken for a Primal Sorcerer. The two have different philosophies towards magic. To Primal Sorcerers, magic is just a tool, to Wizards, magic is almost a religion, it is something they revere.
• Nubile Savage: Kagonesti elfs are usually dressed in this manner. Silvara wears a tribal garb adorned with tribal feathers in her hair and face paint. It's a rather Stripperiffic outfit that bares her midriff and legs.

O — Z

• Obfuscating Stupidity:
  • Kender come off as cluelessly chipper and annoying, but often have a far greater grasp of the situation than they let on; similarly, Gully Dwarves are a lot more cunning than their can't-count-beyond-two stupidity indicates. But the out and out master of this trope is Fizban/Paladine.
  • As Speaker of the Suns Gilthas fell under this, though in his case it was more Obfuscating Weakness.
• Obviously Evil: in the Animated Adaptation, anything even remotely Draconic (Takhisis, Dragons, Draconians, anything reptilian really) was rendered in CG. Which kind of gives away the surprise of the cloaked monks looking for the crystal staff to heal one of their sick being revealed as a group of Draconians just a little early.
• Odd Friendship: Huma, Knight of Solamnia and Kaz the Minotaur.
• Oh, Crap!: Happens to Raistlin when Tas and Gnimsh suddenly appear in War of the Twins at the same time as a group of Dwarves enters his tent intent on assassinating him. Before this happened, Raistlin knew he could not die because Fistandantilus did not die, but the Kender's presence allows for time to be altered, thus the Oh, Crap!. He can die!
• Older Than They Look: The Kender look like little children far into their older years. Much of Kender female makeup is based on trying to induce wrinkles and greying hair to look older.

• Omniscient Morality License: The Cataclysm was supposedly necessary for the betterment of the world. All of the deities were in on it, Good, Neutral, and Evil.
• Our Demons Are Different: The three Fiendish races, Daemons, Demons, and Devils exist, but they are all subservient to the gods of evil. They are rarely seen, as the gods of evil prefer relying on their mortal servants to do whatever they want done. The gods of evil are even far more likely to send an aspect of themselves to talk to their followers directly than to send a Fiendish servitor.
• Our Dragons Are Different: Unlike dragons in most D&D settings, Dragons on Krynn CAN begin to suffer dementia as they get older... though in this case 'older' can be very very very old indeed. The legend of Huma has a passing reference to an elderly but still sharp-minded dragon... who is known to be senile by the time of the main story... which was long enough for civilizations to rise and fall.
• Our Dwarves Are All the Same: Varies depending on the writer. Dragonlance is one of the few settings that brings in the varied dwarf races that are present in D&D. At the very least, Flint (main character in early books) is a hill dwarf, not a mountain dwarf — and then there's the gully dwarves (technically hybrids). In a few books you get the equivalents of the Dungeons & Dragons "derro" and "duergar": the Thiewar and Dewar, one of whom is a pale race that can't handle bright lights but spawns the only dwarven mages, and one of which is apparently Always Chaotic Evil with a tendency to madness. Morlocks also exist, but appear to be isolated to a very small geographical area beneath Karthay, as seen in Dalamar the Dark.

• Our Gods Are Different: Krynnish deities do not need worshipers to survive, unlike deities in some other Dungeons & Dragons settings. They also do not have statblocks, and can not be killed by mortals.^note Well, unless you are Raistlin.
• Our Minotaurs Are Different: Minotaurs are a major race with their own civilization, and are among the setting's greatest seafarers. They are a fairly civilized, if not always nice, Proud Warrior Race.
• Our Ogres Are Different: Krynnish ogres are very different from — and more prominent in-universe than — the D&D standard. They're actually the degenerate descendants of the local precursors, who were blessed with incredible beauty, strength, magic and long lives by the gods of evil and used them to enslave ancient Krynn. They ended up being consumed by decadence and were overthrown by their slaves and splintered into various sub-races, including the Irda (defectors from decadence who hide in remote regions), the minotaurs (saved from destruction by Sargas and remade in his image and who consider themselves the true inheritors of the ancient ogre empire) and the more "classic" ogres (whose downfall twisted them to become monstrous barbarians but who still dream of reclaiming their ancestors' power).
• Outdoor Bath Peeping: In Dragons of Winter Night Gilthanas accidentally stumbles upon Silvara bathing on a waterfall near where they're camping. He tries to Ignore the Fanservice and leave, but fails as he gets too entranced by the sight of her bare back and she eventually notices him Eating the Eye Candy. She's very perturbed by it at first and even reaches for her weapon, but he manages to calm her down and they actually have a bonding moment. The incident raises the Unresolved Sexual Tension to the point where they both confess their feelings and the scene ends with a Sexy Discretion Shot. The illustration for the chapter title is even a Sexy Silhouette of Silvara naked in the water.

