Join me as I review Kendermore by Mary Kirchoff, live! Share your thoughts on this second novel in the Dragonlance Preludes series, released on September 17, 1989 by TSR Inc. You can buy a copy here: https://amzn.to/3NL3Uve
About Kendermore
Beloved kender Tasslehoff Burrfoot encounters marriage, magic, monsters, and mayhem in this Preludes novel set before the War of the Lance
While carousing at the Inn of the Last Home, carefree kender Tasslehoff Burrfoot is snared by a bounty hunter whose assignment is to ensure the return of the light-fingered escape artist to his homeland. It seems his beloved Uncle Trapspringer is being held prisoner by the venerable council of elders—until Tas honors Kender marriage tradition, that is.
But before he can say “I do,” Tasslehoff’s betrothed pulls a disappearing act of her own. The race is on to see who gets dragged to the altar first. But not only must Tas dodge matrimony, he must elude a capricious wizard set on pickling one of every creature on Krynn, cheer up the last existing woolly mammoth, foil a most determined and deadly assassin, and—in the end—save Kendermore.
Review
Welcome to another DragonLance Saga review episode. It is Bakukal, Newkolt the 5th. My name is Adam and today I am going to give you my review of Kendermore by Mary Kirchoff. I would like to take a moment and thank the members of this YouTube channel, and invite you to consider becoming a member by visiting the link in the description below. You can even pick up Dragonlance gaming materials using my affiliate links. This is my perspective only, and if you have any thoughts or disagree with mine, I invite you to share them in YouTube chat.
Returning to these Preludes is like visiting an old friend. I know a lot of people have problems with Kender both in novels and in-game, but I have always been a fan. To me, the best part of kender is their hypocrisy and wit. They handle items, then grow genuinely hurt when you call them a thief for taking your things without permission. Then they can turn on a dime, and taunt you to tears of rage. But again, they will take any personal slight deep into their heart. Tas is this personified. What I am not so eager to revisit with each of these stories are the same descriptions of Solace and the Inn of the Last Home. Don’t get me knowing. I like the locations, but every book describes them in such detail, knowing they are the tenth novel to do so. At what point is enough enough?
The story starts after Kitiara, Sturm, Caramon and Raistlin have left Solace for their five year sojourns. Tas, Tanis and Flint are kicking it in the Inn drinking when a stout and gorgeous dwarf woman named Gisella Hornslager enters with her assistant Woodrow. I immediately fall for this character as she is as sexually overt in her mannerisms and suggestions as I am, and I dig it! There are a number of adult jokes I never got as a kid, and it really makes this re-read a delight. She is looking for Tas because he has a bounty on him, and this is the setup to this novel.
Apparently Kendermore was getting low in its population, so they began instituting forced marriage. Since it’s a law, and Tas hasn’t returned to Kendermore yet to marry the Mayor Meridon Metwinger’s daughter Damaris, they put out a bounty to return him to Kendermore. In order to prove how serious they are, the Mayor detained Tas’ Uncle Trapspringer Furrfoot, absconding with his Minotaur or Werewolf finger bone, he doesn’t know which is its true origin, and sent that with the bounty hunter, the voluptuous Gisella, to showTas that Trapspringer is truly held prisoner, and Tas must go with them.
Initially Flint and Tanis were stopping Gisella and Woodrow from taking Tas, but he eventually agreed to go on his own. They travel all the way to the coast of New Sea, referencing a pre-cataclysm map, and grow ever more furious with Tas’ shortcut. When they finally saw the coast they were approached by a hoard of Gully Dwarves offering the very pretty Gisella a pulley job. She took it for a former pulley job she had back in the day, must’ve had something to do with the end of a massage, or that’s the inference anyway, and she refused. Then she realized they were using pulleys to bring up crates from the sea, six hundred feet below Xak Tsaroth!
