What is it like to be a halfling?

By far one of the most interesting twists Forbidden Lands puts on standard fantasy races is to posit a relationship between hobbits and goblins, hushed up like a scandalous family scandal. The world’s history and the campaigns tend to ignore them, focusing instead on the mysterious ancient elves, the constantly-striving dwarves, and the rampaging humans, orcs and demons; even the map shoves them away in a corner where nobody goes. But that doesn’t mean that we should ignore them; and, in fact, we should consider whether the fact that most Kin don’t think of halflings much is in fact some kind of success in itself.

A note on terminology: the player’s handbook differentiates halflings and goblins, but the GM’s guide is clear that they are very much two halves of the same kin. In this essay I’m going to use the word “halfling” for the two kins as a whole, as the thing that they share is that they’re one kin split in half (as well as being half as tall as humans, which is far less interesting in comparison). When I need to, I’ll use “goblin” and “hobbit” for the chaotic and orderly halves respectively, because (a) the word hobbit is right there and (b) I don’t fear the Saul Zaentz Company.

What are halfings like?

The immediate answer is both “like each other” and “as much unlike each other as they can”. (This article is going to be rife with this sort of contradiction.)

How to tell hobbits and goblins apart

Hobbits and goblins are both short, but you should be able to see a family resemblance between some hobbits and goblins that you wouldn’t see between them and a random dwarf. At the same time, a big part of hobbit and goblin identity is that they aren’t like each other.

My take on hobbits is that they are basically 1930s-1950s English farmers, because that was Tolkien’s inspiration; goblins are similarly very English, but a lot more like 1970s-1990s punks. Hobbits drink beer in pubs; goblins have raves in fields. But you could take any society and construct hobbits and goblins from it: all you need to know is that hobbits are the “mustn’t grumble” fairly-well-off rural folk, and goblins are the “ready to riot at the drop of a hat” mostly-poor urban folk. (Typically, that is. Worzel Gummidge is poor and a loner but has definitely a hobbit vibe, whereas Toad of Toad Hall is rich and landed but is filled with goblin chaos energy.)

Hobbits absolutely have furry feet, maybe weird facial hair like huge sideburns, and tend to be round in the face and in the body. They have names like “Proudfoot”, and live in semi-underground burrows with circular front doors and immaculately-polished floors. They’re farmers and they tell people “gerroff my land!” in the sort of broad accent that carries across fields.

Goblins, meanwhile, are clean-shaven, or have thin facial hair like John Waters or Prince. They tend to heroin-chic thinness, and are angular in the cheekbones, noses and ears. They may well have a variety of home-made piercings through ears, lips and maybe other body parts. They are impatient about boring things like chores or weeding fields, and prefer to hunt or steal their food; as such, the word “ramshackle” applies to most things where they live. They have a piercing, nasal industrial-urban accent that could cut well across background noise of machinery.

How goblins like to poke fun at hobbits

Goblins like to say that they’re all about freedom and doing whatever they want, but in truth they find themselves picking on their hobbit neighbours far more than you would expect based on random chance. Like an itch that you can’t help but scratch, goblins feel compelled to return to the hobbits’ lands and commit mayhem: stealing a chicken and chasing the rest of them into fields; stampeding cattle into haystacks; shaking the plum trees so all the fruit falls off and gets bruised and then writing “Proudfuck!” on the wall of a barn with the juices.

Note, though, that any violence is limited compared to what they could do. They never take so much as to make it likely that the hobbits would starve, nor do they ever destroy so much that the hobbits won’t be able to repair it fairly quickly: the effect of their raids is annoying rather than crippling. Killing any hobbits is especially Going Too Far.

Hobbits, meanwhile, pride themselves on maintaining tidy and productive farms, and when the goblin raiders are safely back in the woods they pick themselves up and fix the damage. Similarly, though, they never get to a point where they arm themselves and defend the farms against goblin raids with lethal force.

To some degree, goblins and hobbits are aware that they are ultimately the same Kin, although how conscious of this they are may depend on the individual. The younger or less self-aware will merely know that some things Aren’t Done; others will have a curious type of doublethink where they only occasionally remember that they’re actually related; older, smarter or, especially, female halflings who have been to a cradle will understand that the fates of goblins and hobbits are irreversibly tied together.

Maybe hobbits pride themselves on growing more than enough food that they can support their wild and foolish brethren in the woods as well: it’s all very well to constantly have fun and not worry about the mundane details of survival, but some of us have to grow up and put away childish things.

