Kender are a type of fantasy race first developed for the Dragonlance campaign setting for the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy role playing game published by TSR, Inc. in 1984. The first kender character was created by Harold Johnson as a player character in a series of role-playing adventures co-authored by Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis. Weis and Hickman's Dragonlance shared world novels introduced the kender to readers and players alike, largely through the character Tasslehoff Burrfoot, who became one of the main protagonists in the series.

Tasslehoff first appeared in the Dragonlance adventure module DL1 Dragons of Despair, published in March 1984; later that year, the kender's first literary appearance was in the novel Dragons of Autumn Twilight, published in November 1984. The kender are often compared to notable diminutive humanoid peoples in other fantasy fiction, such as the hobbits of Middle-earth or halflings featured in Dungeons & Dragons campaign settings.

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 character's 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, with mixed success: While Matt Barton and Shane Stacks assessed kender to be similar to Tolkien's hobbits, Daisy De Palmas Jauze considered them a novelty.

Roger E. Moore introduced the kender, and Tasslehoff Burrfoot, to the wider community through his short story A Stone's Throw Away, published in April 1984 in Dragon. While Hickman was involved in some of the development, he stated that it was Roger Moore who contributed the most in defining the kender's final iteration.

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 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 the German word for "children", 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.

Shannon Appelcline noted that game designer John Wick commented in a 2009 podcast that: "Kender … they don't make sense. It doesn't make sense for a race of sociopathic kleptomaniacs to exist in a culture. So how do you put that in a culture to make it make sense?"

The Dragonlance books present three conflicting accounts of how the kender were created. In Dragons of Summer Flame, the Irda state that kender descend from the gnomes. When the Greygem of Gargath was released, the gnomes present who desired the gem for greed were turned into dwarves, and those who wanted it for curiosity were turned into kender. In the Tales trilogy, however, the dwarves state that when the Greygem came to Krynn, its chaotic magic transformed a group of gnomes into both the first kender and the first dwarves. Still again, it has been stated that in the final battle for control of the Greygem at Gargath's tower, the chaotic power of the gem transformed part of the dwarven army into gnomes, and part of the elven army into kender.^{[citation needed]}