Dragonlance: A Map of Krynn

Krynn is the world on which the events of the Dragonlance Saga take place. A Dungeons and Dragons campaign setting, Krynn was created by TSR, Inc. in 1984 to serve as the backdrop for an epic saga of heroes, villains, dragons and mighty battles: the War of the Lance. Chronicled in both a bestselling novels trilogy (The Dragonlance Chronicles by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman) and a hugely popular D&D adventure module series, the saga served as a major entry point for many readers to both the world of D&D and to fantasy literature itself. With almost 30 million copies sold, Weis and Hickman’s Dragonlance material is among the biggest-selling fantasy series of all time.

A map of Krynn. Please click for a larger version

Dragonlance became a mainstay of D&D, with the setting revisited multiple times. After the release of D&D 3rd Edition in 2000, Margaret Weis’s own company, Sovereign Press, was licensed by Wizards of the Coast to produce more Dragonlance material. This licence was terminated in 2008, the last year in which new Dragonlance RPG material was published. There have also been exactly 200 novels and short story anthologies published set in the Dragonlance world, with the last of these being released in 2010. Despite rumours, there are no signs of the campaign setting being revived for novels or RPG material in the near future, which is a shame.

The principle setting for most Dragonlance material is the small continent of Ansalon, located deep in Krynn’s southern hemisphere and attached to the southern polar icecap by the Icewall glacier. Many years later the continent of Taladas, located north-west of Ansalon, was added to the setting. In the 2000s, following the suspension of official support for the setting by rights-holders Wizards of the Coast, the active fan community at Dragonlance Nexus (original site, current) created the much-discussed but never seen continent of Adlatum, located east of Taladas and north-west of Ansalon.

Krynn is a small planet, merely 7,200 miles in circumference or slightly larger than our Moon (at 6,783 miles). That would make Krynn somewhat more than one-quarter but somewhat less than one-third the size of Earth. The size of Krynn is drawn from the size of Ansalon, which has been pinned down in the novels and in particular Karen Wynn Fonstad’s excellence and authoritative The Atlas of the Dragonlance World (1987).

The world map is based on the work of Justin Parkoff and the team at Dragonlance Nexus, who revised the size of Krynn so it has enough space to fit the other continents and also allow Ansalon to sprawl from the southern icecap into the tropics, despite the continent’s small size.

Next up will be a map expanding on Ansalon after the Cataclysm, at the time of the War of the Lance.

 

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