Mythology

My initial source was from DL5 (Dragons of Mystery) and the Dragonlance Adventures hardback book. DL5 lists the gods, but it also lists alternative names given in other cultures. If you tabulate these, you will see patterns emerge in who has names for what (for example, Tarsis and Icewall have names for Mishakal and most of the evil gods, but no others; elves and kender have names for the same set of gods).

From this, I made the assumption that these cultures only worshipped the gods for whom they had names. The grand list of 21 gods (7 of each from good, neutral and evil) was a later compilation by someone wanting to produce a grand unified religion. Number one suspect for this would have to be those masters of hubris, Istar. Since the Ergoth names are closest to the "official" names, it seems (although I've never seen it explicitly mentioned) that the official names are Solamnic. What may have happened is that when Istar and Solamnia merged, Istar was greatly impressed with Solamnia's gods and adopted them for their own (and later decided to "improve" them too).

However, there are no neutral gods listed for Ergoth. Where do they come from? Reorx is obviously a gnome/dwarf god, and Zivylin (the World Tree) fits very nicely into elven mythology. I think that Istar probably bundled all the gods that didn't fit elsewhere into the label of "neutral".

Sometimes the fit isn't perfect, which shows that the Istarin tried to force a square peg into a round hole. Some gods, such as Majere/Manthus and Habbakuk's appearance in the elven pantheon, cause particular problems. Sometimes Istar equated gods on the basis of their spheres (such as the elven god E'Li and the solamnic god Paladine, both patriarchal sky gods) and other times by their exhibited powers or symbols (such as Manthus and Majere, who both have the rose as a symbol, and exhibit rebirth qualities).

The other element to remember is to include historical/mythical events that caused wide-scale change. In Earth mythology, the Flood is a commonly recurring motif which may have some historical root. Before the Cataclysm, Krynn did not have any such events, but it did have a number of early Dragonwars, a time of magical chaos and the changes wrought by the Greystone of Gargath. Of course, the "Greystone" story is probably just one such version of many tales that tell of the origin of dwarves, kender and other new races. Very important for Krynn, of course, is the origin of Dragons.