Dragonlance gets way more hate then it deserves, to the point where trying to actually rationally discuss it gets derailed by undeserved hate. But in actually, the problems with Dragonlance have been blown way out of porportion (though make no mistake they are real problems) overshadowing many of the cool things in the setting (Wizard of High Sorcery, the gods, DRACONIANS, the tight worldbuilding, the knights). There aren't that many, and those that are are actually fairly easy to fix without changing anything significant the setting, if say you wanted to do a reboot or rerelease. Let's start with the basics.
Kender and Gully Dwarves
Kender are primairly hated because their game description basically makes them easy fodder for chaotic stupid disruptive players. Gully Dwarves are hated because their entire concept (retarded dwarves) is offensive. However the way it seems to be described by haters, it's as if these things are ubiquitous in the setting. When it's really not. Once you get away from the Hickmans, things become less stupid. In other books Kender are actually capable of building a functioning society, and aren't just mary sue ADHD kleptomaniacs. There are kender soldiers, royalty, nobles, barbarians, warlords, necromancers (though admittedly more in the classic sense), revolutionaries, and assassins. They very well could just be halflings, and not all clones of Tasslehoff. As to Gully Dwarves, you could drop them from the setting entirely and lose nothing. Seriously. The gully dwarf people appear all of once early to mid way through Dragons of Autumn Twilight, when the heroes go to Xak Tsaroth and find them enslaved by the dragonarmies. The only Gully Dwarf who matters at all is Bupu, and she appears maybe once or twice again (I'd have to reread Legends to remember). You could replace them with any other little race that can be oppressed. They could be kender, gnomes, or just really unfortunate regular dwarves and nothing would change. Or one could use this version of gully dwarves (from a discussion on the Dragonlance Forums):
ferratus wrote:I have given this a lot of thought, and I generally come down on the side that the condition of the Gully Dwarves is a result of institutional, generational, grinding poverty. We only every see Gully Dwarves living amongst dwarves or in exile among ruins.
We know that dwarves are an intensely traditional, guild-based, and clannish society. If a dwarf goes up against any of those institutions (or is unable to fill his role in any of them) then I imagine that it doesn't go well. Aghar could simply be dwarven for "without clan" or "outcast". Without membership in a clan or a guild, the dwarf is unable to earn a decent living and has no property or property rights.
Therefore, they live by squatting in the places no other dwarf wants to live (hence gully dwarf) and survive by doing dirty jobs that carry social stigma. One doesn't have to look very hard to see the types of challenges that Gully Dwarves need to overcome.
You cannot get a better education because you can't afford it. You can't get credit because you can't get property. You can't be apprenticed because your father doesn't have a trade. You can't fight in the military because you are not truly a citizen and you cannot provide your own gear.
We already that a dwarf's worth is based on how much he produces for his community, how prosperous he is, how honoured his lineage, and his prowess in battle. The Aghar cannot live up to this ideal. Their lineage is disgraced. They are unskilled and uneducated. They are poor.
So in this social order the dwarves of the other clans see the Aghar and start giving negative traits to explain their poverty. They are lazy. They are stupid. Most insidiously, the dwarves whisper to each other that these Aghar are not even dwarves at all. They must be something else, something inferior, they must have gnomish or human blood in them.
The Cataclysm
The problem with Istar is apparently that there was too much good in the world. I raise you that if being super good amounts to a totalitarian theocratic dictatorship with open slavery, genocidal campaigns and fucking thought police then you are doing it wrong! This also creates the really weird implication that too much good in the world was a problem, meaning the gods had to create the cataclysm to destroy the social, religious and economic center of Ansalon, completely reshaping the continent and sending the survivors into fantasy Mad Max, so that evil could rise and thus the balance be restored. WTF?!
