The second volume in the Dragonlance chronicles trilogy, and the second book set in the Dragonlance universe as a whole, this one comes out just a few months after late-1984’s Dragons of Autumn Twilight. These are coming out so fast (the third volume also comes out this year) that there is no pretence of these following the adventure modules anymore.

If the first volume ended just as the corresponding AD&D game modules were coming out, this volume jumps to the future after the last published modules and has our characters start out the novel in Winter, on a ship carrying a dragon orb after returning the Hammer of Kharas to Thorbardin. These events actually happened between the novels and if you want a detailed account of them you have to either read the already released adventure modules or wait a bunch of years for a short story collection that will fill in the gaps.

As a middle book in a trilogy it suffers from a lot of the problems of those books, it doesn’t have the appeal of the original with its worldbuilding and introduction of characters, and it also feels like taking the characters from point A to point B so that we can have a final showdown in the third volume. Fortunately it also has some good things that can happen in good middle volumes (a bit like in Empire Strikes Back), it’s smart enough to end the book with a strong emotional punch through the loss of one of our heroes, as well as having all other characters in such a downtrodden position that you need to read the third book to follow that glimmer of hope.