Dragonlance: War Wizard — Greta, the Cover Art, and the Kiri-Jolith Connection
Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s Dragonlance: War Wizard releases August 4, 2026 — the first volume of a new trilogy set on Krynn, built around the early friendship between Huma Dragonbane and the wizard Magius. The excerpt Polygon published this week drops readers into that friendship mid-action: three figures preparing to face ogres, with Huma, Magius, and a character named Greta all present.
Greta reads as core team. She doesn’t appear on the cover.
What the Cover Art Tells You
The cover, painted by Stephen Youll, shows Huma and Magius squaring off against an ogre and a mercenary. Four figures: two heroes, two antagonists. That fourth slot didn’t go to Greta — it went to a villain type. Cover billing in fantasy publishing isn’t accidental, and this one says plainly that the book is primarily the Huma/Magius origin story.
The most likely reading: Greta is a genuine supporting character who plays a meaningful role without being a top-billed protagonist. Weis and Hickman have always written ensemble casts where supporting players feel like the center of their own chapters. Being vivid in a short excerpt and being the third lead of a trilogy are different things. She matters — she just may not be Raistlin.
Huma Dragonbane and Magius — The Core Relationship
Huma Dragonbane is one of Krynn’s defining legendary figures. He lived over a thousand years before the events of the original Chronicles trilogy, and his story ends with the sacrifice that ended the Third Dragon War. He forged the first Dragonlance. He is, in many ways, the hero against whom all Solamnic Knights are measured.
Magius is his closest friend — a red-robed mage, which already puts him in a fraught position alongside a Solamnic Knight. The excerpt captures this tension directly. The quoted passage about magic being “inherently deceitful and dishonorable” and incompatible with the knighthood isn’t background lore — it’s the central friction of the whole relationship. Huma’s world has rules that explicitly exclude Magius. Their friendship exists in defiance of that.
This dynamic was explored previously in Richard A. Knaak’s The Legend of Huma, but Weis and Hickman are now telling their own version of the origins. War Wizard gives the original creators of Dragonlance their first crack at the Huma/Magius story directly.
The Kiri-Jolith Connection for D&D Players
Kiri-Jolith — the Sword of Justice, the Bison of Heaven — is the patron deity of the Knights of Solamnia. His domains include glory, law, strength, and war, but he is not a god of conquest or bloodlust. His clerics train as warriors to protect the helpless, and his worship centers on action, discipline, and service. Temples dedicated to him are described as resembling fortresses.
Huma Dragonbane is the most important mortal figure in that tradition. A Kiri-Jolith cleric reading War Wizard is reading about the Knight whose sacrifice defined their deity’s order — the event that made Kiri-Jolith’s patronage of Solamnia meaningful in the first place. After the War of Souls, Kiri-Jolith became patron to all Knights of Solamnia, not just the Order of the Sword, and Huma’s legacy sits at the foundation of that entire relationship.
For a D&D player running a Kiri-Jolith cleric, this book functions as primary source material in narrative form. The excerpt alone — watching Huma navigate his bond with Magius against institutional hostility to mages — is exactly the kind of ideological stress test that makes Kiri-Jolith’s values legible at the table. Courage and honor exercised in defiance of an unjust rule is very much this god’s territory.
What to Expect From the Book
At 352 pages, War Wizard is compact for a Weis/Hickman novel. The tone in the excerpt is active and dialogue-driven, with the ideological tension surfacing early rather than being held in reserve. That’s a good sign. The original Chronicles worked because the philosophy and the action were inseparable, not sequential.
This is book one of a trilogy. The cover’s focus on Huma and Magius alone suggests the arc will follow their bond across all three volumes. Whether Greta stays central or recedes into the ensemble as the scope expands is probably the most interesting structural question the series sets up going in.