DL5: Dragons of Mystery is a Dragonlance sourcebook. This is weird for a couple of reasons.

For starters, you’d think the series would have led with this, since it has lots of information on the pre-generated characters and how they met (is…Raistlin smiling in that group photo style illustration??), the world, the dragons and religions of Krynn. All of which play a part in the DL1-4. So releasing this after the fact seems like, well, too late.

On the other hand, DL1-4 are practically drowning in lore (and poems and songs with sheet music), and actually wind up covering most of the material in this book (albeit in a heavy-handed, expository way).

This is a good example of how disorganized Dragonlance was from the start. On one hand, I want to give them the benefit of the doubt and acknowledge that hindsight is 20/20 and it is super easy to point out production problems for a trailblazing product decades down the road and after best practices have long been established. On the other hand, I dunno, it does seem particularly messy even after allowing for all that. And the fact that TSR never really figured out how to do Dragonlance properly after the initial run of modules seems to point at some intrinsic flaw. I really love Dragonlance as novels, but damn, imagine if someone could have figured out how to do the RPG it right?

It does have a very nice spread of the the constellations though.