OSSR: Complete Book of Gnomes & Halflings

[Username17]

OSSR: Complete Book of Gnomes & Halflings
Player's Handbook Rules Supplement


Nothing says “quality” like novelty fonts.

The Complete Book of Gnomes and Halflings was the 9th book in the Player's Rules Supplement series. It is about the core races that people don't care about. While it's the same length as the other Complete books, it's actually two books in one: it starts over from “chapter 1” when we get to the Halfling section. So this was obviously intended to be two books at some point, and then cut down into one on the grounds that people honestly don't care enough about Gnomes to fill an entire 128 page book. You might think that this would be the last of the PHBR series* because by this point they'd done a book for all four of the basic classes (plus Psionicist and Bard for some reason), and all of the non-human races that the PHB supported at the time (namely Dwarves, Gnomes, Halflings, and of course Elves). But there were more to come, they just weren't very “core.” The later books inclue the Humanoids book (a Player's Handbook Rules Supplement about additional information for races that are not in fact in the Player's Handbook), the Ranger's book, the Paladin's book, the Barbarian's book, the Ninja's book, and the Druid's book (which in addition to not being a fighter variant is also specifically just part of the Priest's book, considering that the book was about Priests generally and not Clerics specifically). So really, this book is the last part of the series that you could claim with a straight face was anything like “core” rather than “batshit.”

• *: Yes, they abbreviate Player's Handbook Rules Supplement as “PHBR” and not the more obvious choice of “PHRS” because go fuck yourself. Sometimes this series is also called the Player's Handbook Reference Series, as if that made the ultimate choice of acronyms any better. I think it important to note that the word “reference” does not appear on the front cover, but it's listed that way in book catalogs.

This book has only one author and only one editor. The author was Heidi Gygax's highschool English teacher. That is not a joke. First of all, the “complete” books were not actually written by a design team, or given much oversight at all – it's pretty much the ramblings of one dude in every case. And secondly, the makers of D&D were such a small and incestuous group that almost all of them were just geeks from Wisconsin who could play 3 degrees of separation from Gary Gygax before they even started writing. Or in this case, two degrees of separation. But even with this tiny group, it's not like they had design meetings or anything. This book presents a vision of Gnomes and Halflings that was pretty much just this one guy's ideas – later books present Halflings and (especially) Gnomes completely differently.

Even the art direction didn't last long. In fact, this book doesn't have any art director at all. It has several artists credited, but considering that some of them are listed under both “Color Artists” and “Additional Black and White Art,” I think that a lot of the pieces in this book weren't even done for this book and are just grabbed from the archives as things that might plausibly be a Gnome or a Halfling.

The Halfling look and feel has of course changed a lot over the years, but no race has changed as much as the Gnome. The Gnome is unrecognizable in the change from 3e to 3.5, for fuck's sake! 2nd edition AD&D never really had a coherent vision of what Gnomes were supposed to look like or what they were supposed to do. This book was supposed to fix that, I guess. But since there was never any editorial control exerted later, this was just one more data point on a pile defined by having too many data points.




This book includes a picture of a Gnome that looks like this.


But it also includes a picture of Gnomes looking like this, which seems pretty different to me.


They don't even all have bulbous noses.

This book agrees with itself that Gnomes have large noses and pointy ears, but that's about as far as it goes. In keeping with the theme of the book, I will be drinking small drinks, which must therefore be proportionately alcoholic in order to keep me from getting too sober to appreciate the nuances of this book. The drink of choice will be straight 151 in a very small glass.

Introduction: The Small Folk

Why a book for the small folk? And what do gnomes and halflings have in common that warrants their inclusion in a tome together?

The introduction is split into four mini sections of a couple paragraphs each. It's broadly speaking an attempt to justify sticking two half-length books together and selling it as a single full length book. It describes both as “popular races,” which brings up an interesting philosophical question because of course they are literally the two least popular races in the Player's Handbook. If we go by relative popularity, that statement is a damned lie – at least if we compare to the other PHB races. If we compare to all the races, it's quite likely true: D&D has hundreds of races, and I'm willing to bet money that Gnomes have more fans than Xvarts or Phanatons. Still, Gnomes were so unpopular that the 4th edition authors thought that it was a working proposition to remove them as a player race. That proved to be an extremely unpopular decision, which got the authors to sheepishly admit the existence of the “Gnome Problem.” That's the basic reality that because D&D is a group activity where people select their usable content ala carte, that a piece of content that is liked by a small percentage of fans will be used by a much larger percentage of the gaming groups. So for example, if 5% like a race, then like 25% of groups have someone in it who likes the race. So going out of your way to shit on relatively unpopular races still pisses off a large portion of the fanbase. So all in all, I think Frankifact gives that claim “Mostly True.”

