On Halflings…
The poor D&D halfling… talk about an identity crisis.
Lets see, they’ve gone from pure tolkien rip-off (D&D, AD&D)
… to a wierd chameleon species AD&D
Tallfellows (vaguely elf-looking that lived near elves)
Stouts (vaguely dwarf-looking that lived near dwarves)
… to being made setting specific and being made into
… to being cannibals (AD&D Dark Sun Setting)
Back to being Kender in D&D3e (and I presume 4e).
Boggles the mind. They’ve gone from a pastoral homey (not homie damnit) folk where an adventurer would be an odd duck (role playing potential assh**es, think about it) to a gypsy folk where every one of them is eager to see whats over the next hill etc. (i.e. every halfling is an adventurer by temperment. Great.) and if the art is to be believed, are indistinguishable from elves except for size.
Jeez.
Also, when did gnomes loose the beards and all get nose jobs?
Funny observation, and yet so true it’s sad. Whatever happened to the old dragged-into-adventure-beyond-your-will race? To me, that’s what makes The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings so amusing and insightful, and dare I say, serious literature. This speaks to something about humanity, going beyond fantasy for fantasy’s sake.
But having halflings (kender) be happy-go-lucky hippy free spirit types who bravely kick down the dungeon door with their bare feet is just downright silly.
And turning them into cannibals!?! That’s insulting to both halflings and cannibals.
This ins one reason why I like the players in my games to all be human — so the races can all be somewhat foreign to them — always just different enough to never quite get along.
As for revamping halflings, I propose we put our heads together an put together a true halfling race… maybe even call them hobbits. Why not? It’s not like we are in the same legal danger as WotC. I’ll post something to my site to this effect, and you feel free to comment on it. We publish a small circulation PDF every quarter with new (and old) ideas for spicing up role playing campaigns. Feel free to check out our work, and even contribute if you’re interested.
Keep up the good musings in the meantime!
As for gnomes, we’ve posited sea gnomes, tinkerers who live beneath the sea. But with aquatic beards and without nose jobs!
Seems to me it’s part of the problem of taking a single individual within a race, and making a template out of it that is used to describe the whole race.
The original “halfling”, Bilbo, being the reluctant homebody, that was the first hobbit as it were.*
Then in the Dragonlance novels that one halfling character was the template for the mischievous Kender. Don’t remember any other characters from that race in the ones I read, so there’s nothing to contrast it to.
And Darksun? I feel like Darksun should not be spoken of.
All of that said, I don’t really feel the outrage, or see a need of a solution. In the Dungeons & Dragons game the halfling have been rewritten several times. The point I see in it is making them a race that has a reason to go get into adventures - which the original hobbits were not. As they were presented in Tolkien’s work, there’s not much reason for a player to play them, unless the DM wants to write a story where some of the characters are genuinely dragged against their will into the adventure, and a player wants to play that reluctant character. In other words, a module that you might call “There and Back Again”.
As I’ve always liked the original vision of the hobbits, and like writing stories of high fantasy, I’ve never written stories where they’re on the stage. They make much more sense off it it.
my 2cp
-Adam
* Of course, Mary and Pippin were adventurous young men at the beginning of the story, so maybe the lesson is that no rule lacks many different exceptions when it comes to personality.
Thanks for the comments; sorry it took so long to er, moderate them?
I know I’m painting with pretty broad strokes in my comments, but the ‘official’ takes on them are thin.
Interestingly enough, 3.5 SRD (here http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/halfling.htm) reads almost exactly like the 1e MM entry, swapping ‘hairfoot’ for ‘lightfoot’ and ’stout’ for ‘deep halfling’.
So, someone should tell the artists - and while I’m on the subject whats with all the bondage gear in the 3e PHB? Everyone has a kinky leather fetish?
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