1977, Tracy hickmann, a Mormon who just returned from preaching in the Indonesian islands in the South Pacific, married his high school girlfriend Laura. From 65438 to 0979, Sickmann worked as a manager in a small theater in Utah, earning so little that he could hardly support his eldest daughter and pregnant wife. At that time, they couldn't afford most of the entertainment. In order to make his wife and daughter happy, Sickmann began to make up stories in his spare time. In these stories, soldiers rode dragons to kill each other, but at that time, these stories were only used to coax children.
198 1 year, the theater served by Sickmann closed, and Sickmann lost his job. He heard that TSR (Tactical Studies and Rule, a company that designs paper games, and the famous Dungeons and Dragons is their product) is accepting contributions from non-professionals, so he sent two game settings designed by himself and his wife to TSR's headquarters (Lake Geneva, Wisconsin). He only hoped to earn a few hundred dollars to support his family, but TSR's response made him overjoyed: the company appreciated Sickmann's talent very much and invited him to join their work team. Hickmann was ecstatic, immediately packed his bags and drove to Wisconsin with his wife. Along the way, he excitedly discussed and imagined how to design the most popular game for the company that saved their family. According to Sickmann's memory, perhaps it was on the road in Iowa that the prototype of the dragon gun world was born.
At that time, TSR made a market survey, and the results showed that readers wanted to see more dragons. After the results of this survey were discussed by the company's top management, TSR decided to start designing games that meet the requirements in news product design. After heated discussion, the proposal of a new employee in the design department was unanimously supported: this is a trilogy story called Eye of the Dragon. The employee's name is Sickmann, and he just moved here from Utah.
Therefore, Harold Qiang Sen and Sickmann, managers of the new product design department, spent a weekend discussing the new plan. Both of them are tired of paper games that only focus on killing now. In order to prevent the new game from falling into the ridiculous pattern of "killing Yi Long every day", they decided to design a game that is not just about going into the Dragon Cave to kill the dragon and win the treasure: the game contains a main story, and various races form an expedition to find an ancient sacred object to drive away the legendary dragon. Because some dragons in many previous games were too weak, the two decided to arrange for these awesome beasts to appear in the future. After constantly rendering to create an atmosphere, players will face them, and they will be more dangerous than any monsters in the past.
At the same time, the production team also put forward an unprecedented approach-pre-setting the role to be played by the player. These characters are heroes in the story, and each character represents a race in the setting (including soldiers, wizards, priests, etc. ). This decision was controversial at first, because in the previous game settings, players played their own designed roles, and opponents thought that players would not be willing to play these roles specified by the game. Therefore, the designers made concessions, and they let the players freely choose whether to play these roles or bring their own roles into the world. The result is that players love these characters so much that they often take them to other adventure settings.
At this point, Sickmann and Harlow must submit a proposal to the senior managers. In order to let these people know the general appearance of the dragon gun world, they jointly searched for Larry Elmore, a popular painter under TSR at that time. Although his works are not as good as those of Boli Oye Lo and Luis Royo, they are still quite standard. ) I hope he can draw some sketches with game characters as the main body. The two spent an afternoon explaining to Larry the setting and face of the world; Larry is also excited about this plan. He used his weekend vacation time to draw four paintings, which are the first four of the dragon gun.
The senior management of TSR appreciated the plan and decided to put Sickmann in charge of game development, and let him be the team leader to lead a larger design team. The original plan has also been expanded: the original plan has been changed from three sets of games to twelve sets, in addition to a full-color calendar, three novels and various short articles, models and toys. Therefore, the new design team began the process of creating dragon guns.
The dragon gun project is unprecedented. No game design company has ever created a complete set of products and released toys, game systems and novels at the same time. So the difficulties encountered by designers are unprecedented. With everyone's efforts, the world of dragon gun Krynn began to take shape.
