I'm through 2/3rds of the 2nd book (Dragons of winter twilight) and I have to say that Raistlin is my favorite character. I really hope they will make the 2nd book a movie too, as it seems better than the first.
Raistlin has a burning ambition enough to move mountains by itself. He is smart and egoist. He is the perfect anti-hero. If he was a step closer to the black robes, he would be a good darklord (curse and all).
EDIT: Just to check for a good drawing of Raistlin I checked the web and decided to read his bio from Wikipedia... don't do it unless you have read most of the books about him.
And that comes from a person that reads the end of the book first and doesn't enjoy a mystery movie unless he knows the killer in advance.
"You truly see what a person is made of, when you begin to slice into them" - Semirhage
"I am not mad, no matter what you're implying." - Litalia My DMGuild work!
Sorry for commenting a post that was written, like, a week after I was born, but I'm THIS bored, and I scrolled the 'unanswered topics' and saw Raistlin and just had to comment.
I have a love-hate relationship with Raist. Reading about him felt like being manipulated - he's such a jerk and doesn't even try or feels a need to hide it, and yet for some reason you can't help but sympathise with him. The sort of writing that makes you want simultaneously to bow down to the author and to punch them in the face. Which is weird to me, cause he's the only character in the Dragonlance novels that managed to spark that magnitude of - negative or positive - emotion in me. The rest are kinda bland - not because they don't have cool concepts, but because these concepts aren't executed well enough. (Maybe it's just the problem of writing an RPG into a book - it's an adaptation between two very different mediums of storytelling, so a lot is lost in the process.)
I actually have an OC (I really want to put him in a campaign but didn't have the chance yet so in the meantime I'm just making up stories about him) that started as a Raistlin expy.
He's called Talyn. He has the 'sickly but determined young wizard who's obsessed with magic and knowledge, obeys no one and outsmarts even the gods' aspects of Raistlin, but he's chaotic good, and his magic-obsession isn't power lust or addiction but simple wonder and curiousity - he wants to know the weave for its being, not for its use, if to paraphrase Le Guin.
Talyn had some adventures in Ravenloft - he and his friends were dragged into the mists once for a week, and between all the horrors he noticed how his own spells worked slightly differently there, and started experimenting. When they got back to Toril, he started drafting an theory about planar influence over magic - and after a few years, he traveled to the Shadowfell with a bunch of books and lab equipment, and intentionally jumped into the nearest patch of suspicious fog so he can research further. Yes, not the smartest thing to do, but he has a talent for getting both in and out of trouble.
So... I think Raistlin himself can work perfectly in a Ravenloft story, but I think it'd be better as a darker version of Talyn's (mis)adventures there - not a darklord, just an outlander scholar of the arcane who's crazy enough to tempt the dark powers just to get the knowledge he wants. Only that he'd look for knowledge with a more 'practical' use - maybe he was looking for Vecna so he can get from him the secret of ascending to godhood, and that's how he came up with the plan to usurp Takhisis? I imagine he'd adventure between domains, make and betray some new friends, gain a few darklords' eternal wrath for weird reasons, find out where Soth disappeared to... Stuff like that.
As a darklord I think his curse would be simply to lose his magic - the only thing he cares about - which we've already seen in Dragons of Summer Flame.
WDYT?
I really hope they will make the 2nd book a movie too, as it seems better than the first.