• Pals with Jesus: Tasslehoff is close, personal friends with Paladine, AKA Fizban.
• Person of Mass Destruction: Maladar from the Taladas Trilogy, but any powerful spellcaster can also be one.
• Pet the Dog: Raistlin has many of these moments throughout the series.
• Phosphor-Essence: The Great Priest of Ishtar is the greatest cleric on Ansalom and is perpetually clad in unbearable light. It's later revealed that it is much less impressive than it seems.
• Physical God: Chemosh (God of Death) and Zeboim (Goddess of the Sea) have had major physical appearances, and part of The Dark Disciple trilogy is told from their perspectives. They act a lot like the squabbling deities in The Iliad.
• Picked Last: Raistlin apparently had this happen to him (due to his frailness) whenever he tried to play physical games with his twin brother and his friends. He eventually just stopped playing with them.
• Pity the Kidnapper: A Red Dragon named Pyrothraxus took over Mt. Nevermind, home of the Tinker Gnomes during the early Fifth Age. The Gnomes keep pestering him, wanting to learn about him, and even though he has killed some of them, they keep bothering him For Science!. He is said to have gone insane.
• Planetary Relocation: This turns out to be the reason the gods seemingly abandoned Krynn at the end of Dragons of a Summer Flame, as well as why the constellations in the sky are now different: At the conclusion of the War of Chaos, Takhisis stole the whole planet out from under the other gods' noses, planning to rule it herself. Unfortunately the act proved so taxing for her that she was too weak to prevent other parties from taking an interest in ruling Krynn, and she had to enact a rather risky plan to clear the field again.
• Plucky Comic Relief: Tasselhoff Burrfoot, playing off grumpy Flint Fireforge most of the time. Also, any and all Kender, Tinker Gnomes, and Gully Dwarves. Occasionally, these get somewhat cruelly played for tragedy).
  • One of the worst examples of that was "The Wish", a short story in The Reign of Ishtar collection which followed a motley group of nonhumans including a kender. The others, as well as the audience, assume that the kender's ditziness is just being a typical dumb kender, but in the scene when he is describing witnessing the murder of his parents, you realize that he is in fact five years old.

• Post-Adventure Adventure: The first book, Dragons of Autumn Twilight, opens with Tanis and his friends reuniting after years apart. Their previous adventures together are discussed, but not really recounted in a lot of detail.
• P.O.V. Sequel: Many books in the saga are of this type.
• Powered Armor: A Tinker Gnome in the novel Conundrum wears a suit of powered armor he made himself.
• Precision F-Strike: In The Raistlin Chronicles, Caramon, Ariakas, Baron Langtree, and a Red Shirt trainee in Ariakas' army all utter "shit" at one time or another.
• Precursors:
  • The Ogres, then called the Irda, ruled a civilization that was primarily in the mountains of Krynn that fell millennia before the Cataclysm. The gods of evil blessed them with a 2500 year life span, incredible knowledge of magic (although it was only allowed to be practiced by the nobility) and huge stature. The empire was destroyed by a revolt of their human slaves (assisted by the benevolent Irda who traveled to a remote island and were spared) combined with the Gods of Light cursing them to make their physical forms mark their true dark nature.
  • The Taladas Trilogy shows that there were once humanoid wolves living in Panak, Taladas' ice region, until they were wiped out by dragons. They live on in the form of spirit wolves that can aid the native shamans. When they learn that the adventurers' party is trying to locate an elder dragon called the Wyrm-Namer, they agree to give them the secret location of the beast...with the condition that they kill it to get revenge for what happened to their species.
• Pretty in Mink: Perhaps not in the actual text, but some of the covers show ladies wearing fur capes. This includes two different covers for a War of the Twins book showing (possibly) Crysiana wearing a white fur wrap. Variant 1◊, Variant 2.
• Promoted Fanboy: Some of the designers for the 3.5 rulesets for Dragonlance were fans.

• Punch-Clock Villain: Kang and Slith and the Doom Brigade. They were only working for the Dragonarmies army because they were born and raised to be. Even then they are prone to complaining about their "jobs" as soldiers. They eventually abandon the Dragonarmies and go found a city for Draconians.
• Race Lift: This happens with cover art sometimes, in the novel The Sellsword the protagonist is described as being black, but on the cover he kind of looks like Jason Statham. The Kagonesti elves also have this happen to them in book cover art, and sometimes in sourcebook interior art. They are supposed to be brown-skinned, but get depicted as being as pale white as their Silavnesti and Qualinesti cousins.
• Rage Against the Heavens: The Kingpriest's direct appeal to the Gods wherein he demanded they grant him the power to purge evil from the world completely would seem a different version of this.

