Tasslehoff Burrfoot, a kender part of a party of adventurers in the Dragonlance universe, gets involved in a nasty issue for violating kender marriage laws that triggers a fantastic series of adventures.

I don’t remember a thing from this book, which I read in 1998, but I do remember laughing like a madman and having to block my mouth to avoid waking up my brother and mother. I read it around the time I started playing Dungeons and Dragons. Skimming over the pages today, as part of a big decluttering project, I see where many of the names that my friends chose for their characters came from (Kitiara, Takhisis), and also where I took some of the ideas for my campaign (cataclysm). I also feel like I’m reading my early dnd synopses, which I wrote in Spanish.

Names that sound familiar:

• Tasselhoff
• Kitiara
• Gisella
• Takhisis
• Tanis
• Damaris
• Kendermore

Connections

• Neuroplasticity: I wonder how trivial decisions like reading this or that book may have on early human brain development.
• Dragonlance: one of the campaigns I referred to a lot during my early dnd adventures.
• Impermanence, philosophy: for the last few years, fiction, especially fiction that I feel attached to, spurs a mix of emotions in me that sends me into a philosophical mindset. The stories are completely made up and don’t reflect reality. All the atoms that sustain them today, in ink, paper, neurons, digital bits, will be rearranged into different forms, and, in a few years, there won’t be any trace of them, but they still happened. Yet, I feel a very strong emotional attachment to them, something that feels important. Are these emotions a manifestation of ignorance, of identifying with and attaching to something that is not our true nature, or is there something else behind it?