Klein has three basic values in this world, and all creatures in the world follow this norm. Elves represent absolute good, orcs represent absolute evil, and human beings have the right to freely choose the two camps of good and evil. Dragons are the tallest creatures in nature and belong to three different camps. The main characters in the story also have good and evil natures respectively. Tanis, the semi-elf who leads these characters, has both human and elf blood, so he often suffers from two different natures.
With the development of the game, each character began to show his face. Games must be tried and played constantly, and many characters are endowed with personality and characteristics by the people who play them. One night, Sickmann's good friend Terri Philips tested the game with the design team in his apartment. He played a weak and evil wizard with a hoarse voice. This is the prototype of the most popular mage in the story, the philosophy of Raistlin Ma. Terry hypnotized a group of dwarves by magic that day, so he was added to the novel.
Margaret Weis, another important author of the dragon gun series, joined the team in the autumn of 1983. Margaret Weiss 1970 graduated from Missouri State University, majoring in writing and literature. 1972 to 1983, as the advertising director and editor of independent county branch of Pioneer Publishing Company. 1983, TSR company hired Weiss as the editor of the publishing department in order to better develop its growing book publishing department (TSR was founded ten years ago and has begun to enter the publishing ranks of fantasy novels). TSR Company assigned this experienced screenwriter to join the dragon gun development team in order to guide the novel part and participate in plot planning. At that time, this group was really a strange party for her. Michael Williams likes to wear red suspenders, Doug niles has a bushy beard, and Sickmann is used to putting his feet on the table when he speaks. Fortunately, she quickly blended in with these friendly freaks and prepared to take over as the producer of this novel.
TSR Company's initial idea was to contact all writers who were interested in the project and ask them to write a short story for the group's reference, but the result was not satisfactory. Each author's article is unique, but it doesn't meet the design team's expectations, so Sickmann and Weiss decided to do it themselves. In just one weekend, the two co-wrote the prelude and the first five chapters of "Autumn Nightingale". Looking back now, they themselves find this speed incredible. Maybe it's because they already have a plan for the story and think like a spring when they write it.
After reading the stories in these five chapters, the top management of TSR Company boldly decided to give the novel to these two newcomers to write. The cooperation between hickmann and Weiss is not smooth. At first, Weiss was a professional writer. Sickmann thought that he would be a game designer all his life, so most of his writing was done by Weiss (which is why Weiss' authors rank is always ahead of Sickmann). When they cooperate, Sickmann will write the outline and main points of the story first, and then discuss with Weiss to finalize the plot. Weiss then wrote the first draft of the plot, while Sickmann provided the scene and worldview. After the first draft is completed, Sickmann will review and answer Weiss' questions, and finally Weiss will write the final draft. However, Sickmann later discovered that he was also interested in writing, so their cooperation mode was reversed in some other works, but the order of the authors' signatures did not change.
At the beginning of the plan, neither of them had experience in writing novels, so they made many mistakes. They thought that the story was to copy the actions in the game, but later they found that this introduced too many characters (which is why the adventure team was later separated), which dazzled the readers and brought trouble to the author: almost everywhere, they had to count their heads to remind themselves not to miss any role. Once, Weiss completely ignored a character in her second novel. As a result, they had to proofread the whole story again. Finally, in order to simplify the story, the plot of 100 page was deleted from the first novel alone.
At this point, the whole group settled down and began to arrange props for the topic of "Dragon Gun". People originally wanted to set this weapon to have magical power and send out a powerful beam with dragon vitality as energy; But the two authors are unanimously opposed, because it is not like fantasy novel, but more like science fiction. So Larry, the painter who painted the dragon gun, redesigned the weapon. He strives for perfection and pays attention to details. Finally, he not only designed the dragon gun, but also attached a saddle, shield and air combat mode to the dragon's back. The planned game consists of twelve episodes, and the novel takes the form of trilogy. However, to be on the safe side, the editor-in-chief in charge of planning asked the two authors to think about the ending of the first novel first, and the whole system is expected to end after the fourth episode. This is because TSR won't lose much in case of system failure. At that time, some critics in the market were questioning the necessity of using default characters, and no one was optimistic about this novel written by two unknown writers.