• Random Encounters: When the Companions are inside Kith-Kanan's burial chamber, and a giant slug comes out of nowhere and attacks them.
• Ranged Emergency Weapon: When Sturm needs to buy time for Laurana to use the Dragon Orb, he decides that he needs to draw the attacking dragons toward him, and fires a bow at them to do so, even though he never otherwise uses a ranged attack.
• Rebellious Princess: Laurana. She runs away from her family twice, becomes a Lady of War in defiance of elven tradition, becomes the Four-Star Badass leader of the highly chauvinistic Knights of Solamnia, and ends up abandoning her army to try and save her love.
• Red Baron: Laurana became known as "The Golden General" after finding success in the battlefield.
• Redemption Equals Death: Lord Soth, following his refusal to aid Tahkisis anymore and her subsequent admonition that she would rend him complete from this world, he still refuses. The next time he's seen he's in the Court of Paladine wearing gray armor, instead of shining, in the RPGA guidebooks: his gift for the suffering he was put through is the ability to move anywhere on Krynn, but only as a mortal appearing as he once did before becoming a Death Knight.
• Redemption Quest:
  • In his Back Story, Lord Soth failed one of these, which caused the Cataclysm.
  • Dhamon Grimwulf later on in the Age of Mortals has one of these as well.
• Religion is Magic: Played With. Often, Clerics will not even refer to what they do as magic. It seems that the word "Magic" is synonymous with "Wizard" a lot of the time. Played straight other times, as people will talk of the loss of Divine magic after the Cataclysm, and about the loss of both Arcane and Divine magic after the Chaos War.
• La Résistance: In Dragons of the Hourglass Mage Raistlin works for a secretive group in Neraka that is working to bring down the Dark Queen Takhisis, called the Hidden Light.
• Retcon: The War of Souls trilogy (Dragons of a Fallen Sun, Dragons of a Lost Star and Dragons of a Vanished Moon) reveal that the very ending of Dragons Of Summer Flame was actually a trick by Takhisis, and that far from the other gods leaving voluntarily she stole and hid the world and manipulated Palin into 'discovering' wild magic. The trilogy pretty much reverses nearly all the changes done in Dragons Of Summer Flame.
• Role-Playing Endgame: The original version of the tabletop game sets a hard Cap at Level 18; any characters who exceed this are sent on a one-way trip to another Plane by the gods, presumably to prevent them from repeating Raistlin's attempt at killing a god and taking their place.
• Royals Who Actually Do Something: Gilthas Pathfinder in the War of Souls and Elven Exiles trilogies.
• Rube Goldberg Device: Gnomeflingers. Or generally, anything made by gnomes.
• Sacrificial Lion: In the original Chronicles, Sturm Brightblade.
• Sadistic Choice: The Kingpriest had left the gods with two choices: allow him to ascend to godhood and wipe out anything he deemed evil (as well as usurping their power for his own), which would include outright genocide of any race the Gods of Good didn't directly create, or cause the Cataclysm. This was as much a result of how close the Kingpriest was to succeeding as the fact all other attempts to stop him, either by warning or by champions such as Lord Soth, had failed. They chose the Cataclysm, as it ultimately would do less damage than the Kingpriest would have.
• Saintly Church: The church of Paladine under Elistan, as opposed to it under the Kingpriest, which was a Corrupt Church.