What about moon elves?

The GM’s guide (p. 70) says “As the elves fell to the earth from The Red Wanderer of the sky, the moon goddess Eor was jealous and threw blue moonstones after them. From these, dark elflike beings grew who couldn’t abide the sunlight of their new world … [A]s punishment they were split into two kin: [hobbits] and goblins.”

The Bloodmarch campaign talks a lot more about how “the time had come to find the lost moonstones and unite the two kin” (Bloodmarch, p. 82), and why they split in the first place (p. 58), and it even says that this will happen to a significant NPC (p. 56). But it doesn’t actually say anything about what the resulting Kin should look like or what they could do, though, other than some muttering about how they’re good at illusion magic. Oh, and they also used to inherit memories, which is a spectacularly useless Kin Ability now if the splitting of the ancient moon elves into goblins and hobbits also disabled or scrambled those heritable memories.

Nothing in The Bloodmarch need have any impact on your campaign about what hobbits and goblins are like now. Still, there are a few things we can salvage from this.

No need to bring Gods into this

If you want to run an epic fantasy campaign where the Gods exist and do things, knock yourself out; but like pretty much everything else regarding gods in the Forbidden Lands’ unreliable narrator universe, there’s no need to assume they ever actually existed or did things independently of powerful groups of ancient people.

Most obviously, when people wonder “why are we the way we are, and why is it that we do things in this particular way?”, it’s a better tale if a person in a position of authority says “it is because the ancient Gods made it so”; and if they’re convincing enough they can then parlay that into a subsequent “…and that’s why they said I should be your King”. Saying “eh, who knows? it’s probably some quirk of evolution or something” is probably more accurate, but won’t carry the crowd with you. (Neither will bad Just So stories, btw – warning, much of the rest of Oglaf is NSFW!)

So maybe hobbits and goblins want an explanation of why they’re so similar and yet different, and a convenient explanation is “Eor tried to trick another God but was found out, and that’s why we’re punished”. And maybe that’s even based on a folk memory of a real event, like how most Middle Eastern civilisations had a myth about a deluge, which may or may not be related to that time when much of the Mediterranean filled up with ocean water really quickly?

Why should hobbits be uncomfortable in the sun?

OK, but what’s this nonsense about hobbits being nocturnal? That’s goblins you’re thinking of; hobbits are fine in the sun!

Are they, though? What do we know about the places hobbits build for each other, where they can have fun and relax? “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit”, begins The Hobbit; and for all the subsequent talk of how the better rooms are the ones with windows, it’s nonetheless telling that hobbits dig into the ground to make their homes, rather than the much cheaper alternative of building houses on top of the ground and not having to move any non-trivial amount of earth at all.

Or what about their second-favourite place to be: pubs? Go look at a traditional English pub and count the windows, and then at look at how much of the interior is actually exposed to the exterior light brought in by said windows. Or do an image search for Aragorn and the Prancing Pony. Or consider the adjectives typically associated with hobbit places – cozy, comfortable, snug – and contrast them with typical elven adjectives: airy, graceful, luminescent.

“But hobbits go outside in the fields and do agriculture”, you say: sure. But what’s the standard image of a hobbit in a field? A hobbit sleeping in the shadow of a haywane, with a hat over their eyes. Avoiding the sun.

Why should either kind of halfling be interested in tricksy illusionist magic?

Goblins seem too into unsubtle mayhem to be interested in illusions, and hobbits are too repressed to even consider playing tricks on anyone.

Well, except on Carnival day, when it’s opposites day and anything goes. (Of course hobbits, who invented Second Breakfast, celebrate a day called Fat Tuesday!) Obviously it makes sense for a tightly regimented society to have one day in the year where they can let loose and relax: it acts as a pressure valve. But you then start to wonder why they need such a safety mechanism, on top of the constant mantra of “we are good and decent and noble and polite and would never get into trouble”.

Bilbo in The Hobbit is sarky as anything, for instance; and yes, you might say he’s unusual, but it also seems like a small downtrodden Kin would delight in being able to take the fight to larger, nobler, more powerful Kin from time to time. Short of some kind of size-transformation magic, the only way that can happen is through smarts and subterfuge.

