Posted: Wed Aug 17, 2016 9:33 pm
The amount of stupid shit in Dragonlance is actually relatively small and could be easily excised if someone wanted to do a reboot, retcon, or just move the plot into a new era while cleaning out old issues. The problem is that the main authors of the series are enamored with the stupid shit and rub it all over everything. Leading example: Kender. Kender have little impact on the overall war and make up a tiny fraction of any given party of heroes in the stories. When they do show up, their impact on the plot is usually not contingent on their being kender at all, and they could be wholly replaced by regular halflings or by other existing races in Dragonlance with almost no impact on the plot at all. If Tasslehoff Burrfoot was a half-elf with personal wanderlust and an annoying streak and not a representative of two entire nations of wanderlusted halflings with an annoying streak (who are somehow the most innocent souls of Krynn for being oblivious to how harmful they are to the people around them as both kleptomaniacs and general nuisances), nothing would change. If the kender nations were completely removed from the map (as one of them has been), nothing would change.
If Tasslehoff Burrfoot were removed entirely from every single book he is in (almost all of them) and had all of his plot contributions handed out to other characters in the party, most books and characters would be mostly or completely unchanged. Tas is there in the Time of the Twins, but he doesn't really do anything except serve as a sounding board for Caramon's recovery from alcoholism, which could've been served just as well by any of the other characters Caramon meets in Istar. Tas is there in the War of the Lance, but his contributions are pretty much limited to sneaking off with Fizban to watch him do important things near the end of the first book. And so on. Tas is omnipresent in the main plot books of Dragonlance, and yet he contributes almost nothing and could be excised with almost no damage to the stories or setting at all.
Same deal with the gully dwarves, except they're less pervasive. If they were replaced with any other primitive race ever conceived of in D&D (lizardfolk would be my pick), things would've gone about the same in Xak Tarthas (or whatever that place was called in the first book of Chronicles). They are never again relevant to any book in the main line, and were never important to the setting in general. They just kind of show up sometimes as minor characters for the space of one or two scenes to remind people that they exist because the authors think they're funny.
Then there's the fantasy psuedo-Mormonism, which suffers on two counts. Firstly, the count that the gods of good sort themselves firmly out of most people's interpretation of that category when they brought the Cataclysm down on the whole world because one man turned out to be a megalomaniacal sociopath. Second, it only has the surface trappings of Mormonism anyway, so if this was supposed to be pro-Mormon propaganda, it's not doing a very good job at all. Actually Mormon values and buzzwords don't show up at any stage (or at least, not in a way that's distinguishable from generic goodness), nor does anything recognizably structurally similar to the Mormon Church ever get established as a good guy organization (and if it did, it would eventually be ripped down, because the good guys have lost basically every confrontation in Dragonlance except the War of the Lance, with significant territory loss after every defeat).
Despite the catastrophic failure of the allusions of Mormonism even from a Mormon perspective, let alone a secular one, they also show clear signs of having been tacked on somewhere towards the end of the project. Maybe this was an idea the Hickmans had early on but never found a place for, so they just sort of shoved it in as things began to take shape, or maybe it's an idea they didn't have until near the end, or maybe it's an idea they just lost interest in after the first couple of modules and stopped referring back to. Either way, the effect of the comings and goings of the gods has actually very little impact on the plots of most books or on the setting. Goldmoon is fantasy Joseph Smith, but all this does is provide her with a motivation to go to Xak Tsaroth and retrieve the gold plates of Mormon Disks of Mishakal. If the gods of Good were still active forces upon Krynn during the War of the Lance and had told Goldmoon, an entrenched cleric of the Mishakal traditions of the plains barbarians, to go retrieve the Disks not to return faith to the world but just because an important religious artifact had fallen into the hands of minions of Takhisis and Mishakal would like that problem solved, the plot of the first book remains identical. That plot line doesn't ever really come up again outside of the first module (the first half-ish of the first book).
You can also make the gods of Good more justified in the Cataclysm by having people's faith fade during the Age of Might, when they're decadent and wealthy, rather than during the Age of Despair, when it's fantasy Mad Max and you'd expect people to be more desperate for supernatural help than ever before. Then have Takhisis be directly responsible for the corruption of the Kingpriest and the Temple of Istar (which she later on uses as a nexus of unholy power anyway) and have the Kingpriest's "petition to the gods of Good" actually be an evil ritual to summon Takhisis into the world for a permanent Team Evil victory. This is almost exactly the same as Takhisis' plan in the War of the Lance, the difference being that in the War of the Lance she uses fascist armies rather than corruption of powerful leaders originally loyal to Paladine in order to do this, so we aren't breaking a ton of new ground here.
We also aren't breaking a ton of new ground if, instead of vague (and destructive) signs that no one could reasonably interpret correctly, we instead have the gods send an angel directly to the Kingpriest to try and warn him about what the real purpose of the ritual is, and he banishes it because he's been convinced that it's a demon in disguise or something, so then they send an angel directly to Lord Soth, a well known hero of the land whom the Kingpriest will hear out, and tell him to go warn him about the real purpose of the ritual, but then that gets foiled in the way it was canonically, and Paladine resorts to the nuclear option not because he happens to be in an Old Testament mood today, but because none of his pieces on the board are responding to orders so he's going to flip the table and start over rather than let Takhisis win. This still doesn't explain why he nuked the entire nation and not just the temple in question, but considering that the temple's foundation stones survived even after the nation-spanning nuking and Takhisis was able to use that to rebuild the temple and try again, it's possible to argue that Paladine didn't nuke it hard enough.