• Schizo Tech: To an extent, The Gnomes of Mt. Nevermind power their extinct volcano home with geothermal power. One Gnome in the short story "Boom" by Jeff Grub made an atomic bomb, but it never got detonated. A Gnome in the novel Conundrum made a suit of Powered Armor. The Gnomes in general have a higher tech level than the rest of Krynn. It is prone to malfunctioning and exploding a lot, but apparently even they can get stuff to remain stable enough to use reliably (such as their Geothermal power). A lot of this technology doesn't spread because a lot of people are afraid of Gnomish Technology. Justified, once you consider that nine times out of ten, gnomish technology has a nasty tendency to explode. Or break down catastrophically. Or do something radically, potentially lethally, different from what it was designed to do. The tenth time, it works fine or can be repurposed into something that does what you expect it to. But you wouldn't want to wait around for that tenth time, either... To say nothing of the fact that any Gnomish invention that isn't potentially lethal is considered a failure by the Gnomes, and treated as a hindrance to technological progress. Any tech that actually simply works is considered something of a failure by the Gnomes; if it has no flaws, how can future generations improve on it?
• Science-Related Memetic Disorder: This is what the Tinker Gnomes as a whole suffer from, a divine curse cast upon them by Reorx when he created them from disappointing human servants of his in the mythical dawn of the races. Though they burn with ceaseless scientific inspiration and curiosity, for the vast majority of the race, the curse clouds their wits and renders them incapable of doing actual science. Some of them double down on the trope by viewing the curse as a blessing, viewing any design that actually does what it's supposed to instead of something new and unexpected as suspicious at best, and anything that does what it was designed to do on the first try as an outright heresy on the part of the creator, worthy of exile or worse.
• Screw the War, We're Partying: The day-long Spring Dawning Festival held in Laurana's honor after she liberated Kalaman.
• Sdrawkcab Alias: in the original game modules, the Big Bad of the first four adventures, Dragon Highlord Verminaard, apparently dies by falling into an extremely deep hole; much later in the campaign, the heroes encounter a treacherous mercenary and information broker who goes by the name of Sevil Draanim Rev. Since they never saw Verminard's face, and Sevil speaks in a rasping whisper, they're unlikely to recognize "Sevil" until they find out his full name.

• Serrated Blade of Pain: Sturm Brightblade is forced to fight in the arena against a minotaur gladiator, who uses a massive sword with a jagged edge.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: Happens several times in Legends.
  • The obvious one is when Caramon sees the future when Raistlin ascends to godhood and goes back to the present to stop him.
  • Tas attempting to stop the cataclysm, but instead breaks the time-traveling device because Raistlin wanted him to die.
  • Raistlin killing Gnimsh in the Thorbardin dungeons in order to prevent him from activating the time-traveling device which interrupted Fistandantilus' spell in the past, resulting in his death.
• Sexy Discretion Shot:
  • Gilthanas and Silvara are heavily implied to consummate their feelings shortly after they confess to each other during their encounter at the stream.
  "Reaching out, she shyly put one hand around his neck and drew him near. And then, as he kissed her, he felt her other hand-the hand that had been clasping the blanket around her body-move up to caress his face. Silvara's blanket slipped unnoticed into the stream and was borne away by the silver water."
  • In The Black Wing novel, the Villain Protagonist dragon (shapeshifted into a human in disguise) decides to sleep with one of her companions just out of curiosity of how sex feels like, with the scene ending with her pulling her lover to her and the next chapter starting in a Post-Coital Collapse.
  "Onyx gave in to the wine, to Led, and dismissed her self-control. Instinct far different than she'd experienced as a dragon brought her dark, slim hand up to the back of Led's neck and pulled his bearded face down to hers. Under a black, starless sky Onyx's senses spun away to the heights she had reached only in dragon flight."
• Shameless Fanservice Girl: When Gilthanas happens upon Silvara bathing, she doesn't hesitate to climb out of the water and reach for her knife, putting safety above modesty. Although after he pacifies her she does grow uncomfortable with his staring and does cover herself with a Modesty Cloth. This is Justified since she's actually a silver dragon and her elven body is her Voluntary Shapeshifting.
• She Is All Grown Up:
  • Tanis notices this after he pulls his Childhood Friend Laurana down on top of him. Especially justified as he is a half-elf and she is a full elf, so he hit puberty at least a decade before she did.
  • Happens with Caramon and Tika. He remembers her as a little freckled brat and is stunned by what she's grown into (and what has grown onto her) after he's been gone for five years.
• Shorter Means Smarter: The Tinker Gnomes, who are half the size of humans but extremely clever. However, they zigzag the trope in that they also tend to lack in common sense and, in fact, are cursed to never really apply their intellect properly.
• Significant Anagram: Metatextual. Margaret Weis uses an anagrammatized Fizban as characters in other works: in The Death Gate Cycle he becomes Zifnab, and in Starshield, he becomes Zanfib. It's implied that he might be the same continuous character throughout all the series he appears in; he just can't remember his name when he shows up, though not necessarily. For example with Zifnab it seems more likely that he actually had read the Dragonlance Chronicles in his youth, and modelled his personality after the character he liked the most. He also tries to become James Bond at times, with less success.
• Skeletons in the Coat Closet: Followers of Chemosh are fond of this sort of wardrobe.
• Sleeps in the Nude: In The Odyssey of Gilthanas, the first time we see Silvara as Arlena Plata is when she's waking up in her room in Castle Eastwatch in the buff. Aside from fanservice, it's an excuse to detail how she looks like in her new body.
• Slut-Shaming: Laurana gets subjected to this by her father and brother the first time she sees them again after running off to go adventuring with her Love Interest Tanis Half-Elven and his mostly human traveling party, and they basically accuse her of whoring around with them. She's so shocked by this that she faints on the spot.