Still, that’s just against other Kin, on rare occasions. It’s not like halflings would have any need of illusion magic during everyday life, right? Goblins certainly have no desire to be able to say “we’re not actually here, ignore us” or “something really interesting happened over there, pay attention to it rather than us”. And hobbits never want to say “you didn’t see my granny puking up her sherry in the bushes just now”, “there isn’t a door over here where we definitely don’t lock up my weird uncle” or “you must be mistaken when you think you remember my wife being pregnant and then not having a baby”.

And neither of them want to pretend that they’re two completely separate Kins, nothing to do with each other, really, we hate each other actually. (Such a good trick that even some of them have fallen for it.) United halflings would be a cause for concern for other Kin, but if the hobbits and goblins are constantly fighting each other, well, you can just leave them to it, like a harmless bunch of clowns, and focus on more important matters instead.

It’s probably for the best that they don’t have illusion magic. They’d be borderlin-unstoppable if they did.

Halfings are all about family

One thing that becomes apparent quickly about both hobbits and goblins is that there are many of them; and if there aren’t, this is because something’s gone wrong, rather than through choice.

Hobbits and goblins in general are one big family

Hobbits and goblins are very clear that they’re not like each other, and know exactly how it is that they disagree, in minute detail, in a way that’s very familiar to anyone who’s ever listened to a family’s grievances about how it was terrible what they did to our Emma back in the day. What might appear to a bemused outsider as minor differences that aren’t even worth bothering with, become matters of the utmost importance. Similarly, if you’ve ever experienced left-wing politics, where people with objectively very similar opinions nonetheless hate each other with a passion, certainly much more than they hate people on the right that a disinterested observer would expect to be their common enemy, bells will now be ringing loudly and annoyingly.

You know how local politics are far more vicious than national politics, precisely because the stakes are so minimal that everything ultimately reduces to people constantly trying to score victories over each other? Hobbits and goblins, as a Kin, are like that. Because they care, and things are so deeply personal, they can find ways of hurting each other than mere strangers never could.

And like real-life families, those are criticisms and attacks that can only be made by family: if a stranger is unwise enough to venture into the fierce debate about Rachel’s trustworthiness, goblins and hobbits will immediately unite to defend her honour. Only to return to the topic after having stomped the stranger flat: “Hooray, lads, we dealt with that uncouth foreigner! Now, of course, he did have a point about Rachel being a lying scumbag…”

Halflings are fundamentally social creatures

If you look at how hobbit and goblin societies, there’s similarly a great insistance on family-like structures.

This is obviously true about hobbits. One of the things we know about Bilbo and Frodo is how unusual it was for them to be comparative loners: hobbits are farmers and that means having plenty of children who can help bring in the harvest. Marriages are a business partnership between families, not a love match between people: a way of making sure that the farm, or a part of it, continues to be viable, and that it goes to an acceptable person when the current owners die. Think of the Murdochs / Succession, or basically any middle-class-and-above Victorian literature.

It’s also true of goblins, albeit in a slightly more elective sense: here, the allegiance is to the Big Boss, and the family that they have constructed around themself. Think of criminal gangs, like the mafia or Peaky Blinders: to some degree there’s a core of familial relationships, but there’s also a fair amount of people unrelated by blood who nonetheless understand that they are all one people now. They may have marked themselves by tattoos, cutting off a finger, or otherwise having committed acts like murder that irredeemably cut them off from the rest of society: there’s no going back now. You have a group of people who have intense social attachments to a leader and to each other, so when the head goblin says “Alright, muckers, we’re going rampaging!”, they all go.

Put it this way: can you easily imagine a hobbit hermit, deliberately isolated up a mountain or on top of a pole, so they can think quiet thoughts away from the hustle and bustle of hobbitkind? Or a lone goblin fighter, who lives alone in the woods, venturing forth occasionally to trade rabbit pelts for metal and raw materials for explosives, or to sabotage hobbit farms’ dams or barns?

No. Hobbits and goblins only really make sense when there are many of them.

There’s not much room for individual freedom

Everyone can see that it’s a problem if you’re a hobbit and you don’t agree with the head of the family. Every time you say “I’m not happy with doing this”, “Why don’t we do things differently?”, “You’re ignoring a thing that I care about” etc. you’ll get slapped down. If you’re lucky, you’ll eventually get to be the head of the family yourself, at which point finally you get to say what happens, and those whippersnappers mouthing off at you can just bloody wait their turn.