Anyway, the main thrust of the first section of the introduction is that the world of AD&D® is scary and full of nasty nasty shit that makes you feel small and weak even if you have a big sword or mighty magic powers, and that Gnomes and Halflings are small even by demi-human standards so they are even more overwhelmed and have to develop coping mechanisms. I'm not sure I buy this, because we're talking about the 2nd edition Gnome who specialized in the fucking Wizard class and has about as much mighty magic as anyone. The second reason I have trouble buying this is because I genuinely don't understand the logic of discussing “The Small Folk” without talking about Goblins and Kobolds. I mean, they are just as small, right? Anyway, the three things that apparently Gnomes and Halflings do that mitigates their smallness form the other three mini-essays in the introduction: Cooperation, The Invisibility Factor, and Fighting Small. Let's tackle these in the order given.

The cooperation essay is weird on a bunch of levels. First of all, they mention the fact that military alliances are of obvious benefits to everyone and the pitch is supposed to be that Halflings and Gnomes are master diplomats and get more alliances. This is not, to my knowledge, borne out in the mechanics of 2nd edition AD&D. Gnomes get no bonus to Ettiquette checks or reaction rolls. The Halfling reaction roll bonus applies to Humans only (which makes it more of a racial affinity thing than a general likeability deal). Secondly, it points out that in AL-QADIM® the Gnomes and Kobolds aren't at war and get along just fine. This only serves to reinforce the omnipresent feeling that if you're going to make a “Complete Book of Short” that it makes very little sense for the book to not have some Kobold chapters. But really, I think the thing that most sets my teeth on edge about this whole bit is that being able to get along with Elves, Dwarves, and Humans is presented as being a major feat and proof of diplomatic wang. But... fucking Gnolls team up with Orcs, Goblins, and Trolls on a regular basis, and I don't see them being trotted out as paragons of diplomancy. The mini-bit on alliances sort of rambles off track with a weird hypothetical about a Human ruler cutting down a Halfling forest (note: only a specific kind of Halfling lives in forests in this edition) and getting a series of increasingly sternly written notes before actual war breaks out. I don't know. Then there's a little addendum about how Gnomes and Halflings are Jews keep their traditions but adapt them to fit local requirements when living as minorities in other lands. Examples include how Gnomes keep their little fires going when living in Human lands. OK, Gnomes are basically Jews. Got it.


Really, no good sentences include the phrase “the Jews.”

The mini-essay on The Invisibility Factor seems to basically get Halflings and Gnomes confused. Halflings, we are told, are able to vanish in forest underbrush. I'm pretty sure that's actually a power of Forest Gnomes. Forest Gnomes are pretty explicitly David the Gnome.


Forest Gnomes in this book.


David the Gnome.

Anyway, the point is that this little article is a big rant about how Halflings and Gnomes are masters of misdirection, and mostly there isn't any mechanical justification for this rant. But apparently Halflings are such masters of misdirection that they convinced the author to ascribe abilities to all of them that are actually the province of a specific flavor of Gnome. Hurgh.

The “Fighting Small” essay is about how Gnomes and Halflings both use similar techniques for fighting creatures larger than themselves. This is why Gnomes in this edition get a large bonus to their defenses against Giants and Halflings don't. I had to read that several times to make sure I was reading that correctly and not just drunkenly imagining that they said crazy shit that makes no sense. But that's really what it says. Fuck this book.

The long and the short of it is that this introduction has failed in its one and only duty: to explain to me why the fuckety fucksticks I am reading a combi-book about Gnomes and Halflings rather than a book about just one of those two or a book about several races that happened to include both Gnomes and Halflings. In tasking itself to tell me all the ways that Halflings and Gnomes are similar, the book actually just brings up a bunch of ways they are different. Each of the “common traits” mentioned (except, obviously, height) is a trait possessed by just one race or the other (and often only by a subrace of that race, and/or to a much more limited extent than implied by this text).

One thing I do think must be said is how fucking bullshit 2nd edition's methodologies really were. Actually finding this mechanical information is a nightmare. Fact checking this book is way harder than it needs to be, because information isn't in one place and often contradicts itself. The Halfling monster entry has totally different abilities than the Halfling writeup in the PHB, and the Gnome is similar. Even basic shit like raw number bonuses are not the same – Monstrous Manuel Halflings get +3 to-hit with thrown weapons, while PHB Halflings get only +1. Many of the skill effects of being a Halfling are actually written up in the Thief class rather than any of the various Halfling writeups. And so on. This edition was bullshit, but even within that context I'm pretty sure that almost all of the positive declarations about these races made in the introduction of this book are false according to the rest of the rules. Arrgh.