Woodrow suggests they use the pulleys to lower the wagon to the empty ship and take it to the other side of New Sea. When they get the Aghar dwarves together and tie up the wagon, it makes it to the bottom but all of its contents seem to empty into the sea on the way. Meanwhile, Uncle Trapspringer visits a doctor in Kendermore called Phineas Curik. This human is a dentist by trade but does what he can to fleece money out of the never ending stream of Kender. I also appreciated the chaos of Kendermore and the mayor’s audience hall. It’s as insane as one would imagine it to be.
Trapspringer pays the Doctor with half of a treasure map, so the doctor tries to find him to get the other half. This leads him to city hall and Kender chaos. Ultimately he is invited to the palace where Trapspringer is supposed to be. Traveling through Kendermore, even for those who live there, is a nightmare. Roads are random and signs are never updated. Phineas had one boot stolen, and had to trade another for a shortcut through a candle shop. He finally gets to the palace which is a truly beautiful building and finds the prisoners roam freely. He finds Uncle Trapspringer and asks for the other half of the map. Trapspringer believes he gave it to Tasslehoff Burrfoot, when someone comes in from the mayor’s office and tells Trapspringer he can leave as the mayor’s daughter, tired of waiting on Tas, left fo the ruins, so the wedding is off, and he is free to go.
This panics Phineas who will never find the treasure without the other half of the map, so he convinces Trapspringer to find Damaris, the mayor’s daughter, with him. He returns to his office to pack for the trip when a man with a sword wound enters and forces the dentist to sew him up. This burly human pays him with a lot of steel and when Trapspringer rappears, the stranger is gone: In truth he found the half to the map Phineas has and is shadowing them to the Ruins to steal it from them. They travel to the ruins and are attacked by monsters and end up in the ruined Tower of High Sorcery’s grove which heightens their emotions. They turn on one another and an ogre comes out of nowhere and rescues them.
The ogre, named Vinsint, has trapped them, but is quite articulate and polite, making them dinner. Meanwhile Tas, Woodrow and Gisella are sailing across Newsea when a massive storm sinks their ship and wagon. They begin to pull the wagon out of the water from the other shore and have to abandon it as it’s stuck. They grab what they can carry and head inland, only to meet a troop of dwarves led by Baron Krakold from Rosloviggen. They invite them to their town, which is about to start Oktoberfest, and learn that Tas knows Flint Fireforge, son of Reaghar Fireforge from the Dwarfgate War. The baron also knows the name and is honored to have his friend as a guest of honor.
They all travel to the town and the party ensues. A gnome has a carousel there and Tas and Woodrow ride it as the animals come alive, and a dragon Tas was riding takes him and Woodrow to a mountain top citadel where another gnome is waiting. Apparently these two gnomes are wizards of some sort and their life quests are to collect species. They need a Kender so they tell them that they have to stuff them both and put them in a display. This is a great presentation of gnomes, save for the wizard aspect. It seems to be contradictory to their obsession with carousels and their lifequest.
Anyway, not wanting to be stuffed, Tas and Woodrow run through the keep trying to get out and find a Wooly Mammoth that is crying and is going to be killed any day now. It was raised there and taught to talk and have manners by the gnomes. Tas and Woodrow promise to help it escape as well. Tas is taken into a glass jar fitting room by the gnomes, and when he finds one that fits, Winnie and Woodrow start busting through walls to escape. They believe Tas is murdered, and when the gnomes try to stop them, Tas comes up behind them and bashes their heads together. They crumple unconscious and the three escape by busting through the keep’s wall.
Back at the dwarven village earlier, Gisella is trying to buy silk, when she witnesses Tas and Woodrow flying away. Frantic, she tries to get help but everyone is busy with the festival. Then Denzil from Kendermore appears. Apparently he went looking for Tas toward Solace rather than the Ruins as I suspected. He asks Giselle if she needs help and they leave to find the pair in the mountains. Denzil is a complete ass hat, and is violent with Gizelle, but for some insane reason, she doesn’t mind and actually seduces him! Now I am not one to frown on adults doing what they want, as long as all parties are consenting, but why make her an abuse apologist? There is no reason for it. One of my earliest memories was my father physically abusing my mother before they were divorced. I know there are many complicated reasons why abused individuals stay with their abusers, but they don’t have to. There are organizations that can help you escape dangerous relationships. Please if you ever find yourself in that situation, leave as soon as the behavior begins. No matter who you are, you are worth more than that!