• Some Call Me "Tim": Pretty much the entire race of Gnomes have names that fill several volumes in the great library of Mount Nevermind, which include their full family tree and any notable accomplishments from their lives. When talking amongst each other, they use a shortened version which "only" takes about a minute to say. The other races have a tendency to only use the first 2-3 syllables of a gnome's name, a practice they find demeaning. Even the name of the Tinker Gnomes' mountain falls under this trope — it's only called Mount Nevermind because the first human explorers made the serious mistake of asking their gnome guide where he was from. After the first six or seven seconds of rapid pronunciation, they interrupted with 'Nevermind', which the gnomes then adopted as the official name of the mountain for reasons of aesthetics.
• Sourcebook: There are many Dungeons & Dragons sourcebooks for the series.
• Spoiled Sweet: Laurana. In Dragons of Autumn Twilight she's a pampered princess but is also kind and friendly to all the Companions and does not show even a trace of the racism and classism that are so prevalent among so many other Krynnish elves.
• Squishy Wizard: A rare subversion is Dunbar Mastermate. Rules of conduct for mages generally keep them frail and unathletic, but Dunbar's work on a ship didn't conflict with the rules and did give him "a physique that even Caramon might have envied".
• Stable Time Loop: This is how Time Travel is supposed to work for humans, elves, and ogres. However, other races break this trope for everyone involved though.

• Stars Are Souls: Stars over Krynn are portals to the plane of Radiance. But each new one is created upon a Heroic Sacrifice — inhabitants of the world being aware of this fact, and supposedly rejoicing.
• The Starscream: Raistlin and Kitiara both fit this trope. Galan Dracos from The Legend of Huma does too.
• Starter Villain: The thuggish, cowardly hobgoblin Lord Toede, a mid-ranking minion of the Dragon Overlords. Though never a serious threat, he proved popular enough to get his own spin-off novel. Also applies to his master, Lord Verminaard who served as the Big Bad for the first book, but simply one of the many Dragon Highlords.
• Starter Villain Stays: A hobgoblin named Toede is the first named villain encountered in the game modules. Originally just a minor Fewmaster, he becomes a recurring antagonist and eventually rises to the rank of Highlord commanding an entire Dragonarmy.
• Start of Darkness: The novel Before the Mask details how Verminaard turned to evil.
• Stellar Name: Goldmoon.
• Straight for the Commander: Kitiara employs this tactic to try and destroy the Whitestone Army when she targets the Golden General Laurana for capture.
• Supernatural Gold Eyes: The Ogre Titans have eyes that are gold, glowing, and pupilless.
• Superweapon Surprise: One short story features a quiet elven village that has been occupied by draconians. The elves turn out to be silver dragons.
• Swiss-Army Superpower: This is pretty much how the Fire Rose works, but it enacts a heavy toll on its wielder.
• Sword and Sorcerer: Caramon, an impressive warrior, and Raistlin, his brother and a fearsome spellcaster. They used to hire themselves out as mercenaries, often fighting back-to-back against hordes of foes.
• Take a Third Option: The Legion of Steel was founded to be an alternative to the people of Ansalon to the often Lawful Stupid Solamnic Knights and the Lawful Evil Knights of Takhisis/Neraka.
• Taking You with Me: Draconians. Upon death, they turn to stone which traps your weapon, go up in flames, or just explode.
• Tall, Dark, and Snarky: Raistlin puts Snape to shame.
  • As does his apprentice, Dalamar. Black Robes in general seem prone to this.
• There Is Another: Assuming there are any clerics, druids or other divine magic weilders in a given group for the 5e Shadow of the Dragon Queen campaign, it means that Goldmoon wasn't the only person to recieve the word of the good/neutral gods during the War of the Lance.
• Time Dissonance: Any race that lives significantly longer than humans exhibits this, especially elves and dragons.
• Tim Taylor Technology: This pretty much describes the tinker gnome theory of engineering.
• Tiny Guy, Huge Girl: It is mentioned in the Races of Ansalon sourcebook that most Half-Gnomes are the result of a male Gnome and a Human woman.
• To Be Lawful or Good: The Lawful Good Silvara has this inner conflict for most of Dragons of Winter Night since she's a silver dragon that is bound by an oath to remain neutral during the War of the Lance, but is anguished to not be able to help people against Takhisis's armies so she finds a Loophole Abuse to be able to help and is eventually convinced to betray her oath by the Fizban and rest of the party.
• Took a Level in Badass:
  • Laurana: from a spoilt, near-airhead to the Golden General.
  • Tika Waylan; from barmaid to badass in one book. Though, it isn't as poignant as in Laurana's case.
• Transformation Trinket: In the short story "The Scavengers of Istar", Ferret Snitchwhistle follows his Kender nature and steals the Icons of Symeon from the Great Temple of Lord City, Istar. The icons are small disks made of precious metals, sport engravings of different Metallic Dragons each, and grant magical abilities. The silver disk, specifically, allows the user to shapeshift at will.

