The Shattered Chronicle of Krynn

Across all worlds touched by mortal hands, time inevitably blurs into fractured recollection: half-told tales, vanished chronicles, and the silent erasure of centuries. Yet nowhere is history so violently broken as on Krynn, for this world’s story was not merely forgotten. It was shattered in the conflagration known as the Cataclysm. Created, uplifted, and then hurled into ruin, Krynn bears the scars of divine wrath upon every coastline and every soul.

Most who now inhabit its healing lands seldom trouble themselves with ancient epochs. Hunger, fear, and fragile hope are concerns enough. But there remain sages, lorekeepers, and wandering chroniclers who sift through ruins, legends, and forbidden texts. They speak of Krynn’s long life as a tale of three great movements: the ages before the Cataclysm, the Cataclysm itself, and the grim, uncertain era that followed.

What follows is their attempt to piece the shattered chronicle together.

Before the Cataclysm

In the distant dawn before memory, Krynn’s earliest centuries passed into something scholars call mythohistory, a realm where fact and fable mingle so completely that none can say where one ends and the other begins. From these mists emerges the Age of Starbirth, the moment when, according to sacred verse, the gods shaped the world from churning primordial chaos. Countless hymns declare how fire, stone, and sea were called into being by divine will, while others insist the cosmos itself bore the world as a child. Whatever the truth, only one certainty remains: the Age of Starbirth is a time no mortal can recall, no scripture can fully illuminate, and no scholar can wholly agree upon.

From this luminous dawn rose the Age of Dreams, a vast and storied era in which the first mortal civilizations emerged and the timeless struggle between light and shadow took root. Here arose heroes whose deeds have been retold in every inn, hall, and sanctuary from Solamnia to Khur. In this age, the Knights of Solamnia were founded upon oaths of justice and courage, the Mages of High Sorcery shaped the raw stuff of magic into disciplined art under the watchful eyes of the Moons, and the dwarves carved the first stones of mighty Thorbardin deep into the mountain hearts.

Yet even as these cultures gained prominence, they quarreled not only with their enemies but with their own histories. Each people elevated their founding myths as truth and dismissed the tales of their neighbors as exaggerations or outright lies. The Age of Dreams became a tapestry so rich and contradictory that even its most celebrated victories remain entangled in dispute.

Amid this era of wonders rose the terrible and world-defining conflict known as the Third Dragon War. Dragons darkened the sky, kingdoms burned, and the Dragon Queen Takhisis walked the world with her armies of scale and shadow. Salvation came in the form of a mortal knight—Huma Dragonbane, whose courage shook the heavens. Legends claim he was granted the first of the sacred dragonlances, a weapon forged through the rare accord of gods and dragons. Armed with this holy lance, Huma confronted Takhisis and drove her from Krynn, banishing her and her brood beyond the veil of the world. In the silent peace that followed, the good dragons, bound by ancient pacts and grown weary of mortal strife, also withdrew, leaving Krynn to the stewardship of mortals and the guidance of the few gods who remained.

Centuries passed, and the glow of victory gave way to the rise of a new epoch: the Age of Might. For a thousand years, human ambition spread across Ansalon. Nations flourished, fields prospered, and cities rose gleaming into the sun. Among them, none grew so vast or so proud as the empire of Istar. Through alliance with the Knights of Solamnia and the fervor of its ruling priesthood, Istar proclaimed itself the very heart of the world. Its kingpriests, each claiming divine mandate, declared war upon evil itself - not merely in deed but in thought. Laws hardened into dogma, dogma into persecution, and the empire’s light, once guiding, became blinding.

At last, the final kingpriest reached for a height no mortal should touch. He sought divinity itself, believing he alone could usher in an age of perfect good. The gods beheld this ambition and trembled not in fear, but in sorrow. For if such a desire took root, Krynn could not endure.

And so the stage was set for the world’s ruin.

The Cataclysm

The gods, unwilling to annihilate their creation without warning, issued the Thirteen Warnings. Across Ansalon, trees wept blood, fire burned without fuel, and mad cyclones descended upon Istar’s gleaming temple. Chosen mortals received whispered visions urging them to halt the kingpriest’s folly. But these envoys either failed in their journeys or were ignored by the very people who most needed to heed them. Istar’s priesthood dismissed the portents as evil illusions, their pride shielding them from the truth.

When the appointed hour arrived, the gods acted. They swept their most devout followers to safety, though some later viewed this mercy as a curse, and then delivered judgment upon the empire that had sought to rise above them. A mountain of incandescent fire descended from the heavens, striking Istar with the fury of a sundered world. The sea itself convulsed, swallowing the empire in a tidal rift that became the Blood Sea, splitting eastern Ansalon like a wound. Coastlines tore apart, mountains fell, and entire nations sank beneath roaring waters. Even lands far from the blast shuddered under divine upheaval, and though some regions escaped destruction, none emerged untouched.

