Halflings

A halfling rogue. Just look at that smug bastard!

Halflings, or simply "'flings", are generally small, well-spirited people; that's how they've been portrayed in almost every single setting ever, and it'll probably stay that way. Still, when they're portrayed differently they tend to be rather . . . quirky. For instance, Dark Sun's halflings are all cannibals, while Eberron's are nomads that ride around on dinosaurs and Dragonlance's are the abominations known and cursed as Kender. Go figure.

Small and dodgy (stunty and right stuff,) they generally favour rogue classes, though halfling paladins of Arvoreen are not to be underestimated! Halflings typically love food, beer and sex, the hedonistic little bastards. They are also kleptomaniacs and will steal anything you have while you aren't looking: don't bother bolting it down, they'll just take the nails too.

Adult female halflings are also known as "legal lolis."

Halflings are really a shameless ripoff of Tolkien's Hobbits, who are also referred to as 'halflings' by humans in the same series. Artists (and, more to the point, artists' bosses) can't seem to decide whether halflings are chubby and fat, look just like normal humans but are half as tall, or look like children who get stuck at age 10 for all eternity and thus permanently remain lolis/shotas (which is actually how they were described in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons). We at /tg/ prefer the last option.

Halfling Physiology

Halflings consist of two main organs, the stomach and the fingers. The fingers serve to bring food to the stomach, and the stomach exists to fuel the fingers, ad infinitum. It is believed by top scientists that the length of halfling lifespan is due to the fact that they are perpetual motion machines, powered by an endless cycle of food snagging, digestion, and finger-fueling. That halflings are mortal at all is mainly thought to be a consequence of their recruitment by adventuring parties, who break the chain by forcing the halfling to use its fingers for lockpicking.

Halfling Mating Practices

Pretty much the same as human mating practices, only shorter and with more meal-breaks.

Surprisingly these little fuckers are basically a race of deviant sluts if the Book of Erotic Fantasy is to be believed. (It shouldn't, as it turned half the races in the game into sex-crazed hippies in a transparent attempt to justify its own existence.)

Either way, D&D doesn't focus much on halflings crossbreeding, just like every other race that was neither a human, dragon, or outsider. In AD&D, in the Forgotten Realms, it was mentioned that a lot of Shield Dwarves have halfling (or gnome, or even human) parents, due to a sort of poison/genetic deficiency that had built up in their race and was making dwarf/dwarf breeding less likely, encouraging crosses. In 5e, the Stout type of halfling is rumored to be the result of dwarf/halfling interbreeding. But that's about it, honestly.

Halfling Society

What else is there to say? We covered the food, the sex, the epic midget-dom. Oh, halflings love giving gifts. If you've read the first chapter of Lord of the Rings, you should know this. If you haven't, what are you even doing on a website built by tabletop geeks?

Anyway, this compulsive gift-giving is primarily the source of their acute kleptomania. Without somehow making up the deficit, the average halfling would run out of gifts to give in approximately an hour and twelve minutes. Most hobbit hole kitchens are adorned with a wood burning that reads, "steal from the tall, give to the short." Where these wood burnings come from is a mystery, since halflings never write anything and nobody's invented the soldering iron yet. It is assumed that they stole these, too, but from whom exactly is a mystery beyond our current ability to discern.

Halfling Subraces

Although not as mutable as even the dwarf and gnome races, never mind the elf race, there are still quite a few different species of halflings scattered throughout the D&D multiverse.

To begin with, remember, halflings began as rip-offs of Tolkein's Hobbits, and even their names are little more than literal translations of Tolkein's names for them. This is most evident in the Hairfoot (from "Harfoot"), or the AD&D Common Halfling. This was nothing more than your vanilla hobbit; short, prone to fat, quiet natured, good humored, and fond of living in comfort, with particularly large and hairy feet.

The Hairfoots, for obvious reasons, couldn't last and so in 3rd edition their place was taken by the Lightfoots. These halflings are essentially the bastard lovechild of a Hairfoot and a Kender, combining most of the Hairfoot's common sense, love of creature comforts, and big hairy feet with the Kender's slender build and some of its adventurous nature. The result was a peace-loving race of small nomads who werent' all adventurers, but were more likely to do so than Hairfoots. Lightfoots got far more love give to them in 4th edition, losing all vestiges of their Hairfoot ancestry in terms of appearance and growing to a height slightly taller than a typical ten-year-old, but underwent a harsh devolution/were replaced by Hairfoots in 5th edition.

The Tallfellows (taken from Tolkein's Fallohides) are... well, they're basically elven halflings. No joke; they speak elvish, they live in treetown villages in deep woods, preferably where elves live, they can detect secret doors like elves, they're stealthier in the woods, they get super-high (19) Dexterity and Wisdom, they live the longest of any of the three main halfling subraces... they're elven halflings.