• Turns Red: All Draconians have a final effect that activates on their death, meant to disable or destroy the ones who killed them. The Aurak subspecies, born of magically potent Gold Dragons, takes this a step further. Upon suffering a mortal wound, the Aurak does not simply die, but instead continues his attack. Now, however, its innate magical power begins erupting from its body, manifesting as a magical fire that wreaths the draconian, spreading to anything struck (it also begins to burn any items on the Aurak as well, meaning loot must be stolen from what is essentially a flaming zombie before its destroyed). Eventually, the flames consume the entire body, even the bones, resulting in the monster collapsing into a ball of burning energy that begins blasting everything around it. While it can still be fought (and stolen from), this is unwise as, after a fairly short time period, the ball explodes in a manner similar to a Bozak, destroying anything within several square feet of it before finally dying. This has happened at least twice in the series, in "Lord Toede" and the sequel book to "Doom Brigade" where the draconians were finally given character stats. Interestingly, a third Aurak was featured in a short story who simply fell over dead when killed, though he was a malformed specimen so it is possible the spell simply didn't activate for him.
• Ultimate Blacksmith: Theros Ironfeld was the only one capable of forging the Dragonlances. He was the successor to Duncan Ironweaver, student of Reorx and original creator of both the Dragonlances and the Silver Arm used to forge them.
• Ultimate Final Exam: The Test given to aspiring High Sorcery wizards. In D&D terms, applicants are already 3rd or 4th level and are already have several spells, but the Test is the gatekeeper to any more advanced power. The Test determines whether the wizard has absolute commitment, skill, and responsibility to magic. If any of these qualities is found wanting, the most likely outcome is death; if the wizard is lucky, he'll live and the Test will wean out the lacking attribute (usually in extraordinarily painful and life-altering fashion).
• Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny: The final print Dragon magazine had an article about a hypothetical fight between Raistlin Majere and Elminster, both perhaps the most powerful Wizards in their respective worlds.
• Uncoffee: Tarbean tea. There is also "Kefre", which is even more like coffee.
• Undeath Always Ends: The Death Knight Lord Soth was cursed to forever walk the land of the living after he failed in his Redemption Quest. That is, until Takhisis made him mortal and killed him for refusing to aid her during the War of Souls.
• Undressing the Unconscious: In The Soulforge, Kitiara ends up having to undress and unconscious Raistlin who's soaked from rain. She doesn't miss the chance to tease her half-brother Caramon claiming she has now seen him naked by proxy (since he and Raistlin are twins), much to Caramon's discomfort.
• Unequal Pairing:
  • Laurana's an elven princess who's in love with Heroic Bastard Tanis. Her family, mostly Gilthanas, disapproves of the relationship.
  • Ironically, Gilthanas himself ends up falling in love with Silvara, a Kagonesi elf maiden of low status. Even more ironic, she's actually a very old silver dragon who's much older, stronger and wiser than him, meaning he's actually on the other end of this trope, which he can't quite deal and he ends up spurning her, though he comes to regret it years later.
• Unequal Rites: This can happen between Wizards and Sorcerers, and Clerics and Mystics. This can also occur between Wizards and Clerics, with some Clerics calling what they can do not magic but "Faith". Some Wizards dislike Clerics because it was a powerful Cleric, the last Kingpriest of Istar, who tried to annihilate all Wizards, be they good, neutral, or evil. There is also some of this from Black Robe Necromancers, and Clerics of Chemosh, with the Clerics of Chemosh believing they are the only ones worthy of controlling undead creatures. Mystics who can also create undead creatures may find themselves trying to be converted by Clerics of Chemosh.

• Un-person: In Stormblade, from the Heroes trilogy, it's said that clanless dwarves are treated as if they do not exist. Other Dwarves view them as "nothing less than a living ghost" and won't speak to them unless it's absolutely necessary.

