The Birth Story of the Dragonlance

Did you know that Dragonlance, the unforgettable universe of TSR – now Wizards of the Coast – was actually created by a couple we know very well, after a cross-country road trip?

This couple is of course Tracy Hickman and his wife Laura Hickman. You will be surprised to hear the story of the creation of this epic universe.

DESPERATION

The birth of Dragonlance actually coincided with one of the most difficult periods in Tracy and Laura Hickman’s lives. In an interview with Matthew Peterson, Tracy explains;

The Dragonlance came about at a time when our lives were quite depressed and stressful, to be honest. My wife and I couldn’t find work, and we had been unemployed for a while, and we couldn’t support our family, but my wife and I wrote two game adventure modules and put them up for sale individually, without having to pay homage to anybody’s copyrights. But at that time we heard that the TSR company could buy these adventures for about 500 dollars, which was a lot of money for a man with nothing. And that winter, we couldn’t take our children to church because we didn’t even have money to buy shoes. So we sent these two adventure modules to TSR and hoped they would pay something so we could buy shoes for our children.

The two adventures were Rahasia and Pharoah. Mike Gray, now vice president of Hasbro, told the Hickmans at the time that they could sell these adventures more easily if they started working at TSR. Deciding to take this gamble, the Hickmans packed up their children and their belongings and set off in their car for a fresh start.

“As we drove across the plains, my wife and I thought, ‘What can we bring to this company to design games and make money from it?’ We were driving through the flat plains of Nebraska at the time, and that’s where we came up with the idea of warrior dragons flying into battle, and that’s where we started Dragonlance. In fact, the biggest factor in imagining this universe was the feeling of helplessness brought on by being unemployed for about 6 months and our hunger to create something new.”

BASEMENT-DWELLING CHEF OR GAME DESIGNER?

Tracy describes the rest of their journey as follows,

“A few days after we left our home in Utah, we went a little further south to my family in Orem. It was my aunt’s house and we said goodbye to our family there, but my parents were not as hopeful as we were about this journey. My father expressed his unhappiness in these words;

‘Son, don’t go to Wisconsin and fail. You have failed in everything you have ever done. If you fail in Wisconsin, I don’t have the strength to lift you up again. So why don’t you give it up, take your family and settle here? You can live in my basement. I know the owner of a restaurant here, and there’s a chef position open. So I had two options, take my family across the country and become a game designer or become a chef living in my father’s basement. It wasn’t too hard for me to make that decision. I knew I had to be good at something, and I had to prove it, so off we went, a journey between the life we left behind and the future where the Dragonlance would be born. But we still didn’t know how this would save us.

Along the way we encountered many difficulties, the weather conditions were challenging. When we arrived at the end of three days in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, TSR’s home, it was St. Patrick’s Day and a snowstorm met us.

We put our young children in the hotel room TSR had reserved for us. That evening, I went out to find food to feed my family because we couldn’t afford to eat at the hotel. I found a Chinese restaurant called Su Wing’s and ordered takeout. For dessert, I bought Hostess Ding-Dongs from a local market. We told our children that the Ding-Dongs wrapped in foil were actually “Blarney Stones.” We kissed the stones and then, laughing, we opened them and ate them.”

(Blarney Stone: A stone believed to be sacred and believed to bring good luck when kissed)

The Hickmans were not the only ones facing difficulties. Margaret Weis, another member of the Dragonlance creative team, was also going through her own difficult times,

“I had gone through a difficult divorce, I was a single mom with two kids, and I wanted to get out of Dodge, and then I applied to TSR, where I saw the Dungeons and Dragons game and realized how much work had gone into it, so I applied for the book editor job, interviewed with Jean Black, and got the job. I borrowed money from my parents and moved to Lake Geneva with my kids. My first paycheck wasn’t due for two weeks, so we lived off my daughter’s birthday money. Then I was sent as a book editor to work on the Dragonlance project with a guy named Tracy Hickman (laughs here) and I listened to him talk about Raistlin, Caramon, Sturm and Tanis and I fell in love.”

DON’T FORGET TO KISS YOUR BLARNEY STONES

Tracy Hickman, Laura Hickman and Margaret Weis went on to write novels and plays in many other settings, but Tracy never forgot her humble roots,

“Since then, we have celebrated St. Patrick’s Day with Chinese food. Even though the Ding-Dongs are no longer wrapped in foil, we kiss them as if they were Blarney stones before we eat them. We do it every year to remember those desperate times and to look forward to a brighter and more hopeful tomorrow.

Now I look back at the past, especially the car trip we took, and I feel like saying that classic but profoundly meaningful quote: “What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.”