Games - Dragonlance Nexus

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	Games - Dragonlance Nexus

The Dragonlance Nexus is a popular Dragonlance fansite. The origin of the Dragonlance Nexus is a tale of two cities. Even though the Nexus was officially launched in January 2001, there was a great deal of history to the site prior to that date. This document will try to chronicle the development of the Nexus from its origins in 1996, to its early incarnations in 2001, to the present day.

Origins

The origin of the Nexus beings with a small site called "the Dragon's Realm." Optimized for Netscape Navigator 2.0, the site was started in the summer of 1996 as an experiment by long-time staff member Paladin to learn HTML and to talk about some of the AD&D Gold Box videogames he was playing at the time.

In late 1996, the Dragon's Realm joined the Forgotten Realms Webring. Intrigued by the concept, Paladin started one of the first Dragonlance Webrings to highlight his favorite campaign world. Unfortunately, the Dragon's Realm didn't really fit the Dragonlance mold, so a new site called "The Lost Citadel" was created. Both sites existed in the same 1 MB directory on Geocities. (To put that in perspective, the current version of the Nexus is over 90 times larger.)

The Lost Citadel supplanted the Dragon's Realm in short order when it was invited to join an exclusive Dragonlance Webring called the 'Top 5% of Kender Sites,' run by the infamous Kipper Snifferdoo of Kencyclopedia fame.

The Lost Citadel continued to expand to cover other areas of Dragonlance material, beyond its traditional magic focus. Eventually, the site was spun off into a new site called "The World of Krynn," which went online in November 1997. The following month, the products and Fifth Age sections were added by Paladin, and the site moved off of Geocities to a dedicated web host. Late the following year, the site's back end was upgraded to support the then-popular Netscape 4.0 to simplify some of the site's maintenance.

The Dragonlance.com Era

The World of Krynn was continually expanded and updated, and outgrew several web hosts between December 1997 and August 1999. In addition, the first of several incarnations of the message boards were put online; around this time, other volunteer staff were added to help out with the message boards and some of the site's content.

However, the major change happened in 1999, when Paladin acquired the Dragonlance.com domain name from the previous owner in August 1999. At this point, The World of Krynn disappeared and became simply "Dragonlance.com." With the move to Dragonlance.com, the site's mission changed as well: instead of publishing a repository of background information, the main focus of the site became more fan-centric, posting artwork, fiction, poetry and music created by the fans, while keeping all of the reference material and product information.

In January 2000, the sheer amount of content prompted Paladin to move much of it into a database, which allowed volunteer staff the ability to directly update and add new content. In June of that year, the site was redesigned once again to make the information easier to understand, and new staff members were brought in to help with the growing amount of content.

With that, the pre-history of the Nexus ends and its story begins.

The Nexus Era

The origins of the Nexus date back to January 2001, when a flurry of events were happening at once. Jim Butler, who was an employee of Wizards of the Coast at the time, announced that Wizards of the Coast would no longer publish Dragonlance gaming materials in December 2000. With the backing of famed Dragonlance author Tracy Hickman, a group of fans on the Dragonlance-L mailing list volunteered together to create a new Dragonlance site that would take over where Wizards left off, updating Dragonlance to the Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition rules. This group came to be known as the Whitestone Council.

The newly-formed Whitestone Council was comprised by a number of dedicated fans, including five founding members who are also current members: Dragonhelm, Paladin, Dragonbane, and Arek Brimstone. While Dragonhelm and Arek were new to the Dragonlance web site community, Paladin and Dragonbane came to the project from the Dragonlance.com site.

Under the guidance of Tracy Hickman, and with feedback from fans from across the world, the Whitestone Council created the Dragonlance Nexus, which was launched in late January 2001. As previously noted, the key focus of the Dragonlance Nexus was to create a set of Dungeons and Dragons 3rd Edition rules for Dragonlance, which would be the foundation upon which the future of Dragonlance gaming. This online product was called Dragonlance Adventures 3rd Edition, or DLA3e for short.

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