Just take what you want and ignore the rest.
In the homebrew setting that I'm working, I've changed whole swaths of D&D to fit my desire.
Well sure any old goat can do that. But my point was more that, the more these guys come out and "talk about D&D" the more they're setting expectations for people of what they might find at a table, which places
more work on me to explain that no, wanderlust is a natural element of humanoids, you Mr Halfling just happen to have a stronger sense of it than others of your people. And then allow the player to say "well, I want it to be a divine thing" and I can go "okay" because that doesn't make a lick of difference to me. But it might to the player. Maybe the idea that the gods are in their people's collective heads pushing buttons really gets them excited. And I mean hey that's great, it just gets some of us really un-exicted.
I agree, @
shidaku.
Somehow "godifying" concepts dumbs them down. It is moreorless identical to saying, "the devil made me do it", which shortcircuits the investigation of actual influences and causes. Too much reliance on gods makes the setting feel dumber.
And the main problem is, hard-baking the gods into descriptions makes it increasing difficulty to present the feel of a nonpolytheistic campaign.
Right, or even a godless campaign. It's just
more work to take out something that didn't need to be included to begin with, and honestly their explanations are fairly heavy-handed and ham-fisted.
Also, why don't humans have a patron diety? Oh right we can't talk about that because it would upset someone something real-world relgiions...and lets just ignore the fact that the last time we did it the human patron diety was a horrible racist jerk who commanded humans to go out and kill the other races. Oops! Our bad!
While I didn’t care for this presentation of Halflings either, I didn’t get the impression that the wanderlust was directly divinely inspired. Seemed more like their luck and tendency to be overlooked was divine in origin, and their relative peace and security an indirect result of that divine good fortune, and that wanderlust was more a trait some Halflings experience and that the community as a whole benefits from (though I suppose that could also be attributed to luck... eh.)
Personally, I’m not a fan of the blatantly Tolkien-derivative depiction of Halflings as almost universally provincial with the occasional exception when a special Halfling feels the call to adventure. My favorite version of Halflings I’ve seen, and the one I adopt in my home games comes from Scarred Lands, where the simple Halfling farmer with no shoes is a stereotype left over from a time in recent history where Halflings were enslaved by the dominant empire. They don’t have any particular racial or cultural preference towards agriculture, they were forced into such labor, and the idea that they are not too bright as a race and easily satisfied with “simple provincial pleasures” a mere justification. And although they are free now, the image has stuck around in the cultural consciousness.
Right I mean, this whole description of them being "quaintly rural" for "no apparent reason" and "oh yeah the reason is divine protection" is just...annoying. I mean, they're short, sure, but that won't stop a driven and creative race from conquering the world, developing incredible technology or an incredible culture.
Now I'm tempted to include a halfling empire in my world. Conquering the world to make it safe for short races everywhere! They'd be allied with the Gnomes of course. The Halflings would be the brutal might and the Gnomes would be the mad scientists. Hmmm...I like this idea.