Anyway, next up we start going into Book 1: Gnomes. Each book is five chapters in the same order and format (Myths, Subraces, Culture, Kits, A Typical Village), so we should be able to go through them pretty quick. It might make more sense to do Book 1: Chapter 1 and Book 2: Chapter 1 together, so I'll probably do that.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

The Halfling monster entry has totally different abilities than the Halfling writeup in the PHB, and the Gnome is similar. Even basic shit like raw number bonuses are not the same – Monstrous Manuel Halflings get +3 to-hit with thrown weapons, while PHB Halflings get only +1. Many of the skill effects of being a Halfling are actually written up in the Thief class rather than any of the various Halfling writeups. And so on. This edition was bullshit, but even within that context I'm pretty sure that almost all of the positive declarations about these races made in the introduction of this book are false according to the rest of the rules. Arrgh.

So it's just like 4E D&D, then. What with the fluff writing checks the mechanics can't check and arbitrary PC/NPC separation.

[Username17]

OSSR: Complete Book of Gnomes & Halflings
The first chapters.


It's 2nd edition, so this is basically our Halfling and Gnome.

Gnomes vs. Halflings

Before we get into Book 1, Chapter One and Book 2, Chapter 1 (yes, really. Because consistently using numbers or letters for chapter designations in the same book is too much to ask from early nineties TSR), there is a little introductory text for each book. Both start with a little italicized story. The Halfling one is an italicized story about how an old Halfling woman is going to tell a story. Seriously. It doesn't even tell you what the story is going to be. It's 292 words of the book clearing its throat. I guess maybe that they want to get across the idea that Halfling grandmothers tell stories to their grandchildren to pass down legends of their people? But it seems like that could describe every race that isn't a Bullywug or Warforged. The Gnome story is even more peculiar, being as there is no dialog or names – just a piece of description of a bunch of Gnomes quietly gathering in a rocky valley to all stare at the moon until something undefined and magical starts to happen.


So Gnomes are basically Clefairy. Good to know I guess.

The sturdy but diminutive gnome is perhaps the most misunderstood of the traditional AD&D® game character races. They're kind of like dwarves, of course . . . but isn't there's more to it than that?

That is the intro text to the book 1 introduction after the intro story and the main introduction. And it does basically get to the heart of the matter: even 20 years ago Gnomes were already a fucking mess. This was back when Dwarves were anti-magical and couldn't be magic users, and Gnomes got that trait. But Gnomes also specialized in the Illusionist class, which is a caster class from 1st edition that didn't fucking exist in 2nd edition. Sure, if you were a specialist mage whose weapon of choice was illusions, you were called an “Illusionist,” but that wasn't actually a separate class anymore. So the whole thing where Gnomish magic item activation failure chance doesn't apply to “Illusionist Items” is not something that I or anyone else can confidently parse. “Illusionist Items” don't actually exist, because Illusionists aren't a separate class. So... I dunno.

Basically, this section attempts to sell me on the idea that Gnomes are different from Dwarves in that they are:

• Smaller and weaker.
• Like being outdoors in addition to underground.
• Have big noses.
• Aren't dicks.
• Have boring food that they like a lot and really like to have fires around (this one doesn't seem different from Dwarves).
• Have a deep affinity for Illusion magic in addition to being anti-magical (this one doesn't make a lot of sense).

So really, on the first page of the Gnome book, this book pretty much fails to sell me on the idea that Gnomes need to exist. The only meaningful difference is that 2nd edition Dwarves are not allowed to be Mages “because they are anti-magical” while Gnomes are allowed to be Mages, but they are also anti-magical. The entire reasoning for why Dwarves can't be Mages applies 100% to Gnomes. You could just declare that Dwarves could be Mages (like 3rd edition did), and then there wouldn't be any difference between Gnomes and Dwarves at all.

The Halfling opening essay is basically a series of giant flashing red lights that say “These are Hobbits! Read Tolkien!” but without actually being allowed to invoke the actual words of “Lord of the Rings.” So these guys are, well, I guess I can just quote this shit:

The diminutive halfling has become as archetypical a character in heroic fantasy as the stalwart knight in shining armor or the robed wizard fumbling with his spellbooks. Perhaps it is because, in stature and appearance, halflings is so unheroic that they have won their way into our hearts and our adventuring consciousness

See: Bilbo Baggins, the end. There's some head scratchy bits: like the fact that they love “pastoral life with lots of comforts” which seems like a pretty serious contradiction. But that bullshit is from the original Tolkien, so that's not exactly this book's fault. The author doesn't seem to understand that living in a city is where you get “comforts” and being a subsistence farmer is the other thing where you work hard hours and don't even have food security all year. But considering how many people are apparently confused on this point to this day (as evidenced by the post-wrapup conversation for the Crusades OSSR), that's hardly surprising.


