Dragonlance: A Map of Ansalon

Last time in our cartographic exploration of Dragonlance, I published a map of the whole world of Krynn. This time around our focus is on the continent of Ansalon, the principle location for the events in the Dragonlance novels and tabletop gaming materials.

A map of Ansalon. Please click for a (much, much) larger version.

Ansalon is a small continent located in Krynn’s southern hemisphere. It was once a much larger continent, but approximately 351 years before the events of the first Dragonlance novel, Dragons of Autumn Twilight, the gods became incensed by the arrogance of the Kingpriest of Istar and dropped a flaming mountain onto eastern Ansalon, the very heart of the Empire. The resulting explosion tore Ansalon apart, created new seas and causing untold destruction. This event, the Cataclysm, wiped out much of the population and destroyed Istar and weakened its great western rivals, Ergoth and Solamnia. In the wake of the Cataclysm, the gods turned their back on Krynn and would no longer heed the prayers of their faithful.

Unbeknown to the other gods, these events had been engineered by Takhisis, the five-headed dragon goddess, to permit her return to Krynn, which she wished to rule over alone. Over the next three and a half centuries, she carefully built up a power base of worshippers and minions in Ansalon, headed by dozens of chromatic dragons. They in turn seized the central, mountainous Khalkist region and used this as a fortress to recruit armies and strike at surrounding lands. By the autumn of 351 AC the dragonarmies had overrun much of central and eastern Ansalon, and neutralised much of the west through pacts and treaties. In The Dragonlance Chronicles (both the adventures and novels), a band of heroes from the town of Solace in Abanasinia are drawn into the conflict and eventually rally the free nations to make a stand against the invaders and prevent Takhisis’ return to Krynn. During the conflict, the other gods also resume their contact with Krynn and the good-aligned metallic dragons join forces with the free kingdoms. The heroes also recover the “dragonlances,” powerful weapons which neutralised the advantage of the chromatic dragons in battle.

Subsequent Dragonlance novels have explored the history of the world backwards in time for thousands of years and forward for over a hundred, through the Second Cataclysm and the War of Souls.

 

Mapping Ansalon

Ansalon is one of the most heavily-mapped lands in all of fantasy. Maps of the continent accompanied both the Dragonlance adventure modules for the Dungeons & Dragons game system and the Dragonlance Chronicles novel series by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, which both began in 1984. Two hundred novels and many dozens of gaming materials followed until the last new Dragonlance material was published in 2010, mapping the continent in whole or in part.

This map drew on several resources: Karen Wynn Fonstad’s Atlas of the Dragonlance World (1987), the Tales of the Lance boxed set (1992) and Tasslehoff’s Map Pouch: The War of the Lance (2006). Fonstad’s map was the earliest attempt to seriously tackle the geography of Ansalon, that is, make it work as a realistic landscape in its own right (Fonstad had done the same previously for Middle-earth, Pern and Donaldson’s The Land, and would go on to do the same for Forgotten Realms). However, as a relatively early publication it is missing many locations added by later writers.

Tales of the Lance has one of the most gloriously huge and detailed fantasy maps ever seen, to the point where it seems the artist ran out of time. The map is clearly unfinished, with unnamed locations all over the place. However, some feel this adds to the mystique of the map.

Tasslehoff’s Map Pouch was a series of maps released by Sovereign Press (Margaret Weis’s company) when they acquired the licence to published third-party Dragonlance material for the 3rd edition of Dungeons and Dragons, between 2003 and 2010. The map series featured maps of Ansalon during all three of its main eras of interest: the Age of Might before the Cataclysm; the Age of Mortals after the Second Cataclysm; and the Age of Despair, also the time of the War of the Lance and the most iconic period of Dragonlance history. The War of the Lance map takes the 1992 map and finishes it off, which is great, but the art style is, to be honest, something of an acquired taste. The coastlines are also a great deal less detailed than the Tales of the Lance and Atlas versions.

To create this map I drew on all three sources and on the Dragonlance Lexicon, an invaluable online fan resource run by the team at Dragonlance Nexus.

Thank you for reading The Atlas of Ice and Fire. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods, which will also get you exclusive content weeks before it goes live on my blogs.

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.

 

Thank you for reading The Atlas of Ice and Fire. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods, which will also get you exclusive content weeks before it goes live on my blogs.