When the fires dimmed and the earth stilled, the gods withdrew fully from Krynn. Their voices faded from mortal hearts, their miracles ceased, and even their names drifted into half-remembered myth.

After the Cataclysm

In the centuries that followed, an age remembered only as the Time of Darkness, the world staggered in ruin. Famine stalked the land. Plague and migration uprooted whole peoples. The Knights of Solamnia, once hailed as exemplars of honor, became scapegoats, blamed for their alliance with Istar and cast out even from their own homeland. The great elven nations sealed their borders. The dwarves of Thorbardin retreated deep underground, turning away even their own kin who sought refuge from the surface. Across Ansalon, realms collapsed or hardened into brutal survival.

Where civilization faltered, other peoples rose. Hobgoblin tribes, ogre warlords, and ruthless chieftains carved dominions from the fractured map. Much that had survived the Cataclysm was lost in the dark centuries that followed.

Gradually, painfully, the land began to heal. Explorers charted new coasts and mountains where none had stood before. Tentative alliances formed. Markets reopened. Cities regrew. But even as societies rebuilt, they did so in a world bereft of divine guidance. True clerics, once the mortal hands of the gods, were nowhere to be found. Some clung to ancient faiths, others embraced new doctrines crafted from desperation or deceit. Without the gods to anchor truth, belief fractured as surely as the world itself.

Yet even in this silence, an ancient evil stirred.

The Dragon Queen’s Return

While mortals mourned the gods’ departure, Takhisis, the Dragon Queen, had never truly withdrawn. Cast out long ago by Huma’s lance, she waited in the void beyond Krynn, patient as a serpent in winter. Long unnoticed by the remaining gods, she extended her will through a fragment of Istar’s fallen temple, which she had secreted away in the volcanic wastes of Taman Busuk. There the stone grew into a dark and twisted echo of the glory that once crowned Istar, forming a conduit through which her influence seeped back into the world.

But one crucial fragment of the temple’s foundation was missing. Without it, the portal remained incomplete, and Takhisis could not fully return. Still, she moved her pieces deftly. She summoned the chromatic dragons who once served her, commanding them to steal the unhatched eggs of the noble metallic dragons. Bound by their love for their unborn broods, the metallic wyrms swore neutrality in the coming conflict, withdrawing from battle in exchange for the safety of their stolen young.

The Dragon Queen’s promises, however, were lies. In secret caverns, her priests twisted the metallic eggs into monstrous new soldiers—the first draconians, abominations forged for unrelenting war. With these creatures, with the obedience of her dragons, and with the despair of a godless age at her back, Takhisis marshaled her strength to conquer a wounded world.

She forged her armies into five great hosts, each commanded by a dragon highlord whose ambition matched their devotion. They descended from the shadowed lands of Neraka like a spreading storm, and thus began the conflict that history would name the War of the Lance.

The Dragon Armies and the Opening of the War

From the blackened citadel of Neraka, the Dragon Queen’s armies surged outward. Draconians formed their disciplined core, supported by humans, goblins, hobgoblins, ogres, and any who sought power in exchange for allegiance. Chromatic dragons soared above them, their smaller kin: dragonnels, wyverns, and worse bringing terror unseen for a millennium.

These armies roared across Ansalon. The Red and Green hosts shattered Nordmaar. The tribes of Khur, facing the might of the Green Dragon Army, chose unity under Salah-Khan rather than annihilation. Balifor and Goodlund, unprepared and isolated, fell swiftly beneath the banners of the Black and White. In Silvanesti, the elves resisted with fierce valor for more than a year, but the land itself succumbed when Speaker Lorac’s desperate attempt to wield an ancient dragon orb unleashed a nightmare realm that neither dragon nor mortal could endure. Retreat became inevitable.

By 351 AC, nearly all eastern Ansalon lay in the Dragon Queen’s grasp. Her armies regrouped in Taman Busuk, drawing breath only to strike again. The Red and Blue armies sharpened their claws for a grand invasion of Solamnia, while the Dragon Queen’s most fanatical servant, Verminaard, set his gaze upon a new, devastating weapon hidden in the ruins of an Istarian city. He dispatched Kansaldi Fire-Eyes to seize it, believing such power would secure Krynn’s downfall.

And so the War of the Lance spread like wildfire, fanned by dragons’ wings and the whisper of a god returned.