Dragons of Mystery (DL5) describes itself as an Official Game Accessory. It is one of the most unusual releases from TSR: a 32-page sourcebook for the Dragonlance series of adventures.

It is also a product I love dearly, flawed though it is.

The Dragonlance series was TSR’s first attempt to tell a major narrative adventure path. At the time of the release of Dragons of Mystery, the first four adventures were in print, and a further eight more adventures in the series, plus a war game, were still to come. Dragons of Mystery came out in December 1984, one month after the release of Dragons of Autumn Twilight, the first of the Dragonlance novels. It aimed to give you an informative resource to run the adventures with the pregenerated characters.

Dragons of Mystery gives character sheets and backgrounds for twelve of the story’s key characters: The core eight characters (Tanis, Caramon, Raistlin, Flint, Tas, Sturm, Goldmoon, and Riverwind), plus additional heroes that became important as the story progressed (Elistan, Laurana, Gilthanis, and Tika).

The product gives a great deal of attention to their backgrounds and personalities. Each of their game statistics take up less than a quarter of a page. Half of the page contains a black-and-white portrait of the character by Larry Elmore. The other quarter of the page is devoted to their history and personality.

You can see from the novels how important these are – Dragonlance may have a great story, but it’s the characters that bring it to life.

But in a gaming product? How well does that work?

TSR didn’t know at the time. The gaming landscape was full of players used to making and playing their own characters. And the reactions I’ve generally seen is that this is still what they want to do. Players were and are more interested in creating their own characters than using predefined ones.

Yes, you can have players who enjoy inhabiting roles others have defined. It was something I experienced several times when playing convention modules. And with players that are interested in experiencing and exploring predefined stories and characters, this can be fantastic. You can see people playing in this style all the time now. What else do you make of The Last of Us or God of War?

But after Dragonlance, you don’t see TSR publishing modules with predefined characters for the players to play, with very few exceptions. This was the experiment, and I feel that despite the love for the Dragonlance novels and settings, the idea of playing the characters of the story did not make enough people happy.

I’m in the camp of “I’d like to try it.” And, honestly, if you’re going to publish a sourcebook about the heroes, I think this is a pretty good example. Apart from the twelve characters, we get a five-page description of how the heroes met, which includes a lot of the backstory that makes sense of the start of Dragons of Despair. That adventure is rather rough to start without the information here.

Apart from all the player-focussed material, the book also has some advice for Dungeon Masters running the adventures, although this is primarily focussed on the first four adventures. It’s particularly interesting to look at a session-by-session breakdown of how the designers thought the adventures might be paced: Five sessions for Dragons of Despair, four for Dragons of Flame, four for Dragons of Hope, and five for Dragons of Desolation. Some of the breakdowns seem more likely than others. In particular, Dragons of Despair is so non-linear in the beginning that it’s hard to see the story beats being hit like that. And the beginning of Dragons of Flame is so lacking in material that two sessions just to get characters to Qualinost seems like stretching the material beyond breaking point.

Yes, I know I run adventures faster than most. But still, it doesn’t take eight hours to read all that boxed text (with little interaction from the characters).

It explicitly assumes four-hour sessions here, by the way.

So, while the breakdown is of doubtful value, it has some historical interest.

Far more useful are the notes on running dragons, which during the days of AD&D, was of great use to most DMs. For back in the day, a lot of DMs were dreadful at running them. AD&D dragons had a host of issues – not least of which were poor hit point totals. Yes, they could do some damage, but if you weren’t careful dragon fights could turn into disappointments. The book includes expanded dragon rules, although some require a lot of adjudication from the DM. For instance, it suggests that in dusty environments, the dragon can flap its wings to create a dust cloud to blind fighters and disrupt spell-casters. This is something that wasn’t in the rules before, and no rules appear here for the DM. They just have to work out the mechanics themselves.

We also get advice of how to use one of the most controversial rules of the series: Obscure Death. The reasoning for Obscure Death is obvious enough. When a character important to the story dies, you need to find some way for them to survive. It shows the problems with story-first adventures in D&D: There are times the players are really good at disrupting things. And it applied to both player and non-player characters.

The odd thing about Obscure Death is how rarely it was useful. For almost all of the Heroes of the Lance, the adventures blithely don’t assume their participation. There are a couple of times when one of the villains could die prematurely, but it’s rare. I can see why they thought it was needed, but it caused a lot of ill-will towards the series. It would be removed from later adventures.

I do get a feeling from the entire series of the authors changing course as it continued. There say that they’ll reveal more about Raistlin’s connection with Fistandantilus, for instance. Well, we saw that in the novels, but most of these crucial character details are hardly seen in the adventures. In some cases, like with Raistlin, it’s because that connection was far too complicated to implement in the adventures.

Apart from the 32-page booklet, Dragons of Mystery includes a small poster map of the continent of Ansalon, upon which the adventures take place. (The heroes will end up visiting a lot of it). It’s not a great map, but it gives you an idea of the layout. Finally, the inner cover includes the constellations of Krynn – a constellation for each of the gods of good and evil. The gods of magic get moons, the neutral gods get planets. These constellations are particularly notable because the stars picking out Takhisis and Paladine, the main gods of evil and good, are marked in red. That’s because they’re meant to be missing – a little bit of information that is nowhere to be found in this product or any of the adventures!

It’s only in the final adventure of the series that it actually implies that they have been missing throughout the saga! Readers of the novels had a much better idea of what was going on than the poor DMs trying to run the adventures!

There’s so much ambition here. But readers of Dragons of Mystery would not be aware that a lot of the hints for future story developments would not come to pass – at least, not in the adventures. The foundation it lays can be used effectively by players in the adventures to give extra resonance to the encounters and situations they face, even if the adventures were not truly taking advantage of this work.

Dragons of Mystery is flawed, both in its ambitions and in the support it got going forward. But it is still one of my favourite products of this series; I love the characters, and think this does an amazing job of fleshing them out. Recommended!