Editing Halfling (section)

=Origin=
Unlike the other [[demihuman]] races of D&D, halflings have no particular mythological origins. Instead, they are intimately tied with the origins of D&D as a game.

Quick recap: Dungeons & Dragons began as [[Chainmail]], a medieval wargame that slowly evolved into a role-playing game, making its fateful trip towards D&D when [[Gary Gygax]] and his buddies decided that they wanted to try and use their game to play in a fantasy world based on the various fantasy novels they were fans of - most particularly, the [[The Lord of the Rings]].

Thus, the [[Hobbit]] was carried over from its roots on [[Middle Earth]] to serve as a PC race for the earliest editions of D&D. That was, until the infamously litigious [[Tolkien]] estate heard about it and slapped Gygax with a warning (to be fair, Tolkien did invent the word "Hobbit"). Rather than remove the race from his game - he may not have been too fond of the fantasy elements himself, but bugger the idea of being forced to drop them - Gygax simply renamed them "Halflings", taken from a nickname/insult used against hobbits in the LotR trilogy. Long story short, it worked; the Tolkien estate could no longer sue them for their use, and so halflings have continued into the game ever since, constantly tweaking and tinkering, but rarely completely unrecognizable from their ancient roots.

Designers of a grimmer (and perhaps less-PC) bent stumbled onto references of pygmies and of other rainforest tribes sick of outsiders' shit, and figured the halfling template as good-enough for that. We'll get to those.