Also, there was a time when people described people smoking tobacco indoors as “homey” rather than “disgusting.”

Eventually of course, the “atypical” adventuring Halflings that this book talks about became the only Halflings. A few editions later, Halflings were a race of stealthy nomads and daring thieves. But even as late as 1993, they were still selling the race as having only a small minority of Halflings who did interesting things while the vast majority dedicated themselves to being tobacco smoking farmers who never did anything interesting. It's kind of historically interesting that D&D never found a middle ground – a Halfling culture that was in any way interesting or seemed worth defending that was separate from but in any way compatible with the adventurers it produced. But that's what you get when you have too much Tolkien cock in your mouth to actually do any world building.


The Pathfinder Halfling wouldn't know what a pastoral existence even was – although he probably knows some songs about sleeping with shepherd girls.

Both sections have a “[Race] in AD&D® 2nd Edition” subsection. You'd think this might be a thing where it talks about the actual mechanics for the races or whatever, but it's not. It's actually just a paragraph shilling for various books with trademarked and capitalized names (because that is how 2nd edition wrote citations, and holy fuck is it annoying). So if you want to know more about the Halfling subraces you can read the Monsignors Manual and if you want to know more about Kender you can read various fucking Dragonlance books. And so on for Gnomes in their respective portion of the book. But as previously noted: the fluff and the mechanics don't line up in any of these sources, and the different sources conflict massively on both mechanical and fluff details. And I just... don't know how any of this was supposed to work. And this book is not much help.

Both sections also have a “New Stuff About [Race]” subsection. Yes, they really call it “new stuff,” because this book does not suffer from being overly formal or exact. Most of both is just chattering on about how they are going to go into more detail on Gnomes and Halflings and their various subraces than other sources do. You might think that this is basically promising to randomly contradict other sources, and you'd be right. The big draw for the Gnomes is that they are going to be introducing the Forest Gnome, which I hadn't actually noticed wasn't in the game before this book. So um, there's that. The big draw for Halflings is something I'm just going to have to quote:

this book includes additional detail on not just the Hairfeet but all the halfling subraces--including a nearly unknown variety, the Furchin (hitherto featured only in a single SPELLJAMMER® adventure).

OK, take a drink.

Book 1 & 2: Chapter 1 (or “One”)
Myths of the [Fill in Race Here]

Like in Dragon Kings, and really most 2nd edition AD&D products, there is a chapter given over to “legends.” Actually, it's a chapter in Book 1 (for Gnome Myths) and another chapter in Book 2 (for Halfling Myths). You could accuse this of wasting twice the space, but I'm pretty sure the author could have just written twice as many for one group or whatever. Indeed, in many ways there are actually only two myths in this book: one for Halflings and one for Gnomes. These are worthless, but they do use up page count in a way that doesn't take a lot of design work. Still, it seems weird to have a chapter called “Myths of the Gnomes” and only have one myth. It's false advertizing. What follows the one myth in each chapter is a bit different, so I guess we should handle these things one at a time.

The Gnome chapter begins with an italicized continuation of the earlier story of Gnomes gathering to pokevolve into Clefable. Interspersed with this narrative, it cuts away to plaintext rant about how Gnomes claim to have never been created and to have simply always existed in timeless balance between Good and Evil and Law and Chaos. Which I guess is why they aren't “Neutral.” Fuck. Anyway, instead of all metronoming at a Moon Stone, they all sieg heil at a hologram of Garl Glittergold. More than anything, I am now sad that in a game that gives us Rock Gnomes and Whisper Gnomes and Autognomes, that there isn't a Metrognome. Seems fucking obvious. It's not like the Gnomish propensity to be Tinker Gnomes and keep Giant Space Hamsters made things “too serious” to support city dwelling Metro Gnomes.

After the deeply surreal back and forth between two different acid trips about the Tao of Gnome, we get into a more familiar “list of gods” type spiel called “Gods of Gnomedom.” These are dumb, but it's also one of the few places in this book that actually is sourced. It tells you that these are cribbed from 1992's Monster Mythology by Carl Sargent. That's another OSSR waiting to happen. So I guess for whatever reason, the author felt that his hands were tied and he had to put in a bit about Callarduran Smoothhands the Greater God of the Svirfneblins. It's odd, because of course the deities in various worlds are obviously different, so I'm not actually sure what settings Flandal Steelskin or Baervan Wildwandered are even available in. Presumably not Al-Qadim or Ravenloft, but really I have no fucking idea. This seems to mostly be copypasta from a different insane book by a different madman, and no real attempt to explain what circumstances this information might be useful in.

