their lack of nations is odd not in the sense of lack of imperialism but the lack of everyone else stealing their land or eating them, one can not be a species of couch potato and farm in a place with ten-ton monsters who are hungry.
MTF goes into detail about how they defend themselves against monsters.
their lore is bare-bones in everywhere that is the default which should not be the case as why would you have a thing just dumped in your setting and do nothing with it?
So do something with it. Do the books need to spell out every little detail for you?
it is an abstraction from what is written no tales of artist or poets just simple folk, only simple folk and not portrayed as bad guys so add in the lack of definition of what else they care about they end up as well bland.
And again, the books do go into detail about their storytelling. And since halflings are commonly thought of as
rogues, you can easily see them as bad guys to one degree or another.
did him being a halfling matter in the slightest or could he have been any race without any changes? your answer can explain a great deal.
Well, yes. For starters, three of my players are playing halflings. It was important to them that this guy was corrupting their people.
Halflings, in my world, are also one of the more civilized people--humans, orcs, and elves only have tiny tribal-style villages at most, often built around ruins, whereas halflings have towns (the setting is a world-forest, centered around a giant river, that actively fights against anything larger than a town). Only dwarfs and gnomes (who basically are one people) have larger civilizations. The only changes to halflings are that they control a lot of the boat traffic and mint coins (unlike other surface races, which engage in barter or use hacksilver or weigh the metal; dwarfs also mint coins).
This also meant that if the cultist had an uninterrupted hold on the town--which he almost did; he was a charismatic preacher promising eternal life to supplicants and was performing various miracles for them--he'd be in a decent position to spread out to other halfling towns and take them over as well.
I should reiterate that the halflings are, for the most part, the same as you get out of the PH: we were introducing a new player to D&D and as the only official settings I know well enough to run well are Ravenloft and Planescape (neither of which are new-player friendly)
and I love world-building, I whipped up a super-simple world based on some ideas I had floating around in my head. I didn't want to make any radical changes to confuse the new person. Then the rest of the players (sadly, the new person had to leave for non-gaming reasons) liked the world and their characters enough to continue playing in the setting.
I am not talking about their mechanic but what little lore they go in mtof as that explain how the ogres have not eaten them all yet.
They most likely have a militia of sorts. They have a god of defense (Arvoreen), after all. Also, they're villages are notoriously well-hidden, so dumb ogres might not be able to find them.
Also, people keep pointing out that halflings tend to live among humans or near human cities, so they probably are protected by human or multi-racial patrols designed to keep such threats away from civilized lands.