• Unresolved Sexual Tension: Goes on and on and on between Raistlin and Crysania in Legends. At least in Raistlin's eyes, letting love blossom would distract them both from the purity of purpose necessary to control the dangerous magical forces integral to his master plan. It's not strictly a Virgin Power, but it's related.
• Unwitting Pawn: Crysania fits this perfectly. Tasslehoff also sort of fits this trope at times. When he isn't being a Spanner in the Works, that is. The Kingpriest himself to Fistandantilus. The latter didn't get exactly what he wanted out of that scheme, but the Kingpriest was his pawn all along nonetheless. The Gods of Magic become Takhisis's Unwitting Pawns in Dragons of the Hourglass Mage.
• Vader Breath: Raistlin suffers from a combination of this and frequent coughing fits due to his shattered health.
• The Vamp: Kitiara enjoys being sultry has had a lot of sexual partners and is very talented at the act itself. Tanis' feelings for her make him seriously consider switching sides and joining her army.
• Victoria's Secret Compartment: Iolanthe stored a component for a spell in her bosom.
• Villainous Breakdown: Mina starts having one near the end of the War Of Souls.
• Villain Protagonist:
  • Kitiara in the 'B' storylines of both Brothers in Arms and Dragons of the Highlord Skies.
  • Dalamar is also the "hero" of his own subplots. The audience roots for him on a combination of his being something of a Magnificent Bastard (though he's got nothing on his shalafi) and because Dalamar as the most powerful Black Robe in the world is sufficiently better than the alternative.
  • The Villians Series starred many antagonists in their own novels.
    • Before the Mask is the Start of Darkness for a young Verminaard showing how the boy who grew into a Dragon Highlord.
    • The Black Wing shows the life of the black dragon Khisanth (a minor villain from Dragons of Autumn Twilight), from waking after the Cataclysm to how she joined the dragonarmies.
    • Emperor of Ansalon shows Duulket Ariakas rise to power.
    • Hederick the Theocrat shows Hederick's life in Solace.
    • Lord Toede has Toede being brought Back from the Dead to star in his own novel.
    • The Dark Queen stars Takhisis, Queen of Darkness herself as she spends her time plotting to escape from the Abyss.

• Voluntary Shapeshifting: Many dragons are capable of voluntarily shifting into mortals forms. Notably Silvara is actually an old silver dragon polymorphed into a Kagonesti elf and spends the majority of her screentime in that form.
• Walking the Earth: After the War of the Lance and having been spurned by Gilthanas, Silva took to roam the world without aim, seeking to help people whenever she could. She eventually settled in Castle Eastwatch under the persona of a human Solamnic Knight of The Rose called Arlena Plata, assisting in the fight against the Dragon Overlord Gellidus. Gilthanas himself, having regret rejecting her spends most of Gilthanas Odyssey trying to retrace her journey and they do eventually reunite in the Dragons of a New Age trilogy.
• Warrior Princess: Laurana. Her distant ancestor Princess Vixa from The Dargonesti is another good example, suggesting it runs in the family.

• Whatevermancy: Pyromancy, Hyrdomancy, Cryomancy, Spectramancy, Geomancy, Aeromancy, etc.
• What Measure Is A Nonhuman: The first book applies this rather harshly, complete with the line "I don't consider myself a murderer. Goblins don't count." However, Depending on the Writer this can be averted.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Jaymes Markham gets this after he uses a Love Potion on someone. He uses the potion to seduce a woman who was in an important position, which would help him accomplish his goals. But, this is basically raping her, as she had no control over herself when she was under the effect of the potion. She calls him on it when the potion wears off. This is also heavily debated in the fanbase, between 'she wanted to at the time, even if she was on drugs' and 'Jaymes should be castrated'. In the end, when the potion wears off, they remain married, but live apart. Jaymes shacks up with the witch who really loved him and gave him the love potion, and his wife lives with her priestess friend in the Temple of Kiri-Jolith. So really, it seems like in the end, they all had no problem with it, since it saved Solammnia or something.
• White Magician Girl: Goldmoon is a cleric with healing power and a kind nature.
• Who Wants to Live Forever?: Berem Everman, in the Dragonlance Chronicles trilogy as well as the adventures it was based on, is immortal due to having a piece of the foundation stone from the Temple of Darkness embedded in his chest. He's not at all happy about it... in fact, in the Chronicles, he's more than willing to replace the stone to seal the gate to the Abyss, killing himself in the process.
• Why Won't You Die?: Takhisis, to Huma. See Determinator above.
• Wife Husbandry: After the Male Draconians find the Female Draconian's eggs and let them hatch. They then raise them so that they can eventually breed with them. There were initially only Male Draconians made, so the race would have died out if they had not sought out the Female eggs that were made, but never allowed to hatch.

