Dragonlance: The Age of Mortals (Jeff Crook) Books in Order

Jeff Crook's Age of Mortals books are set in a Dragonlance world that has already been shaken hard. This is Krynn after the Chaos War, in the wider period shaped by lost certainties, new powers, and the fallout that reaches every kingdom and clan. Crook's two books in this line, Conundrum and Dark Thane, do not follow one hero from novel to novel. Instead, they use the same troubled era to tell two very different kinds of stories.

Conundrum is the lighter, stranger entry. Its hero is the gnome Conundrum, and Crook uses him for a tale full of odd inventions, comic misfires, and real feeling underneath the jokes. The book has a wandering, curious energy. It cares about belonging, identity, and what it means to keep going when the world around you makes very little sense, which is often true in gnome country.

Then Crook turns the lights way down.

Dark Thane shifts to Thorbardin and into dwarven politics. Here the focus is Glint Ettinhammer, a hill dwarf scholar who finds himself inside a pressure cooker of clan rivalry, suspicion, and ambition. The stakes are less about a single quest and more about what happens when a proud society starts rotting from the inside. Councils deadlock, power-hungry leaders maneuver, and old prejudice makes every decision heavier than it should be.

What links the books is Crook's interest in outsiders and systems under strain. Conundrum is out of step with the world around him. Glint is treated as suspect in a kingdom that does not quite want him. Even though one book is funny and the other grim, both are about people trying to find a place in societies that are changing faster than those societies can comfortably admit.

This makes Crook's Age of Mortals shelf a nice little sampler of what late Dragonlance can do. One book gives you quirky adventure, gnomish chaos, and heart. The other gives you intrigue, dwarven history, and slow-building political dread. Together they show how wide the Age of Mortals setting can be when a writer is willing to leave the main road.