Marriage will be a dramatic and often stifling change. None of this “welcome to the family” malarkey you get from both sets of in-laws in modern-day weddings: when you get married, you leave your old family behind, Marie-Antoinette-style. You’re one of us now, and you do what the head of the family says.

And it’s the same for goblins. When the head goblin shouts “Time to make some mayhem!”, who are you to say “maybe let’s not”? Are you denying your mates a chance of having some fun? Are you trying to pick a fight with the head honcho? I mean, don’t get me wrong, that might be fun, to see your bloodied and broken body in the mud. That’s what you meant, right?

A word on family / clan names

The obvious way to handle names is for hobbits in your game to have traditional European names, where women take their husband’s surname when they get married: now you’re a member of the family, and you’re a Proudfoot / Took / Baggins / whatever until you die, at which point you’ll be buried in the family plot under a big headstone that says “Proudfoot” or what have you, and consider yourself lucky to have kept your first name.

Similarly, the head of a goblin gang is the most important, and goblins aren’t going to do things the same way as hobbits, so it feels like goblins should introduce themselves as e.g. Nasty Sid of Black Gordon’s gang. When Black Gordon finally karks it, and a new leader is grudgingly acknowledged by their bruised and bloodied rivals to have earned the right to the big chair, you change your name and you’re now Nasty Sid of Crazy Johnny’s gang.

But if you want to make things weirder, you could have hobbits have dynastic name changes as well, and/or mix in stuff like how Japanese Emperors get a new name when they die and are retroactively renamed. If you don’t want an obviously patriarchal or matriarchal society, you could add to this by saying that people are referred to by a first name, a “son of” / “daughter of” name after the Icelandic fashion, and a dynastic name, e.g. Barnabas MacDouglas of the Cherry Trees, or Judy NicGladys of Good Cheer.

This is a fun way of adding depth and complication; a way of saying “these people are different” that your players don’t need to get involved in other than smiling and nodding. It also means you have an excuse to have complicated embroidered family trees in hobbit homes, which ticks the “another thing that Tolkien really likes” box, and underlines the severe hypocrisy of halfling society because obviously none of the goblins are on this family tree.

It also makes it possible for goblins to carry out a rare prank where they sneak in and mess with a fancy family tree intended as a wedding gift, like they change the spelling of a distant ancestor’s name, or even change many ancestors’ names so the second-top row of the family tree now spells out a rude word as an acrostic. Ideally nobody will notice for years, and all of that time the false family tree has been displayed in pride of place in the pristine hobbit burrow.

The problem of not breeding true

The problem of hobbits and goblins being so similar and yet so clearly wrong, is that hobbits can have goblin children and vice-versa.

What do you do about the wrong kind of baby?

The GM’s Handbook says that hobbits and goblins have both “tried to refine their bloodlines without success, and it seems as if chance determines if a new-born is a [hobbit] or a goblin” (p. 70). Fine, but note that this merely says that nobody has managed to breed true reliably. It does not say anything about societies that decided that apparently breeding true was what mattered. Infanticide has regularly been a thing in our world historically, most recently in China where the One Child Policy collided with the desire for a male child. If you’re doing well enough as a society economically that you’ve got spare food and not everybody has to work flat out just to survive, you might decide that ethnic purity is now a luxury that you can afford.

But no matter how strong pressures are to breed true, mothers will struggle to kill or abandon their “unwanted” children. Even just one or two mothers keeping their wrong kinds of babies is enough to shatter the illusion that goblins and hobbits have nothing to do with each other. It therefore seems to follow that a society where hobbits or goblins “breed true”, and any unfortunate babies who might prove this rule false are summarily killed, will be dominated by men. And conversely, if you have something like the system of the halfling cradle (ibid., pp. 70-71), where hobbit and goblin mothers both go to give birth, and come away with the right kind of baby, and the men have no real idea whether they’re the fathers of their children, that feels like a matriarchal society.

Maybe that’s a good reason why goblins and orcs should get along (also, they both probably have sayings like “the goat is on fire again”).

What does it take to make the halfling cradle work?

The existence of a halfling cradle assumes that for every hobbit village, there’s a similarly-sized number of goblins marauding in the nearby woods. That’s not unreasonable in Belifar, but if you’re going to posit halflings anywhere else, you need to say that there are a similar number of goblins nearby as well, or the community isn’t going to survive. Not unless the community decides to ditch the pretence that hobbits and goblins are different, but that might be too accepting of differences…

So let’s get out the trusty back of an envelope. Let’s assume that the hobbit and goblin populations are similar in size, which they must be if the children they need to maintain their numbers come from a common source, and hobbits and goblins mostly die of natural causes.

