The late Karen Wynn Fonstad’s Atlas of the Dragonlance World (1987) is one of many Dragonlance tie-in books produced by TSR. Most of them are a little odd. I used to think this one was, too (and dryyyyyy), but I have changed my mind. This is maybe my favorite Dragonlance sourcebook.

Fonstad was a Midwestern city planner who has four other atlases to her credit: Middle Earth, Pern, the Forgotten Realms and Stephen R. Donaldson’s The Land. Like those, this is an exhaustive cartographic project, tackling every major location from the novels and a ton of minor ones.

There’s so much going on here that I love. The minimal, yet odd color palette is primo. Fonstad’s general approach to map making is wild. Some are pretty straightforward, others are gonzo, drawn from weird perspectives, with cut outs and 3D modeling. Honestly, there are plenty of maps in this book that I plain don’t understand. They verge on psychedelic.

I don’t really know why this exists. I don’t think it is very practical as a game supplement. I suspect it had limited appeal for folks who just read the books. But I am super grateful that it exists.