I'm worried that my take on this next book might come up a little short.
Okay, I know everyone makes that joke, but there's really not much that can be said about
PHBR9 The Complete Book of Gnomes & Halflings. I mean, besides the obvious, what with the self-evident humor that comes from the two pint-sized PC races not having enough material to each fill out their own book, requiring them to be put together in one. It's almost sublime, when you think about it.
But all kidding aside, what I found notable here is how these races represent polar opposites in terms of their associations with Tolkien. Whereas D&D's elves and dwarves are stuck in a permanent liminal space with regard to how much their depictions owe to the Professor, we know exactly what the answers are with regard to halflings and gnomes, since the former and undeniably his creations whereas the latter are inarguably not. That likewise puts its own, subtler spin on those two races being packaged in the same book.
Of course, that doesn't make either of them truly significant, within the wider context of D&D. Whereas it wasn't that hard to find products that explicitly touted their focus on elves or dwarves, gnomes and halflings get far less of the spotlight. BECMI gave us
GAZ8 The Five Shires, and
PC2 Creature Crucible: Top Ballista is sort of about gnomes, but beyond that I'm drawing a blank. Neither of these little guys were apparently much of a draw. Hence why it's not too surprising that the most notable examples of gnomes and halflings were the settings that radically redefined them, such as Dark Sun's cannibal halflings, Dragonlance's tinker gnomes and kender, etc. And even those never got their own racial books.
So what's
this book about? Well, for one thing, it takes the idea of "two books mashed together" rather seriously. Each race has an introduction and five chapters, with the numbering of the chapters resetting after it goes from gnomes to halflings. Since the corresponding chapters cover the same area, we can look at their treatment of each race together.
The first chapter for each opens with a look at their creation myths and some brief coverage of their gods, and this is something I can get behind. The previous racial books' being silent on the role of their gods felt like an oversight to me, so it's nice that the pantheons of Garl Glittergold and Yondala are overviewed here (though it saves game stats for
DMGR4 Monster Mythology, of which I'll speak more later).
Both respective second chapters cover sub-races, and in doing so splits the difference for how the previous racial splatbooks (for elves and dwarves) handled things. Here, there's no particular attempt to avoid mentioning the campaign settings where particular sub-races come from (the way
The Complete Book of Dwarves did). At the same time, it presents the various sub-races in a manner that abets using them in any particular campaign world (which wasn't how
The Complete Book of Elves came across, at least to me), something that it explicitly says is optional when it overviews the kender!
Chapters three (that's not a typo) go all-in with presenting the flavor text of stereotypical gnome/halfling cultures. I won't say that they do bad jobs of it, and there are a few notable points (such as the halfling chapter covering their take on the term "halfling"), but for the most part these chapters are bound by the generic presentation each race has. To be fair, they try and lean into it, hoping to flesh out more details rather than break the mold, but if you weren't the biggest fans of either race, nothing here will change your mind.
The fourth chapters are where we get the majority of the book's new crunch, presenting upwards of two dozen new kits. I can't help but note the bit of awkwardness when each chapter notes there are are a few gnome- and halfling-specific kits in some other books (i.e.
The Complete Bard's Handbook); that makes
The Complete Book of Gnomes & Halflings feel, well...not so complete. It doesn't help that the kits themselves are bland. Even the multiclass-specific kits can't do better than, for instance, the Buffoon, a gnome thief/illusionist whose major kit abilities are being able to say something distracting and being able to use two minor bard abilities ("influence reactions" and "countersong"). The kit's special hindrance, meanwhile, is (and this is the totality of what's written there): "He or she has to walk around looking ridiculous."
And here I thought that was the default state for gnomes and halflings.
The final chapters present sample communities for each race, but they come across as little more than filler. The book closes out with some paragraph-long suggestions for adventures specifically focused around gnomes and halflings. None struck me as particularly memorable.
Even before I picked this book up, I found myself unimpressed with the shorter PC races, and what was here did little to change my mind, either when I got it or when I re-read it now. While not
bad per se, what's here simply offers no real surprises. While there are one or two points of interest (I think the furchin - polar halflings from a distant world called Falakyr who spread out via spelljamming - were original to this book), most of the time you're receiving exactly what you expected, no more and no less.
Right now, we have an active thread going on titled
"why do we have halflings and gnomes?" I feel like this book's answer to that question would be to point behind you, and then run away while your back is turned.
Ultimately, my opinion of PHBR9 can be summed up with a song:
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