1984 65438+ 10, the dragon gun calendar was launched. 1In August, 984, TSR Company promoted this game at its annual game fair Gen CON. The calendar and publicity were welcomed, and players were eager to see the true face of the novel. In autumn, the Dragon of Autumn Sunset was published. However, due to marketing problems, it took a long time for this novel to be put on the shelves. /kloc-at the beginning of 0/985, The Dragon in Autumn Sunset appeared on the best-seller list of The New York Times for dozens of weeks, followed by The Dragon in Winter Night and The Dragon in Spring Dawn.
Development history
If someone asks, "Which world is the most influential among non-players?" Then, the answer is undoubtedly the dragon gun series. In the United States, where the game Dungeons and Dragons has a great influence, the dragon gun novel is a necessary bibliography for most bookstores. In those countries where Dungeons and Dragons are not popular, dragon gun novels are probably the only Dungeons and Dragons products that can be seen. Dragon gun series novels are classics in fantasy literature, and their origins are similar to those of Forgotten Country series, which belong to the information content set for games. Dragon gun series novels are a dime a dozen, and there are more than 100 kinds of books officially recognized by TSR company, and related products (novels, short stories, related game bibliographies, etc. ) is still being introduced. To be sure, there will be a new series.
Although the dragon gun series has great influence outside the board game role-playing game (TRPG) players, at first it was made in strict accordance with the game settings. Different from the battle world in TSR's later period (such as Forgotten Country and Different Scenes), the Dragon Gun series did not launch the battle set first, and then launched the adventure module, but first launched a series of short adventure modules and novels with the same content to test the water market. This kind of sales method now seems to be very unfavorable to novels-neither the pioneer of campaign setting nor the adventure module launched at the same time. Success can only depend on the author's fame and the quality of the novel. What's more, the author of this new novel "Chronicle of the Dragon Gun" is two unknown novices in the field of games and novels. It is natural for TSR Company to be nervous and think twice when publishing. Fortunately, not only the novel itself became an instant hit, but also TSR launched new products for this series, creating a huge product series. It is worth mentioning that the Chronicle of the Dragon Gun is of great significance in the history of fantasy literature in Chinese-speaking areas: this work was translated by Mr. Zhu and introduced to Taiwan Province Province in the late 1990s, which initiated the translation and publication of modern English fantasy works, exposed China readers to western fantasy literature for the first time, and triggered a fantasy literature upsurge in recent years.
Perhaps inspired by the success of the Chronicle of the Dragon Gun, TSR Company published a new novel for the dragon gun series, which also caused the biggest difference between other battle worlds of the dragon gun series and Dungeons and Dragons-the product line of the dragon gun is not based on game settings, but on novels. Although TSR Company has also launched many game products after Dragon Gun Chronicle, most of them are adventure modules, and there are few additional information books introducing regions or organizations. Even the campaign set as a series of symbols was launched after a long time (and the background of the Dragon Gun Campaign was not used as the title), which was in sharp contrast to the regional set with a large number of "forgotten countries". In other words, the dragon gun series is based on stories, not the world background.
As far as the game setting itself is concerned, there are many differences between the dragon gun and other dungeons and dragons worlds, and the most obvious one is the dragon setting. As the core of the series, dragons are numerous and active in the dragon gun series, and the details are more detailed than other worlds, but the most striking thing is the dragon camp in the dragon gun novels. In Klein's world, the good and evil of dragons are absolute. There are only metal dragons representing goodness and colored dragons representing evil, and there are no gem dragons belonging to the neutral camp that appear in other worlds. The mage camp on Klein is also very clear. Mages of each camp will wear robes of their own camp color and can only draw strength from the moon to which their camp belongs. There are almost no specialized wizards who specialize in a certain magic genre here, and only a few so-called "gray robe wizards" who do not belong to the mage Council will become specialized wizards. Another feature of Klein's magic is "weakness". Many people think that the magical power on Klein is the weakest among all the dungeons and dragons, and it is far from the powerful magical worlds such as Taurel (Forgotten Country World) and Artaz (Sunset World). Even Ossie, who is not good at magic, is much better than it. For example, in The Legend of the Dragon Gun, Raistlin tried his best to find dimension door, and almost all really powerful wizards in Feudjou could do it by casting spells. The weakness of magic power may be related to the intervention of Klein gods. Some books in the "Forgotten Country" series mentioned that Klein's God "sent" too powerful wizards to Feudjou.