This is really easy to replace by simply declaring that the Kingpriest went mad with power. He's actually Lawful Evil, but has deluded himself into thinking he's good. Hell, later dragonlance material even seems to support this, with the Kingpriest being on the cusp of acheiving godhood! And it does happen. One of the anthologies (Dragons of Chaos, i think) has a short story called "There's another shore, you know, upon the other side" which depicts an alternate Krynn when the Kingpriest has deposed all the other gods and rules the world as the God Emperor of Mankind sole god. All the other gods are reduced to slaves, beggars, prostitutes or torture victims, and the world lives forever under his insane dictatorship. The sourcebook Legends of the Twins depicts another alternate Krynn where the Kingpriest does something similar. Here, instead of the cataclysm, Paladine himself comes down to stop the Kingpriest and loses. The Kingpriest overpowers him, absorbs his divine power, and ascents to godhood himself and proceeds to kill more people than the cataclysm ever did (somewhere in the realm of 1/3 the entire worlds population), and his genocidal campaigns continue still, determined to wipe out everything that's not an elf or human. Faced with what's basically fantasy Hitler becoming a god and sending the world into everlasting darkness, and all other methods failing, nuking it from orbit does seem like the only way to be sure.
As to the other details, instead of sending 13 vague omens that could be and were easily misinterpreted (storms battering the city non stop for 13 days, trees weeping blood, ect.) it was suggested else where that the gods could just send an Angel or Archon or some other celestial to tell the kingpriest to knock it off. However, he's so delusional that he convinces himself that the angel is actually a demon in disguise and kills or banishes it. So they go to Loren Soth, the only other person in a position to do something about the kingpriest, and that plays out exactly as it did in canon.
Or, there's potentially another one that also serves the double purpose of ditching the stupid balance between good and evil thing and likewise not making the gods of good look like old testament dicks. Here, Istar really was originally a bastion of good, and one of the strongest of it's kind in the world. However, say, here, the Kingpriest was being manipulated by Takhisis (hell, there's a PrC for Takhisian clerics that's basically this). Takhisis manipulates the Kingpriest into commiting more and more atrocities that he thinks are in the name of good (slavery, genocide, gladiator matches, oppression of the temples of the good gods) and eventually, he attempts to become a god. Unfortunately, this backfires, and he himself causes the Cataclysm. This has the double effect of fucking up the divine [insert magibabble here], preventing the gods from interacting with the world. This also works with the Night of Doom as well. In the canon, before the Cataclysm, the gods took their clerics from the world. Here, the good gods get forewarnings about what could happen, and attempt the methods mentioned above (sending messenger to the kingpriest, tasking loren soth to stop him) and take their clerics into the outer planes to keep them safe, just in case, and once the disaster was over, the clerics would be sent back to keep things in order. However, they underestimated just how devastating the cataclysm would be, and were unable to get back once it happened. Centuries pass, and all those clerics die of old age, powerless to help a world that's descending into chaos. And without them to explain what really happened, the people turn against the gods. It would take an act of faith, and a powerful artifact, like Goldmoon finding the blue crystal staff and the Disks to allow the gods of light and neutral be able to influence the world again.
Also, considering that the gods of darkness came back to the world significantly before the gods of light, and that the foundation stones to the temple survived, which Takhisis took and used to recreate a dark version of the temple of Istar to serve as a nexus for her power on Krynn, AS WELL as her taking the Kingpriests Crown of Power mega artifact to give to the leader of the Dragonarmies, and the Cataclysm and resulting Age of Despair could very well be just according to keikaku for Takhisis.
Mormonism
Why is this an issue? There's barely anything related to Mormon in Dragonlance, it really does seem like any mormonism was added as an afterthought or half-assed attempt. Tracy rants about Mormonism a bunch in the annotated books, but the closest thing in the actual text is the Disks of Mishakal = Gold Plates of Mormon, but that's basically it. Anything else people have claimed as references to Mormonism, even actual Mormons don't recognize. It's really a non-issue.
The books:
This is sort of a mixed bag, and one of the actual problems that isn't easy to address (if you even consider it a problem, YMMV). There are over two hundred books written for dragonlance. It's book line vastly eclipses the popularity of the game material to the point where some fans are surprised to find out there's a game attached to it. This has positives and negatives. Dragonlance is very fleshed out as a setting with all sorts of detailed cultures, regions, organizations, and personalities. This is good for roleplaying and if your a fan of the books, you'll enjoy it a lot. (Most of the Core D&D material has a defined place in the setting). However, the disadvantage is basically the same thing. There's so much canon material for it that it's difficult to insert your own stuff without it feeling too much like fanfiction. You may or may not care (I write fanfiction a lot [*shameless plug*] so it doesn't matter to me, but it might be problematic for others).
Next post will be musings about the gods, what to do with them and so forth. I also have some rewrites of prestige classes, as well as some new ones that I think would fit well in the setting. There will also be some suggestions about where starting a campaign might be good.