• With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: Raistlin's unrelenting desire for power leads him to an epic Face–Heel Turn, betraying his brother, his friends and a woman who loved him, and nearly destroying the world by killing the Gods and taking their place: starting with the Dark Queen. Only The Power of Love (and Time Travel) could stop him.
• Wizard Duel: Raistlin and Fistandantilus have one in Time of the Twins. Coryn and Hoarst have an even more epic one at the end of The Measure and the Truth. It involves them flying through different planes of existence and culminates in outer space with them flying around the moons of Krynn.
• Wonder Twin Powers: Opening the portal to the Abyss requires a Mage of pure evil and a Cleric of pure goodness to work together.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Raistlin admittedly deserves some of the things that happen to him, but at some point, his becoming a god to spite reality becomes understandable.
• World's Most Beautiful Woman: Laurana is described as being this.
• World Sundering: The Spelljammer Wiki reveals that Zivilyn, an outer planet in Krynn's crystal sphere where the titular deity resides, was home to people who tried to challenge the gods much like the Kingpriest did. They failed and now Zivilyn, once a normal terrestrial ball planet, is a series of floating islands floating in clouds.

• Worthless Yellow Rocks: Gold becomes devalued after the Cataclysm due to it not being useful for practical purposes. At first, a barter economy was used, and later Steel coins become the common currency on Ansalon.
• Worthy Opponent:
  • The Knights of Takhisis, at least originally. Though devoted to an evil goddess and imperialistic they had a strong sense of honor and treated their subjects sternly but not barbarically. After the disastrous War of Chaos (that saw the Knights lose both their leader and goddess) they slowly degenerated into a band of brutal thugs and sellswords. At least until Mina came along.
    • The Minotaurs view anyone who can give them a good fight like this, especially the Solamnic Knights. Extends to the Minotaur's god, too. Sargonnas views Paladine and Kiri-Jolith as worthy opponents, and vice-versa.
• Wound That Will Not Heal: Raistlin punishes his apprentice Dalamar for spying on him by burning five holes into Dalamar's chest with his fingers, leaving five permanently seeping wounds.

• Yandere: Gair Graymist from The Silver Stair becomes this for Camilla Weoledge after he starts to delve into Necromantic magic and becomes Axe-Crazy. He plans to kill her and keep her spirit by him; fortunately, he does not succeed.
• You All Meet in an Inn: Fitting the novels' tabletop RPG origins, much of the course of the War of the Lance is touched off by the gathering of the Heroes of the Lance at the Inn of the Last Home. In this case it's justified by the fact that for most of the heroes, it's a reunion at a familiar gathering place rather than their first meeting, and most of the rest of it is arranged by the personal intervention of Paladine himself.
• You Are in Command Now: When Sturm gives command to Laurana at the High Clerist's Tower and then again when Lord Gunthar appoints her to command the Whitestone Army.
• You Do Not Want To Know: During Dragons of a Fallen Sun, some of the characters hold a secret meeting in a tavern run by gully dwarves. The book then explains that despite gully dwarves' many faults, they are surprisingly good cooks - provided that you tell them specifically what you do not want them to put in your food, like rat meat. So they'll make you a meal that is not only edible but quite tasty, but the book says that if you watch the preparation of said meal you will not be able to enjoy it. It's also mentioned that the gully dwarves serve some decent dwarf spirits. The dwarf spirits are made from mushrooms. The mushrooms are grown in the bedrooms of the gully dwarves. If you are unfortunate enough to know this, it says, you would do well to avoid thinking about it too much and just enjoy your drink.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: At the end of Legends, Raistlin abandons a dying Crysania after she helps him enter the Abyss and protects him while he regains his magic. He actually tells her that almost she has outlived her usefulness to him just before he leaves.

• You Mean "Xmas": Yule (a winter holiday that greatly resembles Christmas, and uses an archaic name for it), Harvest-Come (Halloween, with the carving of faces onto gourds) and Spring Dawning (Easter).
• You Need to Get Laid: Raistlin. He tried it once. Didn't care for it. Though while in Istar, inhabiting an unravaged and healthy body, he's almost overwhelmed by lust for Crysania. Though even then, he analyzes his cravings in terms of his overall master plan: Banging the hot priestess, however much fun it would be, would not advance his Evil Plan, so he held off.

• Zombie Apocalypse: During Istar's rise to power, a black-robed mage created an army of the undead by collecting skeletons one by one in caves under Istar's western mountain ranges. He beat the Istar army multiple times, with every soldier that fell to his horde rising again to increase its size. The Lordcity itself would have fallen if the Knights of Solamnia hadn't arrived to break the siege.

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