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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bran Blackbyrd" data-source="post: 315279" data-attributes="member: 1710">I hated pre-3E halflings. They were fat, red faced hobbits and I absolutely could not stand them. With 3E I think they lost a lot of their Tolkein association and the baggage D&D halflings have been forced to carry around. I love the 3E halfling, they aren't bloated little toads anymore, but perfectly scaled humanoids. They don't live in holes in the ground either, none of that garbage.I don't care much for the argument that D&D was a complete LoTR ripoff, but I do think that players and even publishers can fall into the trap of becoming locked into a way of thinking.The reason a lot of people pick a race is based on a stereotype, after all, that's what a race is basically, but sometimes the stereotype gets out of hand. A character in a book calls Bilbo a thief, and suddenly all D&D halflings are thieves, Strider wields a torch in one hand and a weapon in the other, and suddenly all D&D rangers must fight with two weapons. Whatever...Gnomes... I never liked the illusion using trickster reputation they had. Who needs it? They were also always portrayed in illustrations as old wrinkly men with big ears and bigger noses. I just didn't see where that would appeal to anyone. Once again 3E saved them from some of that. As it stands though, I just can't figure out what to do with them in my campaign.Ultimately I think there won't be any gnomes on the main continent, they will live on islands south of where the main campaign takes place. Tropical regions. They'll be mostly brown and bronze skinned, and favor fast, sailing vessels with convoluted designs, to the large ships that the rest of the world has created.Halflings exist on the main continent, but they, like the other demihumans there, live in hiding. The halflings used to be like horse nomads (they didn't ride horses though, of course) With a few settled groups. Now they have been broken into small tribal groups, hiding wherever they can. One particular group dwells in dense forest and are quite aggressive towards outsiders. The warriors wear masks over their faces, wear short stilts, and have poles coming up off their back with another mask sitting a foot or so above their heads. The effect this gives when they poke out of the brush with the blank eyes of the masks staring is quite intimidating.One of the villains in my campaign is a halfling necromancer.In a world where the Great Purge saw both magic users and demihumans slaughtered en masse, she is both. She hates humans for the part they played in the almost total annihilation of her race, even though the majority of humanity took no part in the purge, and doesn't know it even happened. She is now a necromancer bent on the destruction of any human that crosses her path, with the help of her family, who she has brought back as undead. She isn't evil, or at least she didn't start out that way, which makes her a bit of a sympathetic villain. She isn't old enough to have experienced the purge first hand, but she's lived her whole life in hiding, listening to the stories of how so many of her family members were killed. Her parents were then killed by some human scouts. She's nearly mad and desperately wishes she had had the kill to raise her family as intelligent undead... She carries on conversations with them anyway.I like mixing up the races too. IMC the drow are good, and the orcs are too. But enough of my rambling.</blockquote>

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