The War of the Lance is over, but the Dragonlance line lives on with DL15: Mists of Krynn (1988, a full two years after DL14). Basically, after the success of the DL-series, TSR wanted to continue making Dragonlance products. The first thing out was Dragonlance Adventures (1987), which opened up the game world to custom character generation. After that, the characters needed something to do, hence this anthology of short adventures (DL16 follows suit as well, but we’ll have to visit that another time — it’s worth the wait, I promise!).

This anthology is a mess. Which is fitting because Dragonlance was always a mess aspiring to ever greater levels of messiness. Taking an ill-advised page from Middle-Earth Roleplaying, the various short scenarios take place in a variety of time periods. During the war, after the war, one right after the Cataclysm. There are Book of Lairs-style monster encounters, too. And the range of levels here is 1 to 15. There’s no through-line. It’s just a bunch of random stuff. A lot of it is undercooked.

Worse, and this is something that generally plagues many Dragonlance products from now through the start of Fifth Age: There is barely any art in this thing, and whats there is just small spot illustrations of items. It’s a big step down. Even the maps are underwhelming. The awesome cover painting by Den Beauvais carries a LOT of the load, but you can’t expect it to carry the entire book!