The Stouts (taken from Tolkein's Stoors) are the dwarven halflings to the Tallfellows being the elven halflings. They're strong, muscular, stocky halflings with a predilection for dwelling underground, infravision, they have facial hair (something other halflings lack), they have a natural talent for mining/jewel-making/stonemasonry/building/smithing/carving and boat-building, and they live longer than Hairfoots. In 5th edition, they gained the dwarven traits of poison resistance and increased constitution.

Needless to say, D&D makes pretty obvious hints that the Tallfellows and Stouts are the result of kinky halfling/elf and halfling/dwarf sex. Even 5e admits this by outright stating in the PHB that many suspect Stouts originate from dwarf/halfling marriages - of course, back in Forgotten Realms AD&D, it was explicit that a lot of dwarven men wound up wedding halfling (and gnome, and human) women, but that lore kind of went away over the years. This may also be why one of the possible "human origin myths" in 3.5's Races of Destiny is that humans are the result of a very beautiful but greedy and slutty halfling woman, who refused to pick between her dwarven lover and elven lover to instead demand they share her, for which the gods cursed her by making her children be a blend of the three of them.

The notorious Kender are, although certainly similar to halflings in resembling slightly fey human children that never grow up, generally not accepted as proper halflings. The halflings who've actually met kender insist on this, saying instead that they are some other race that has simply evolved to fit the "halfling niche" on Krynn. Given their seemingly incurable genetic predisposition to thievery and stupidity, many players suggest that they may be a strain of goblin that has tried to escape the usual fate of its species by evolving to look more human-appearing "cutesy".

The Rhulisiti, as they call themselves, are better known as the Athasian Halflings elsewhere. Degenerated from the heights of glory, these dusky-skinned and feral halflings jealously guard their home in the Ringing Mountains, hunting everything that isn't one of their own kind -- including fellow sapients. Amusingly, virtually all other sapient races in the setting are descended from them in some fashion.

The Furchin are a race of halflings from the frozen world of Falakyr, reached through the use of spelljamming; though they live as Stone Age nomadic hunter-gatherers on their own world, an unknown wizard attempted to take many of them as slaves, leading to individuals or even whole clans being scattered throughout the spheres. Per TSR traditions, their name stems from the fact that they have the ability to grow massive beards, longer even than those of the Stouts, whom they otherwise resemble.

Cerillian Halflings resemble the Hairfoots, but are actually refugees from the Shadowworld, giving them the ability to look into that otherworldly plane and, if necessary, travel back and forth. They rarely bother, however, because their kinsfolk still live in abject slavery there.

Ghostwise Halflings are native to the Chondalwood region of Faerun, an isolationist species of near-feral halflings who have mutated to better survive as stealthy hunters. Most notably, they use telepathy to communicate rather than talking.

Notable Halflings

• Bilbo Baggins, of Tolkien's Middle Earth. The original Hobbit, the one that started it all.
  • Frodo Baggins, Bilbo's cousin and adopted heir. Was involved in the theft of and willful destruction of property (specifically jewellery), and murder; as the owner, Sauron, died of mental anguish. No legal action taken. Fled the country to avoid prosecution. Final fate unknown.
  • Samwise Gamgee, accomplice to Baggins in aforementioned theft, and hunting of endangered mammoth spider wildlife. After a generous donation of the Baggins estates by Frodo to his election campaign, he became mayor of the Shire. This was quickly followed by a name change to "Samwise Gardner" and coincidental loss of any records of any of his potential misdemeanors.
  • Bullroarer Took, Great-Great-Great-Great Uncle of Bilbo Baggins. Most notable for his ability to ride a real horse and for inventing golf with a rabbit hole, a (non-golf) club, and the head of a goblin general while whacking it off his shoulders mid-battle.
• Belkar Bitterleaf, from Rich Burlew's Order of the Stick. Arguable, as Belkar is so fucking, eye-bleedingly awesome that he may, in fact, be a dorf. ("I am a sexy shoeless god of war!")
• Tasslehoff Burrfoot, beloved happy-go-lucky companion to*BLAM* fuck kenders. Fuck them in the ear.
• Olive Ruskettle, a borderline Chaotic Stupid female halfling thief whose biggest claims to fame are stealing the name/reputation of a bard despite being "too chaotic to become a bard(!)" and helping to free the Saurials from Moander, in that order.
• Mazzy Fentan of Baldur's Gate fame, halfling quasi-paladin of justice who can and will break both your legs if you call her "cute."
• That's more or less it. I mean, they're hardly the go-getters of heroic fantasy.
  • Though admittedly sometimes they get involved in major events.
    • If only because they wander into the planning tent in search of more food.
• Flo not a fantasy character, but the nickname for the first fossil Homo floresiensis that was discovered, or to use there more widely known name the "Hobbit" (a possible name for them was Homo hobbitus). Incredibly short Flo was determined to be 30 and yet only barely higher then three feet thus as the first member of the hobbit race we have discovered earns a spot on this list.

Gallery

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  4e halflings and their notable lack of hairy feet.

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