#halflings

I’m pretty ambivalent about halflings and gnomes. I don’t hate them, I just don’t care. And they feel redundant in a setting that isn’t incredibly generic. Like, sure, if you’re doing a setting where anything goes, then, why not. Why not have two short pc races that are so similar they might as well be two cultures of the same species.

But if I’m making my own, specific, setting, I don’t see the need to have either halflings or gnomes, let alone both, because, at least flavor-wise, they amount to “3’ tall humans/elves/dwarves.”

(not to mention how often gnomes feel uncomfortably like antisemitic stereotypes.)

But I understand that there should, generally, be at least one small race that is well suited to being a rogue.

So, in my horror fic-inspired D&D setting, Zichduszek, I created the niflings. The major PC races in Zichduszek were made from humans who were corrupted by otherworldly powers. Dwarves were made into the perfect mine slaves by dragons, elves are the result of the fae messing with humans through changelings and seduction and kidnapping to the fae realms, orcs were created by infernals to be their blood hounds for souls. So, niflings are the result of humans being corrupted by The Shadow, most notably, through children getting lost in areas corrupted by it. They’re broadly halflings, but with grey skin and a connection to darkness. After reaching adulthood, niflings only age in light, and can theoretically live forever if they stay out of it. They can see in any form of darkness and are magically adept at hiding in it.

So working on Urtrament, I had no intention or interest in including halflings or gnomes. Initially, I didn’t really want anything even similar to them, and created Raggamoffyns to fill the “short and sneaky” mechanical niche, after a twitter thread joking about how muppets reproduce.

But as I’ve been working on my story, I realized I wanted an npc to be in that sort of halfling/gnome mold. And not a Raggamoffyn, since I’d already put two raggamoffyn npcs in and a third would have made it seem like the city was just bursting with raggamoffyns.

(actually, thinking about it, Marsti probably does have a comparatively high raggamoffyn populace, since they’re spooky and it’s the closest town to the necromancy college, making it fairly tolerant of spooky people, but still. It didn’t feel like a place for another raggamoffyn character)

So I started thinking about what Urtrament’s short arse race was, looking at pages for gnomes and halflings on tvtropes and Wikipedia to sort of get some understanding of their history in fantasy lit and games, and started figuring out what I wanted with some other influences.

Initially, the only real ideas I had were “I like the cannibal halflings from Book of Vile Darkness, and the dinosaur-riding nomad halflings from Eberron.” One thing I was thinking about was making trolls my setting’s short arse race, drawing a little on Glorantha and troll myths, but I didn’t want to cause confusion, since this is still D&D, and I’d sort of already established trolls as being typical D&D trolls (yes, the Things Proq is Not Allowed to Do post is canon for my setting).

I like hyenas, and so seeing either an Hourly Hyenas tweet or some other mention of them made me start thinking about making the short arse race hyena-like. But again, that could cause confusion with gnolls, and rewriting gnolls to be a pc-viable short arse race would also cause confusion.

So, instead, I made Gnomolls, taking these ideas together and making something unique. They’re obligate carnivores, so they have touches of the BOVD jerron, and they have some hyena-like traits, as well as some goat traits. They’re more specifically fae-connected.

And while I was writing up the physical description in my setting doc, it felt familiar, but I couldn’t really place it, other than “they’re maybe a little satyr-like.”

Lying in bed last night, it occurred to me what they sounded so similar to.

There’s a piece of tiefling art for Pathfinder, a tiefling who is obviously from halfling or gnome lineage, but with cloven hooves and short horns, and I think a tail.

I can’t for the life of me find this picture, but it’s a thing and Gnomolls are basically that guy, at least physically. They’re not tieflings, that’s teufils, but, I do recognize that they could be mistaken for them.

Encounter: Squich (Squish Lich)

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