 The storyline of the original Dragonlance series had been plotted and outlined before either the novel trilogy or the games were written . Dragons of Autumn Twilight was the first novel of the Dragonlance series . It was based upon a Dungeons & Dragons session played by the authors with some of their friends , some of whom later became Dragonlance writers . The novel was written after the completion of the first Dragonlance game modules . Weis and Hickman felt this was constraining and made the novel feel too episodic , so they reversed the process for the next books and completed the novels before the related modules were written . 