So they get up to the keep when Tas is escaping and Denzil threatens Gisella when she sees him reaching for his crossbow and he ends up killing her. He attacks the group, and they narrowly escape, believing him to be dead. They take Gisella’s corpse and bury it, leaving Tas’ Hoopak as a gravestone. If this doesn’t endear you to Tasslehoff Burrfoot, I believe you may be a monster. This was a beautiful act of caring and sorrow. He refused to leave her body behind because he considered her a friend. I heard a line in John Wick 4: Friendship Means Little When It’s Convenient. It immediately popped into my head. It forced me to question my own friendships and how some of them ended. I have not always been a good friend and I left some in ruins. I think I can do better in that department.
So they escape to Khur looking for passage with the wooly mammoth, who ends up leaving them to travel to Icereach to find his family. They buy passage to Goodlund only to see Denzil wandering to the boat. They leap to a garbage barge being pulled by the ship, and was cut loose in the bay. They floated around for a while until minotaurs came by and gave them passage for a while in return for an owlbear corpse… I suppose they were delicious… and then they were stranded again, only to somehow be picked up again by the ship they paid for passage on. I have no idea how that math works, but they end up in Goodlund only to have Woodrow knocked out and Tas abducted by Denzil. They travel to the Ruins as Tas has convinced him that he can guide him past the grove outside the ruins.
Back at the ruins, Vincent hears others outside in the grove and leaves, while Trapspringer and Phineas sneak up the stairs to accidentally open a portal to a pocket dimension. They jump in and land in a candyland, created by a kender who found a necklace of wishes and used them up to make it. All the kender Vincent saved from the grove seems to have ended up here and they are trapped in something like Wonka’s factory. They are all very large after having only eaten candy, and some of them have been here since six Alt Cataclius!
Denzil tries to kill Tas when he realizes he doesn’t know how to get through the grove and that Tas was just stalling to find an opportunity to escape. Vincent arrived and abducts them both. Then outs Denzil as a half-orc! Why, oh why would the editor of Dragonlance novels not know that half-orcs don’t exist on Krynn? At this point, it should be common knowledge! So Tas sneaks up the stairs to find the portal as well, and Denzil stops him halfway through, ready to kill him. The kender inside sees Tas and they all grab hold to pull him inside, while Denziel is pulling him out, and Vincent arrives to pull as well, dragging everyone back into the ruins.
However, Takhisis is brooding in the Abyss and discovered this pocket dimension and would like to use it to reenter Krynn, but it’s never been open long enough. Now with all this commotion she begins to materialize when Damaris, Tas’ once betrothed, accidentally breaks the lever after Denzil enters it to find the treasure that’s been used up, trapping him and the Queen of Darkness. This enrages Takhisis and she demands that Nuitari scorch Kendemore as retribution.
They all leave for Kendermore, bringing Vincent the ogre with them, and they find it on fire with tornadoes and lightning everywhere. They all scramble, getting every kender together and organized to fight the fires, and Woodrow shows up looking for Tas. They all work together and when the storm passes, the kender decides to rebuild, Trapspringer marries Dameris, and Woodrow takes over Giselle’s job. Tas tried to look for his parents but they are gone, and Trapspringer supposedly teleports to Lunitari with his new wife, allegedly finding his first wife there as well.
This was a kender tale of a story if ever there was one. And with that perspective in mind, I enjoyed it. If I was to be critical I could pick it apart, but it’s like a gnome centered story, it’s supposed to be out there and ridiculous, so why not just take it as it is? I would only recommend this to fans of Kender and Tasslehoff Burrfoot however. Others can steer clear of this novel, but I for one enjoyed it for what it was.
Outro
And that’s it for my review of Kendermore by Mary Kirchoff. What do you think of the Gnomes kidnapping species with a magical carousel? What about a talking wooly mammoth and a cultured ogre? And finally is Takhisis trying to invade Krynn a bad trope at this point? You can email me at info@dlsaga.com or comment below.
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