And that's the entirety of the Gnome chapter. So I guess I should say a few words about the Svirfneblin. Or at least, the word Svirfneblin. Presumably, Svirfneblin is a portmanteau made by Gary Gygax out of “Svartalf” and “Nibelung” – two words from old Germanic sources referring to small magic people who are also dicks. The weird spelling is probably because it was the days before you could use Google to look up the spellings of words and Gygax gave zero fucks when he wrote them into an adventure in 1978. But a perhaps equally persuasive explanation is that “Svirfneblin” is simply a word that looks like it is written backwards whether it's written forwards or backwards. Seriously: “Nelbinfrivs.”


A Svirfneblin.

The Halfling section starts out with a rant about how all Halflings have the same origin myth no matter what world you go to. And I'm pretty much positive that this is not true, since like Kender and Jerren and shit probably don't give two fucks about Yondalla. Anyway, this is “The Story of Littleman” which apparently was the story the grandmother Halfling was going to tell at the start of book 2 but got cut off by the editor deciding that the giant block of italicized text needed to be broken up.

Anyway, after the story (which has much less “overcoming adversity” and much more “banter between a grandmother and some children” than was promised), it proceeds to have an out-of-character subsection on “A General History of the Halfling Race” which is different from the no history that the Gnomes get. Despite the title, this section is not actually about history, but demographics and attitude. It's all fairly mysterious. Halflings usually live in racially segregated ghettos because they lack prejudice. Drink moar!

Then we get into “The Gods of the Halflings.” Like the Gnome subsection, this is heavily cribbed from Monster Mythology, and like the Gnome subsection there is really no heed paid to the fact that I honestly have no idea what default setting they are assuming for this shit or how much (if anything) from here applies to any other setting. Unlike the Gnome subsection, there is an essay about contextualizing Halfling religion. It goes on about how Halflings have an all female main pantheon and thus have a matriarchal religion (this is a more interesting cultural trait than anything else posited so far in this book, SO I'll allow it) and that they are basically Shinto, with a potentially limitless number of minor gods representing nice places or good ovens or whatever the fuck.


This explains so much.

And basically, that's both the first chapters. Not a lot of information in them, and even less useable information. Next up, we'll talk more extensively about the many subraces that these two laid back and ultra-tolerant races of nigh-indistinguishable small people recognize.

-Username17

[animea90]

Good job

[Blicero]

How long did it take subrace bloat to creep into D&D? I know that Tolkien had his fair share, so was it basically there from the start?

[Ancient History]

Subrace bloat proper occurred once you had multiple official D&D settings which were all pulling the fluff in their own direction. You can see it in the Master Race Handbook too, where they're trying and failing to harmonize the AD&D baseline elf races with the Dragonlance and Greyhawk variants. By the time D&D3.5 came around, they just rolled with it in all the "Races of..." books, but the rot had set in over a decade prior.

[Voss]

How long did it take subrace bloat to creep into D&D? I know that Tolkien had his fair share, so was it basically there from the start?

1e was definitely really crazy with it. Unearthed Arcana (1985) for 1st edition really shows it off, as the elf entry includes high elves, grey elves, wood elves, wild elves, drow elves and even fucking Valley Elves. Which, if you're not familiar, are a group of grey elves from Greyhawk that are distinct on the basis that the couple hundred of them that exist are the cockslaves of the human wizard (known only as The Mage) who decided to make his home in their valley, which was from then on called the Valley of the Mage.

The paragraph of description in the book tells you that they're exactly like grey elves, except they also speak gnomish, can sometimes be as tall as humans, and other elves don't like them and don't think of them as 'true elves.' Though if you check around the various tables in the book, they also can't be cavaliers like grey elves can, and seriously have slightly different level limits (which in UA differ by the how high the character's primary stat is). And by slightly I seriously mean that a fighter with 18/75 strength can be 7th level as a grey elf, but only 6th as a valley elf, because reasons. But if the character somehow has a 20 str, the valley elf caps at 13 instead of 11. Because the concept of level limit wasn't stupid enough.


The 1e Unearthed Arcana might need its own OSSR at some point, because it is brim-filled with crazy.

[Username17]

Did someone say subraces?

Book 1 & 2: Chapter Two (or “2”)
[Fill in Race] Subraces


This picture is a joke, but there are actually way more flavors of Halfling than this in official D&D.

