Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="JohnBiles" data-source="post: 4675098" data-attributes="member: 63128">This is from my Alternate Five Shires for Mystara: The history of the Alternate Five Shires is driven by several interlocking cycles.  Firstly, agricultural countries undergo a boom/bust cycle which is driven by population growth and the limits of the ability of the land to sustain such growth. It begins with a small population farming only the best lands. As the population grows, they spread out to begin farming more marginal lands. Eventually, all the land is taken, and further population growth is only possible if you either conquer more land.  This can lead either to bursts of colonization and expansion or else to bloody war as everyone begins killing each other to take control of the best land.Secondly, this interlocks with the nature of halflings (postulated for this supplement). When food is readily available, halflings eat like pigs and are happy and content and good natured. They become a peaceful folk, able to fight if survival is necessary, but inclined to strongly lawful and good behaviours. However, when starvation sets in, they become increasingly sneaky, cranky, and quarrelsome, as their survival instincts begin to override their good natures. Halfling adventurers tend to be a lot sneakier and dangerous and theft-inclined than normal halflings in part because they don't have time for meals six times a day. Or the money to pay for it. Until they steal it.Thus, as the Five Shires periodically becomes full of too many people for everyone to have six meals a day, the inhabitants become progressively more suspicious, protective of their relatives over strangers, quarrelsome, sneaky, and even violent. The population pressure must be relieved either by expansion or by civil war which cuts the population down to size.This interlocks with a third cycle, the cycle of growth and shrinkage of the population of the region of the Shadowdeep located under the Five Shires. Manipulated by the Deep Glaurants, the humanoids and other creatures which dwell below the land periodically erupt upwards, seeking to seize the Crucibles of Blackflame and to rule the land for themselves.  While the monsters outstripping their resources follows a cycle similar to that of the Halflings, their cycle is timed differently, and thus has different results, depending on its intersection with the Halfling psychological and agricultural cycles.It is of course in the nature of things that all three cycles are now starting to peak simultaneously in the year 1000 AC, when the player characters step onto the scene...So basically, you have halflings with personality shifts induced by whether they are overfed or in paranoid starvation mode.</blockquote>

Verification