D&D General why do we have halflings and gnomes?

[Weiley31]

Yep, agreed.




Except gnomes. Was it in 4E gnomes were relegated to "monsters"? Best version of the gnome, ever. (Except, maybe, for that concrete one you stick next to the fishpond in the garden, you know, the one with its pants down that's p**ing into the pond).

I know that, lore wise, the Gnomes in 4E came from the Feywild. (So basically an Eladrin version of Gnomes) They were slaves, IIRC, to the Fomorians,but when they made the jump to the Material Plane in 4E, ditched em and never looked back.

They are pretty badass.

 

[Tonguez]

They are broadly similar, and with similar class restrictions - Sparta Rome etc, it was only the ruling class. The agrarian class where slaves and not permitted adventure.

No in Sparta the rulers sons were explicitly exempted, it was the rest of the citizens sons who were agoge. Those Agoge recruited to the Krypteia had the task of monitoring the helots (agraian class) for sedition and enforcing the law (including by killing the helots. Because the Helots were slaves not Spartans

 

[Mind of tempest]

I believe I have figured out why they always feel so off to the side, they do not build big things or seek to interact with other groups.
elves and dwarves had empires, nations and such in a lot of worlds history but the small folk seem to just somehow exist.
they feel like they were added at one point but never really developed them past that.
they simply are not great history no myths their gods other than garl and whats her name are box filler gods.
they feel like they were added by mandate not really used.

 

[Minigiant]

That was a class thing. Since only the oldest son in a British upper class family could inherit younger sons where encouraged to go off and get themselves killed in the name of Empire.

The vast majority of the population, who were not upper class, where "encouraged" (as in required by law) to stay put.

That's the thing.

D&D halflings culture is specifically stated to have no upper class.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Gnomes are the natural druids and tricksters. They are Coyote and Anansi. They are the race with a touch of the Feywild, and the triumph of wit and good humor over self-important brawn or power. While other races follow their gods for power, for fear, or for honor, or history, gnomes follow gods because those gods are freakin' cool, and do awesome things. If they lived in our world, gnomes would totally have anime versions of Garl Glittergold's adventures.

I did not know how badly I needed that imagery until just now.

 

[Hexmage-EN]

While other races follow their gods for power, for fear, or for honor, or history, gnomes follow gods because those gods are freakin' cool, and do awesome things. If they lived in our world, gnomes would totally have anime versions of Garl Glittergold's adventures.

I've set my campaign in Exandria, where Garl Glittergold isn't a thing, but I totally got this impression of gnome kids watching an 80's-style Garl Glittergold Saturday morning cartoon when I read Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes. One of my gnome PCs in another DM's campaign was inspired by the idea "what if a gnome rooted for Urdlen instead of Garl in the stories he heard as a kid and grew up into an adult who treated Urdlen more as a favorite underdog fictional character?"

I know that, lore wise, the Gnomes in 4E came from the Feywild. (So basically an Eladrin version of Gnomes) They were slaves, IIRC, to the Fomorians, but when they made the jump to the Material Plane in 4E, ditched em and never looked back.

They are pretty badass.

4E gnomes had the best lore. For my own campaign I'm assuming that this background is still true, but that it happened so long ago hardly anyone but svirfneblin in the Underdark of the Feywild remember. I also like to think that the svirfneblin were the original gnomes, forest gnomes were descendants of escapees to the surface of the Feywild, and rock gnomes left the Feywild for the Material Plane, all of this happening so long ago that modern rock gnomes have no idea about their history.

 

[Chaosmancer]

I did like one of 4e's takes on halflings: itinerant boaters, who trade up and down rivers.

That's what I did with my halflings for the most part. They enjoy the comforts of good food and a warm fire, but they are nomads and travelers by tradition. They love their homes, but their homes are the wagons on the road with friends, or the boats on the river.

It also helps me with the whole "We don't empire build" thing. Because, well, if you are holding ideal farmlands, someone is either taking it, or you are fighting them off.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Personally, I kind of love gnomes, but a decent chunk of that is because a buddy of mine did an adventure about the Lost Ladies and I ended up heavily filling out some gnomish lore.

See, Gnomes are kind of distilled joy in a way, they were (according to lore) literally born of the laughter of their God. So, I ended up taking that and a few other details (such as the long journey underground) to create something roughly like this.


Garl and his siblings were not originally gods (very few of my gods were anymore), they were members of a terrible race who were tasked with the goal of finding and harnessing magic. Garl actually succeeded, and the beauty of what he discovered, the light and color he saw for the first time, sparked within him a joy and laughter which resonated in his workshop.

See, this race, following a DnD tradition, had gemstones that acted as control modules for them, implanted inside their minds to act as a way to force obeying them. These gems reacted to the magic and laughter and gave birth to new life. Life born of these gems, with minds complex and fractaled (my reasoning for their resistance to mental effects. Gnomish minds are very different).

Garl gathered his siblings and his new children, and fled. They took a portal through the Elemental Plane of Earth, and spent generations underground, looking for a place to call home. To place where they belong. This journey is usually depicted in DnD as the Gnomes traveling from deep underground to the surface, but I wanted to make it more planar, because of this last little bit of Lore. See, DnD lore says that after the Gnomes exited the tunnels from this journey, they exited into the Golden Hills, the divine realm of Garl and his siblings, the Gnomish Heaven (at least the version I found claimed this). However, Gnomes exist in the material plane, which is when I realized the biggest thing that separates gnomes from the other races, the biggest change in the lore which make them fascinating to me.

The Material Plane is Gnomish Heaven.

The Gnomes are a race that love exploring ideas, they love finding new things, new interactions, they are full to bursting with a love of life and all of its complexities. And nothing in the multiverse is more complex and shifting as the material plane. IT has bits and pieces from every plane in existence, it is infinitely discoverable.

Being here, now, seeing the world and figuring out how it works, why it works, and can we change this to make it work differently, that joy is the reason Gnomes exist.


It is only my take on it, and I have a few more bits and pieces, since I wrote a whole Genesis for them, but it makes them infinitely interesting to me, because so many races have this instinctual "perfect heaven" that we have created for them, but the Gnomes are like "are you kidding? This place is amazing, why would we want to go somewhere else?"

 

[Paul Farquhar]

That's the thing.

D&D halflings culture is specifically stated to have no upper class.

So what? Adventurers don't have to be upper class (and I'm pretty sure most are not), they just have to not conform to cultural norms. "Upper class (and male)" is merely an exception that has been pointed out for certain very class based real world human societies.

 

[FrozenNorth]

When they have the racial features Brave and Lucky, and no one else does - well the game paints a very different picture of them than you do. Align your opinions with how they are represented mechanically in the rules and you shouldn't have a problem.

I would say that the write-ups in the PHB and MToF paint a very different picture of them than their mechanical options, not Minigiant