The idea of “subraces” is probably the most racist thing in Dungeons & Dragons. I mean yes, there are more offensive things (like the Aperusa), but that is merely because they are a racist portrayal of an actual group of real-life people. The concept of the subrace is more inherently racist. Broadly speaking, the races correspond to actual species-level differences. Orcs and Elves are both hominids (as evidenced by the fact that they can breed with Humans and Ogres), but they are a different species – more different from Man than Neanderthals and maybe as different as an Australopithecus Robustus. The subrace on the other hand, promises solid game mechanical differences for differences that are well below the species level. In short: they promise real racial distinctions for differences on the level of ethnicity or skin color. That is basically extremely racist.

So given 2nd edition AD&D's general lack of tact when dealing with potentially offensive subject matter (whether it be The Crusades or Pygmies), we aren't really expecting much from chapters delving into the intricacies of racial differences between ethnicities of Halflings and Gnomes. And we don't get it. To give you an idea of the level of discourse we are starting at, the rules for Halflings in the PHB assume you are a “Hairfoot” Halfling, but you are allowed to roll percentile dice to determine how much “Stout” blood is in your lineage. If you roll high enough, you can pass for White see in the dark. Really. It's just better to be a “pureblood” Stout, which of course is why you have to roll your racial purity.


Unfortunately, I did.

So in the Gnome Chapter “Two” (as opposed to the Halfling Chapter “2” because consistency is for suckers) is about the four flavors of Gnome. One of them is the Tinker Gnome, which avoids calls of racism because it's legitimately a Gnome from a different planet and gets a limited pass on that sort of thing. The “Rock Gnome” and the “Svirfneblin,” by contrast, are literally just different ethnicities of Gnome and they have different stat adjustments and powers and shit. Svirfneblin have dark skin, which is why they have low Intelligence and Charisma but make better Thieves. Yes, really. You can honestly get as offended by that as you want – it is undeniably insensitive, and given that it was created in the late seventies by some white dudes in Wisconsin you could easily imagine it being worse than that. In order to have some value added, or possibly just because the author couldn't stop himself from making David the Gnome references for several pages, we add an additional subrace: the Forest Gnomes. They aren't even from a distant land or something, they are just a different nation that has different racial powers because go fuck yourself.

But while one could seriously make an entire essay about how fundamentally problematic the concept of subraces is, and how tone deaf AD&D's handling of the situation was, we should probably cut it at that. This book does the best it can, which isn't actually amazingly terrible given the constraints. Each of the subraces is written up as like a nation or something, where they get food preferences and systems of government and shit. And leaving aside the fact that ascribing this things to a 1:1 correspondence with blood lines and skin color is creepy, there's some actual world building going on here and I should call that out as being vaguely interesting. For the Rock Gnomes we get rants about Gnomish beard styles, Gnomish mining techniques (which seem to be inspired by Disney's Snow White more than by historical methodologies, but whatever), Gnomish jewelry making (are they Jews again? Fuck.), and Gnomish cuisine. For the Svirfneblin we get rants about Gnomish government (which appears to be Sumerian or West African – with separate male and female titles passed down in parallel), Gnomish nationalist symbolism (the Svirfneblin national symbol is the ruby), Gnomish division of labor (these numbers do not add up, but points for effort I guess), Gnomish holidays (Svirfneblin priests get to declare celebrations whenever they want because they never see the sun anyway), and more on Gnomish brewing techniques. There is also a subsection for Tinker Gnomes and Forest Gnomes, but since the first is a low comedy race from Dragonlance and the latter is just an expy from the World of David the Gnome, you can pretty much imagine what the contents are in both cases.


A Rock Gnome mine.

The book suffers slightly from the whole “what is words mean?” problem that so thoroughly plagued RPG books before the invention of Google. When the author is describing the difference between Gnomish ale and Dwarven mead, it kind of seems like he doesn't know that a “heavy mead” is actually a sweet mead. What this piece does do is to present Gnomes as having genuine failings: their food is horrible. Their food production is horrible. It paints a pretty consistent picture (though often with slight nods to politeness like describing things as an “acquired taste”) and that picture is pretty bad. Gnomes are bad at farming, producing scarcely enough grain to make ale and bread to stockpile for the winter. Most of the year they supplement their food heavily with hunting and gathering. The upper limit on a Gnome settlement is five hundred people. Their food is all described as bland and disgusting. This is genuinely interesting and would make a good story or set piece in a D&D game.

Possibly the weirdest thing about 2nd edition Gnomes is that the superpower Gnomes are most known for – the ability to speak to burrowing mammals (or forest mammals for Forest Gnomes) – isn't even a superpower. It's just a language they happen to have access to on their demihuman available starting languages list. That means that fucking anyone can spend a proficiency slot and speak with animals in 2nd edition AD&D, but that this fact is hidden in the available bonus languages of Gnomes rather than somewhere sensible like the list of proficiencies, or the language rules, or anything even vaguely sensible like that that. Fucking “beast tongue” is a regular language that anyone in AD&D land can take courses in at community college.

