This is Tales of the Lance (1992), one of surprisingly few Dragonlance box sets. Despite being the foundation of a wildly successful fiction line, TSR never really figured out what to do with Dragonlance as a campaign setting – the original modules were intended for pre-generated characters and that was something the setting struggled to shed throughout its history. Also, the divergence between the core modules, the fiction line and supplemental material wound up causing a bit of confusion among players.

Tales of the Lance was an attempt to reset the setting, jettisoning weak or contradictory material and refocusing on the good stuff. Because of this, not much of this is new, but I think overall the reorganization is an excellent effort. It still splits its time between pre-generated characters from the novels and custom characters, but support for the latter feels more robust than what was found in Dragonlance Adventures (1987).

Most of the art is recycled, of course. But the rulebook has a good number of these tiny, generic character illustrations and I kind of love them for reasons I can’t quite convey. Then there are the maps. I don’t generally get jazzed about the poster maps from box sets (partly because they are so big) and I don’t usually shoot them for the feed (entirely because they are so big), but these are something special – wild collections of stuff smooshed onto the page. I am particularly fond of the two best-of compilations from the Atlas (more on that later in the week).

If you gotta own one Dragonlance product, I think this is it.