LAST EDITED ON May-02-12 AT 04:29 AM (EDT)
Here you'll find author/studio annotations for various released materials. Why? Well, as I said at the beginning of the first set of annotations I released (for Symphony of the Sword No. 1's first movement, Wounded Rose):
So I've never been a huge fan of the "fantasy" genre. I attempted the works of Tolkien (apart from The Hobbit) too early and thus came to an appreciation of them very late indeed; I would have to be well-paid to attempt the Wheel of Time; and so forth. There are exceptions, though. I mean, I played Advanced Dungeons & Dragons all through high school, and that kind of thing leaves a mark. For that matter, I enjoyed the hell out of Christopher Paolini's Eragon and I'm not inclined to apologize for that... and I've always had kind of a soft spot in my heart for Weis & Hickman's original Dragonlance Chronicles trilogy, too.
(Mind you, we never tried to play in the Dragonlance setting back in the day. It was our considered opinion, having read the campaign setting sourcebook, that only an idiot would actually try to play AD&D in Krynn. :)
Anyway, I was at a bookstore the other day and ran across an annotated omnibus edition of the original Chronicles trilogy. I had just been thinking it might be nice to re-read those old chestnuts again, and here was a compiled edition. What luck! So I snagged it.
I have to confess a certain fondness for annotated editions of things. I'm a big fan, for instance, of the two-disc special editions of the Star Trek movies largely because they have that extra subtitle track that's all production and/or background-story details. So, reading through the annotated version of Dragons of Autumn Twilight, I thought, Why not attempt something like this?
So here we are.
Annotations in this section are keyed to the line in the released text they apply to, thusly:
9 This is the title of any given Symphony of the Sword piece, except the ones with pre-credits sequences.
In order to find them, you'll naturally need to be reading the text files in something that will tell you what line number you're looking at. Be advised that none of the usual tools you find on a Windows machine (Word, Wordpad, Notepad) can handle this simple and useful task, for whatever reason, but there are free tools out there that can. I used the Windows port of GNU Emacs 19.34.6 to compile them. You probably won't. Truss recommends PSPad for this purpose. View -> Line Numbers once you've loaded the text file in question.
Unless otherwise noted, the notes are by me. Those that aren't will appear in a different color and bear the contributor's initials.
You are warned: The annotations for stories early in various series assume you've read the later parts, so if you haven't, there will be spoilers.
As time permits - setting them up is rather labor-intensive - versions of annotated stories with the notes inlined via clever JavaScript jiggery-pokery may be made available. This is also the board to discuss those notes (which will for the most part be the same ones that get posted here).
Finally, please note that the forum's usual rule about not resurrecting dead threads is semi-suspended on the Annotations board. Though we'd still appreciate it if you didn't pick up existing discussion threads that tailed off weeks and months ago, don't let that stop you from posting if you have a fresh question or remark about one of the standing annotations.
--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/