The Halfling section talks about the Hairfoot, the Stout, the Tallfellow, the Kender, the Furchin, and the Athasian Halflings. That's six flavors of Halfling, and I will bet you a dollar that you don't give a shit about any of them. Back at the end of the Gnome chapter, when the author wrote up his rant about Forest Gnomes and discussed their ability to vanish in woodland surroundings, he specified that they did this like Halflings. This is very weird, because as I already mentioned, I'm pretty sure that Halflings have no such ability. The very first thing I checked when I went through the racial writeups of the various flavors of Halflings in this book was to make sure that they don't have this ability – and they don't. I really don't know what the fuck he's talking about. Now as it happens, Halflings do have a special stealth ability. In fact, they have several special stealth abilities. First of all, they have a Dex bonus, which straight away gives them bonuses on Dex checks and may also trigger bonuses to Thief Skills if their Dex is high enough and they happen to be a Thief or Demibard (yes, I just said Demibard, it's 2nd edition, go fuck yourself). Secondly, if they have Thief skills, they straight up get racial bonuses to them for being Halflings, not that this is written in any of the Halfling writeups. And last but not least:

A halfling can gain a bonus to surprise opponents, but only if the halfling is not in metal armor. Even then, the halfling must either be alone, or with a party comprised only of halflings or elves, or 90 feet or more away from his party to gain this bonus. If he fulfills any of these conditions, he causes a -4 penalty to opponent's surprise rolls. If a door or other screen must be opened, this penalty is reduced to -2.

Elves also have this exact ability, but I genuinely have no idea how or if that's supposed to work with other forms of stealth.

And while that's a mighty and poorly explained ability, it has absolutely fuck-all to do with hiding in woodland settings. The whole hiding in the woods thing is an ability referenced all over this book, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't exist.

With six subraces to cover, the Halfling section naturally goes into much less detail on any of them. But beyond that, the author doesn't seem to much care, and glosses over most it. We get some smattering of details like how the Tallfellows breed ponies and have pike formations in war, but we don't go into how they chill their ale or whether their food is gross. The author apparently believes the being less industrious makes you a better farmer, while being more industrious makes you a worse farmer. There is a direct correlation between how industrious a subrace is described as being and how shitty they are at farming (all the way to Rock Gnomes, who are the most industrious of all and “abysmal” farmers). There's probably some weird prejudice against farmers playing out there, but I don't get it. Farming is kind of a lot of work, and the author doesn't seem to want to acknowledge that.

Unlike the Gnome section which jumps right in to the various subraces, this chapter also uses up some space to give some more rants about the legend of Littleman, which I think the author thought was really funny or something. It serves to squeeze the wordcount of the Halfling subraces even more. I think it important to note that the author holds Kender in barely concealed contempt, and throws weasel words at them over and over again. Most of the Kender writeup is painstakingly explaining that Kender aren't really related to other Halflings and the DM doesn't have to let you play one. Kender are actually one of the worst things that ever happened to D&D, so I really understand where he's coming from.

The Furchin are also called Polar Halflings, and in addition to some limited cold resistance they are also balls to the wall awesome, having a Con bonus and an armor class bonus against everything bigger than themselves (which is almost everything). They are the only ones with much of a culture described in this section, and they are apparently Inuit who have been put on a bunch of worlds because they lost a war to someone who had spelljammer ships at one point in the recent past. These and the Athasian Halflings are the only interesting things in this chapter.


Athasian Halfling.

Next up: Cultures of [Fiill in Blank]!

[Count Arioch the 28th]

On the halfling stealth thing: In Rules Cyclopedia 1E, halflings had an 80% chance of hiding in natural settings and 33% chance elsewhere assuming there was something for the halfling to hide in/behind/under. That might have been what the book was referencing.

The bit about gnome food is hilarious, because when I have played gnomes they ate terrible food (I would request things like mustard pies or beef and licorice stew or other terrible sounding thing I pulled out of my ass).

[Night Goat]

I don't see how it's racist to give nonhumans subraces. It's not like different human races have different stats - it's elves, dwarves, gnomes and halflings. These don't actually exist, so I don't see why offending them would be a problem.

[Ancient History]

Actually, at various points they have given different human races and nationalities stats. Just sayin'. Mostly you just see it in the setting-books, unless they do the whole subspecies thing like fucking Illumians and shit.

[Longes]

Actually, at various points they have given different human races and nationalities stats. Just sayin'. Mostly you just see it in the setting-books, unless they do the whole subspecies thing like fucking Illumians and shit.