There's a couple of other things in Dragonlance that you'd probably want to retcon away if you had the chance, but the gully dwarves, kender, and the stupid backstory to the Cataclysm can all be changed with pretty much no impact on the plot or setting whatsoever. All the main book plot lines are unchanged. All the relevant setting information from the setting books are the same. All the plots of the major adventures (of which there are only two, one of which follows the plot of the books anyway) are essentially identical.
If Tasslehoff Burrfoot were removed entirely from every single book he is in (almost all of them) and had all of his plot contributions handed out to other characters in the party, most books and characters would be mostly or completely unchanged. Tas is there in the Time of the Twins, but he doesn't really do anything except serve as a sounding board for Caramon's recovery from alcoholism, which could've been served just as well by any of the other characters Caramon meets in Istar. Tas is there in the War of the Lance, but his contributions are pretty much limited to sneaking off with Fizban to watch him do important things near the end of the first book. And so on. Tas is omnipresent in the main plot books of Dragonlance, and yet he contributes almost nothing and could be excised with almost no damage to the stories or setting at all.
Same deal with the gully dwarves, except they're less pervasive. If they were replaced with any other primitive race ever conceived of in D&D (lizardfolk would be my pick), things would've gone about the same in Xak Tarthas (or whatever that place was called in the first book of Chronicles). They are never again relevant to any book in the main line, and were never important to the setting in general. They just kind of show up sometimes as minor characters for the space of one or two scenes to remind people that they exist because the authors think they're funny.
Then there's the fantasy psuedo-Mormonism, which suffers on two counts. Firstly, the count that the gods of good sort themselves firmly out of most people's interpretation of that category when they brought the Cataclysm down on the whole world because one man turned out to be a megalomaniacal sociopath. Second, it only has the surface trappings of Mormonism anyway, so if this was supposed to be pro-Mormon propaganda, it's not doing a very good job at all. Actually Mormon values and buzzwords don't show up at any stage (or at least, not in a way that's distinguishable from generic goodness), nor does anything recognizably structurally similar to the Mormon Church ever get established as a good guy organization (and if it did, it would eventually be ripped down, because the good guys have lost basically every confrontation in Dragonlance except the War of the Lance, with significant territory loss after every defeat).
Despite the catastrophic failure of the allusions of Mormonism even from a Mormon perspective, let alone a secular one, they also show clear signs of having been tacked on somewhere towards the end of the project. Maybe this was an idea the Hickmans had early on but never found a place for, so they just sort of shoved it in as things began to take shape, or maybe it's an idea they didn't have until near the end, or maybe it's an idea they just lost interest in after the first couple of modules and stopped referring back to. Either way, the effect of the comings and goings of the gods has actually very little impact on the plots of most books or on the setting. Goldmoon is fantasy Joseph Smith, but all this does is provide her with a motivation to go to Xak Tsaroth and retrieve the gold plates of Mormon Disks of Mishakal. If the gods of Good were still active forces upon Krynn during the War of the Lance and had told Goldmoon, an entrenched cleric of the Mishakal traditions of the plains barbarians, to go retrieve the Disks not to return faith to the world but just because an important religious artifact had fallen into the hands of minions of Takhisis and Mishakal would like that problem solved, the plot of the first book remains identical. That plot line doesn't ever really come up again outside of the first module (the first half-ish of the first book).
You can also make the gods of Good more justified in the Cataclysm by having people's faith fade during the Age of Might, when they're decadent and wealthy, rather than during the Age of Despair, when it's fantasy Mad Max and you'd expect people to be more desperate for supernatural help than ever before. Then have Takhisis be directly responsible for the corruption of the Kingpriest and the Temple of Istar (which she later on uses as a nexus of unholy power anyway) and have the Kingpriest's "petition to the gods of Good" actually be an evil ritual to summon Takhisis into the world for a permanent Team Evil victory. This is almost exactly the same as Takhisis' plan in the War of the Lance, the difference being that in the War of the Lance she uses fascist armies rather than corruption of powerful leaders originally loyal to Paladine in order to do this, so we aren't breaking a ton of new ground here.
We also aren't breaking a ton of new ground if, instead of vague (and destructive) signs that no one could reasonably interpret correctly, we instead have the gods send an angel directly to the Kingpriest to try and warn him about what the real purpose of the ritual is, and he banishes it because he's been convinced that it's a demon in disguise or something, so then they send an angel directly to Lord Soth, a well known hero of the land whom the Kingpriest will hear out, and tell him to go warn him about the real purpose of the ritual, but then that gets foiled in the way it was canonically, and Paladine resorts to the nuclear option not because he happens to be in an Old Testament mood today, but because none of his pieces on the board are responding to orders so he's going to flip the table and start over rather than let Takhisis win. This still doesn't explain why he nuked the entire nation and not just the temple in question, but considering that the temple's foundation stones survived even after the nation-spanning nuking and Takhisis was able to use that to rebuild the temple and try again, it's possible to argue that Paladine didn't nuke it hard enough.
There's a couple of other things in Dragonlance that you'd probably want to retcon away if you had the chance, but the gully dwarves, kender, and the stupid backstory to the Cataclysm can all be changed with pretty much no impact on the plot or setting whatsoever. All the main book plot lines are unchanged. All the relevant setting information from the setting books are the same. All the plots of the major adventures (of which there are only two, one of which follows the plot of the books anyway) are essentially identical.