Kender - Conception and Development

Conception and Development

In preparation for the Dragonlance setting, Tracy Hickman ran a series of Dungeons & Dragons adventures. Harold Johnson, one of those involved in the games, chose to play a halfling thief character whom he called Almar Tann. When Hickman, Johnson and others moved to the Dragonlance setting for their games, the character of Almar Tann went with them. It soon became clear to those involved, however, that halflings were unsuitable to the Dragonlance world. As Johnson described it, this was especially due to his characters' possession of a ring of invisibility, so that "it all sounded too much like another story," referring to Bilbo Baggins and the One Ring. Halflings were then dropped from the campaign, and Johnson developed both the initial concept of the kender and the first representative of the fantasy race, Tasslehoff Burrfoot. To solidify the distinction, they were originally described as "thinner, more wiry, and more cunning and streetwise" than halflings.

Roger E. Moore introduced the kender, and Tasslehoff Burrfoot, to the wider community through his short story A Stone's Throw Away, published in 1984 in Dragon #85. While Tracy Hickman was involved in some of the development, he stated that it was Roger Moore who contributed the most to define the kender as they are depicted today.

The original concept of the kender held that they were "savage, warrior children, ever curious, ever alert." This concept was altered dramatically when Janet Pack became involved in dramatic readings of the works, as Pack's personal characteristics had a strong impact on how those involved in the process viewed the kender. According to Jeff Grubb, she, "and as a result all kender since her, was cute. Extremely cute. Sweetly, lovably, frustratingly cute.... And it's hard, after seeing Janet play Tas, to imagine them any other way." Two of the other key characteristics of kender—their curiosity and kleptomania—were introduced by Tracy Hickman. Hickman was uncomfortable with the notion of a "race of thieves" in his games, but still wanted the skills typically associated with thieves, so he added their "innocent tendency to 'borrow' things for indeterminate periods of time."

Originally, kender were to be called "kinder", in reference to "kinderkin", but Hickman has reported that readers tended to read the name as "kind-er" rather than "kin-der" in print, leading to the decision to alter the spelling.