The halfling cradle relies on two women to get pregnant in each community at roughly the same time (let’s say within a month of each other). Say each mother has five children, and is fertile between the ages of 16 and 46: that’s a maximum of 72 birthing slots on average that need a match on the other side. Per the birthday paradox that means you need 10 women on either side to make it likely that there’s going to be a plausible pregnancy in each community. Take into account people who are too young and too old to give birth, and their male counterparts, and you’re easily into requiring 40 goblins and 40 hobbits to make this work.

With numbers smaller than this, it follows that the halfling cradle can’t rely on mothers just randomly turning up and hoping that they have a counterpart on the other side. So maybe mothers need to organise their fertility? Maybe a combination of petitioning the halfling mothers, and then praying to Eor, to become fertile? (Of course the moon goddess is involved with female fertility!)

So a couple trying to get pregnant and apparently failing might just be because there isn’t a counterpart on the other side; and, conversely, a 40-year-old woman getting pregnant against all odds might be because there’s a 20-something woman on the other side who has significant political credentials, and so someone must be found to act as her pregnancy counterpart.

Is hobbit vs goblin a clear-cut binary thing?

The problem with “that baby is clearly a hobbit” vs “that baby is clearly a goblin” is that nature isn’t always that clear cut. A friend with a mixed-race baby tells me that the kid looked 100% white for the first week or so.

People will be on the lookout for tell-tale signs of wrongness. A goblin baby with rosy-red plump cheeks, or a hobbit baby with a hint of pointiness to the ears and teeth: that will start rumours. But not everything has a physical manifestation.

A fierce goblin boy who’s the spitting image of his dad could nonetheless be good at repairing bows and crossbows, and be thinking of ways of checking whether there’s bait in the animal traps, and how to automatically reset them. His talents are better suited to building a vast mechanism for irrigating and monitoring fields, but his upbringing and his cultural situation mean he doesn’t know how to think in those terms.

Similarly, consider this busty, bubbly hobbit girl with dimples in her cheeks when she smiles. She’s listened carefully at the conversations of her betters in the pub, and has determined that a fair number of them are stone-cold idiots. She knows whose livestock isn’t securely locked away at night, whose sowing habits depend on unwarranted assumptions about when the weather will be good and bad, whose barns or timber stores aren’t checked as often as they should be. But because it’s been drilled into her that all hobbits should help each other out, the only way she can use these insights is when it comes to who she ends up marrying: whether she tells her parents about the families to avoid because of their mismanagement, or deliberately chooses a family to favour so she can sail in and rescue them from their own incompetence.

And in general, there must be a fair few hobbits who find the whole ambiance of omertà stifling: constantly, loudly insisting that everybody is happy and jolly, even though everybody knows that most families have an awkward aunt locked away in a bedroom somewhere, or a cousin that nobody talks about.

And the same goes for goblins. There must be a fair few who get frustrated at the constant mandatory mayhem fun events where absolutely everybody has to go on a rampage. Why do we always pick on the hobbits? Why can’t we occasionally leave them alone, and do something more natural and wholesome, like cow-tipping?

Are there even two separate Kin?

So far we’ve said that hobbits and goblins are different things, except that hobbits can have goblin children, and goblins can have hobbit children, and in truth hobbits and goblins are pretty similar, and where you see hobbits you’ll typically see goblins close by, and so on and so forth.

Humans, dwarves and half-elves have two mostly-equal genders, but orcs have a huge gender disparity, whiners have their weird bee-like gender divide, demons are conglomerations of other, smaller, demons, elves don’t breed, and I’ll eventually write up why I think saurians don’t make more saurians by breeding.

Would it be that weird to say that halflings have four genders instead?

That would explain why you can’t stop hobbits having goblin babies, and vice-versa, for exactly the same reason that you can’t stop humans having girl babies or boy babies. If there are four genders rather than two, and you only need two to reproduce, you can ignore one or two of them from time to time; but you can’t get rid of them. Their existence is baked into your own.

Also, if there are four genders rather than two, it follows that there should be proportionately a lot more people who can’t be defined as matching just one gender, through simple combinatorics. If your table is interested in exploring trans themes, you know where to look.