The novel The Dragon of Xia Yan completely changed Klein's history, which made Klein enter the fifth issue and created a new series of dragon guns: Dragon Gun: the fifth issue. The brand of the new series has not only changed, but also the game system has completely changed. AD &；; D system, not SAGA system, which is easier to attract novel readers to play games. SAGA system does not use dice, but uses a card called "destiny card" to play games, but the sales of this new system are very poor, and it was finally abolished by TSR company. After the release of the third edition of Dungeons and Dragons Rules, WotC (the company that merged TSR) announced that the third edition of Dungeons and Dragons would be the official system, but then announced that it would not release any new game books for dragon guns (that is, canceled the game product line of dragon guns). Finally, Tracy Sickmann, one of the authors of Dragon Gun Chronicle, said that she would continue to write new game settings and adventure modules for Dragon Gun and publish them in Dungeons and Dragons magazine.
Since the dragon gun series is based on novels, the number of novels is naturally large. Its storyline book includes three parts: The first part is the chronicle of the Dragon Gun trilogy (the dragon in autumn dusk, the dragon in winter night and the dragon in spring dawn), which tells the story of the Battle of Lance. It is similar to a reference book when playing role-playing games on paper. The story basically adopts a formula of homeless people saving the world, that is, the routine of "the dragon ravaged the world, and the hero set out to find the legendary artifact to save the world". However, because the works successfully depict the imperfect characters of the protagonists, readers have recognized and sang. The second part is The Dragon of Xia Yan, which was published on 1996, thirteen years after the publication of The Dragon at Autumn Sunset, which can be regarded as a final story. In the past thirteen years, Tracy Sickmann and Margaret Weiss have co-authored several novels related to the dragon gun series, including the famous trilogy "The Legend of the Dragon Gun", but these works are almost supplements to Klein's history. Therefore, the book Dragon of Xia Yan, which tells the story after the Battle of Pike, naturally caused a great sensation and rushed to the bestseller list. In this book, the two authors continue to describe the battle of chaos. Different from the Dragon Gun Chronicle trilogy, many old readers have extremely low evaluation of this book, because they can't stand the author's "murder" of Tanis and Tess, their favorite characters. The third part is the Soul Wars series (Dragon of Sunset, Dragon of Meteor, Dragon of Lost Moon), still written by Tracy hickmann and Margaret Weiss, two original authors of the Dragon Gun series, describing the story after forty years of chaos. The trilogy Legend of the Dragon Gun, after Chronicle of the Dragon Gun, is actually just one of the subsidiary works outside the main line. Because it is a sequel, it doesn't start with TRPG, so there are not many new characters in the book, but the characterization of the characters is more profound and successful, so it has become one of the most successful novels in the dragon gun series. In addition, the required reading works include the trilogy "Battle of Chaos" co-authored by Margaret Weiss and Don Perrin, and the trilogy "Dragon of the New Era" by Jean Rabe. There are thirteen collections of short stories in this series.
There are many computer games in the dragon gun series. Like other types of products in this series, the computer game "Dragon Gun" is also based on the main story line. Legend of the Dragon Gun Hero, Fire Dragon and Phantom Wizard are all action games, and players control the dragon gun hero against Long Jun. The Battle of the Long Spears is a strategy game, while Flying Dragon Knight is an aerial shooting game. There are three computer role-playing games in the Dragon Gun series: Crane Hero, Ghost Knight and Crane after Darkness. Among them, Heroes of Klein is very successful, and After the Dark of Klein can be said to be a typical "good game destroyed by program errors".