Not being constantly online any more (i.e. always-on connection) has thrown a lot of my scheduling for a subtle loop. One effect of this is much less posting on my part -- because once I get online, I have people to talk to, boards to check, webcomics to read, LJ to gloss over -- stuff that would have been spread out over the course of the day is now much more compressed.

But I'm going to try to combat that. So, hope to see more regular posts for me -- and if not, you have my permission to send me threatening messages.

I read the new Dragonlance book (Dragons of a Vanished Moon, Book 3 of the War of Souls trilogy) and I'm impressed by where it ended up. For those of you who don't know, Dragonlance was a popular AD&D campaign world, with a literature that exceeded even the infamous Forgotten Realms banner characters. The main trilogies (Chronicles and Legends) came from Weis and Hickman themselves.

Now, around '96, TSR decided to use Dragonlance as an introduction to their new Saga system of card-based roleplaying. Standard AD&D systems such as magic were scrapped in favor of new magics. Enter Dragons of Summer Flame, the "bridge" novel to the new system, which told the story of what the heck happened (briefly, Chaos nearly destroyed Krynn, but was defeated -- but all the other gods left as well). Subsequent stories told of the Heroes of the Lance, or descendants, discovering the powers of mysticism and "wild magic" or sorcery...

But Saga was a flop, and Dragonlance more or less died. Then a couple of years ago, Weis and Hickman put out "Dragons of a Fallen Sun". This was the first step in the rebirth of the world -- because they'd gotten the rights to Dragonlance, and are planning to publish it again. And oooh, did they change the setting....

Not going to type details here because the book is so recent, but they shifted gears from the Chaos War in a remarkably interesting way... Ah well.

Not necessarily the best post to make on a return, but you got it anyway.

Woohoo, 60-odd episodes of Fraggle Rock!