Halfling (Dungeons & Dragons)

• 1. Introduction

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  The halfling carries a name it was not born with. In 1974, the first Dungeons & Dragons edition introduced the small, home-loving creature as a player character class called "hobbit." The name came directly from J.R.R. Tolkien's fiction. A cease and desist from the Tolkien Estate forced publisher TSR to remove the name from all official materials. What the game did next with the renamed race proved more interesting than a simple word swap. Over the following decades, designers pushed the halfling into settings and roles that bore little resemblance to its literary origin. At the same time, they built it a rich mythology of its own. Two questions run through everything that follows. What did the halfling keep from its origins, and how far did different game worlds push it?

• 2. A Race of Many Faces

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  The 1977 Monster Manual gave the halfling its first formal internal structure: three subraces named the hairfoot, the stout, and the tallfellow. Roger E. Moore published "The Halfling Point of View" in Dragon #59 in 1982. It gave the race its first detailed cultural portrait in official print. Third edition, arriving in 2000, brought a new roster: the lightfoot halfling, the deep halfling, and the tallfellow appeared in that year's Monster Manual. The Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting of 2001 added the ghostwise halfling and the strongheart halfling for that world specifically. The 2004 Unearthed Arcana pushed the concept to its limits, cataloguing aquatic, arctic, desert, jungle, water, and paragon halflings in a single volume. Each new type made the same point: small stature was not a fixed culture, but an adaptable physical trait. The 5th edition Player's Handbook, published in 2014, pulled back to two defaults, the lightfoot and the stout. It also noted that lightfoot statistics could stand in for the hairfeet and tallfellow halflings of the Greyhawk setting.

• 3. Three Worlds, Three Halflings

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  The Dragonlance campaign setting took the most radical approach to the halfling's usual niche: it replaced the race entirely with a distinct people called kender. Kender are completely immune to fear, including magically generated fear. They regard the acquisition of other people's belongings as borrowing, not theft. When their pouches fill up, kender discard whatever they consider less valuable to make room for whatever catches their eye next.

  Eberron, introduced in 2004, kept the halfling but stripped away any hint of domestic comfort. In that world, halflings are nomadic, clannish people who use domesticated dinosaurs as mounts across their prairie homelands. Other races view them as barbarians, though Eberron halflings can fit into human cities when they choose to leave the plains. Some do settle in cities permanently, while retaining strong ties to their heritage.

  Dark Sun's halflings are the oldest race on Athas. They seldom exceed three and a half feet in height and live in shaman-ruled settlements in the jungles beyond the Ringing Mountains. Most of them became cannibals; a small number inhabited the Pristine Tower. Wargamer writer Timothy Linward argued that this portrayal drew on a Victorian trope about colonized peoples. He described these halflings as "savage, humanoid-eating" and traced that image to anxieties European colonizers projected onto indigenous cultures.

  The Book of Vile Darkness, published in 2002, introduced the jerren, a race described as related to halflings but distinct from them.

• 4. The Halfling Pantheon

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  Yondalla was created by James M. Ward for the Deities and Demigods Cyclopedia in 1980. She is the oldest halfling deity to appear in an official D&D publication. She is depicted as a strong female halfling with red-golden hair, carrying a shield with a cornucopia motif. Halfling lore gives her two public aspects: the Provider and the Protector. As the Provider, she can make barren things fertile and increase the growth rate of plants and animals at will. According to some lore, Yondalla was once divided into two beings. The darker resulting aspect became a separate deity called Dallah Thaun, the Lady of Mysteries.

  Roger E. Moore introduced the rest of the halfling's core pantheon in Dragon #59 in 1982. In Dragon #92, published in December 1984, Gary Gygax formally designated Arvoreen, Brandobaris, Cyrrollalee, and Sheela Peryroyl as legal deities for the Greyhawk setting. Arvoreen, known as "The Defender," governs protection, vigilance, and war. His realm is the Green Fields on the plane of Mount Celestia, and his clerics wear silver chainmail. His sacred animal is the war dog. Brandobaris, whose name is pronounced bran-doe-bair-iss, governs stealth, thievery, rogues, and adventuring. His sacred animal is the mouse, and his symbol is a halfling's footprint. Halfling lore credits him with winning a contest of speed and strength against Vaprak, the ogre and troll deity. As a result, ogres ceded their forested homeland of Luiren to halflings.

  Cyrrollalee governs friendship, trust, and the home. She appears as a humble halfling woman dressed in brown peasant's garb, carrying two pairs of iron bands of Bilarro. Sheela Peryroyl presides over nature, agriculture, and weather. She is depicted as a pretty halfling maiden with wildflowers woven in her hair, quiet but smiling. Her realm, Flowering Hill, sits on the plane of the Outlands. Urogalan governs earth and death. He is gentle for a deity of death, seen more as a protector of the dead than a threat. He appears as a slim, dusky-skinned halfling dressed in brown or pure white, representing his two aspects. His symbol is the silhouette of a dog's head, and his realm, Soulearth, lies on the plane of Elysium. Before battle, followers of Arvoreen typically sacrifice silvered weapons to seek his blessing.

• 5. Characters Worth Remembering

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  Regis, a halfling rogue, appears in a series of Forgotten Realms novels as a member of the Companions of the Hall. That group is led by Drizzt Do'Urden. Regis behaves in ways that fit many of the classic halfling stereotypes. Writer Bricken of io9 noted that Regis "set himself apart a bit by carrying a crystal pendant he can use to charm people." In the final battle of The Crystal Shard, published in 1988, Regis saves the day in a manner that critics compared to Bilbo Baggins.

  Lidda, a female halfling, served as the iconic rogue of third edition Dungeons & Dragons. Mazzy Fentan, of Baldur's Gate II fame, is Arvoreen's most well-noted mortal follower.

  Across every major rulebook revision from the original 1974 edition to the 5th edition in 2014, the halfling kept its place as a playable race.