How is it racist to have "Spartans have +1 to attack rolls and +1 con because their culture trains hard"?

[Laertes]

Actually, at various points they have given different human races and nationalities stats. Just sayin'. Mostly you just see it in the setting-books, unless they do the whole subspecies thing like fucking Illumians and shit.

How is it racist to have "Spartans have +1 to attack rolls and +1 con because their culture trains hard"?

That's a culture, not a race. They're distinct in that a culture is purely a nurture thing, while race is a nature thing as well: an Athenian who gets brought up by Spartans would have that bonus, while a Spartan brought up in Athens wouldn't. On the other hand, the phrase "all Spartans, no matter where they live and how they're brought up, are violent thugs" is a racist claim, because it asserts that their ancestry is more important than the culture they grow up in and the choices they make.

[Voss]

That isn't the kind of thing anyone is talking about anyway. What AH is referring to something like the Birthright setting, which has NotGermans, NotScandinavians, NotSlavs, and NotMongols (and those Generic Guys), who get various bonuses and penalties to Str, Dex, Con, Int, Wis and Cha.

So your notMongols are dumber than your NotGermans or whatever, who are mostly scheming thieves (IIRC, they stuffed in a lot of Hanseatic League elements, and bankers are of course naturally thieves). And yeah, this comes off as pretty racist. (exact details are a bit fuzzy for me (so it might not have been Int penalty vs Dex bonus for these specific groups, but this was the overall feel for the human 'subraces')

Most of the time people have shied away from this because its fairly obvious and poorly thought of. But doing it with still-fairly-obvious nonhuman expies of various racial groups isn't much better. Like the 3e Forgotten Realm halfling gypsies, to pull an example. Or All Dwarfs Are Scottish Jews, which happens a lot.

[Prak]

It might be kind of interesting to split bonuses between culture and genetics, with the sidenote that a sufficiently distant member of a given genetic group could very well not reflect the genetic bonuses at all, saying that part of a character's attributes comes culturally idiosyncratic mate selection (so, yeah, spartans have +1 str because spartans extol the virtues of strength) and another from culturally idiosyncratic nurture (so spartans have another +1 str because they train super hard), so you could have stuff like "Spartan born and raised: +2 str, +2 con" and "Born Spartan, raised Athenian: +1 Str and Con, +1 Int and Wis," but then you're asking players to care about +1s or only play Born and Raised characters or characters born and raised by synergistic cultures.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

I think it's more along the lines that too many dark skinned beings in D&D are evil and are good at stealing. I like gaming nostalgia, but there is a lot of stuff that makes me cringe (they might as well given svirfneblin +1 to watermelon and seduction against our pure, white women while they were at it).

[TiaC]

That Athasian Halfling looks like she'd fit right in with the wolfriders of Elfquest.

[OgreBattle]

Suave n' athletic halflings became popular around the same time Antonio Banderas's career took off.

[fectin]

People in more fertile areas get better crop yields and have to work less.
People in less fertile areas get worse crop yields and work more for it.
It's no surprise at all that industriousness and "good at farming" are inversely correlated.

[Lago PARANOIA]

The concept of the subrace is more inherently racist. Broadly speaking, the races correspond to actual species-level differences. Orcs and Elves are both hominids (as evidenced by the fact that they can breed with Humans and Ogres), but they are a different species – more different from Man than Neanderthals and maybe as different as an Australopithecus Robustus. The subrace on the other hand, promises solid game mechanical differences for differences that are well below the species level. In short: they promise real racial distinctions for differences on the level of ethnicity or skin color. That is basically extremely racist.

It might be kind of interesting to split bonuses between culture and genetics, with the sidenote that a sufficiently distant member of a given genetic group could very well not reflect the genetic bonuses at all, saying that part of a character's attributes comes culturally idiosyncratic mate selection (so, yeah, spartans have +1 str because spartans extol the virtues of strength) and another from culturally idiosyncratic nurture (so spartans have another +1 str because they train super hard), so you could have stuff like "Spartan born and raised: +2 str, +2 con" and "Born Spartan, raised Athenian: +1 Str and Con, +1 Int and Wis," but then you're asking players to care about +1s or only play Born and Raised characters or characters born and raised by synergistic cultures.

[Username17]

I don't see how it's racist to give nonhumans subraces. It's not like different human races have different stats - it's elves, dwarves, gnomes and halflings. These don't actually exist, so I don't see why offending them would be a problem.

It's a fantasy world, and you can claim it works however you want. They aren't humans. Blah blah blah.

But those are all excuses. When you say that the four flavors of Gnomes are different enough to have different stat mods, then you are saying that KKK style racism is True. At least, it's true in your fantasy world, for Gnomes. If you made exactly the same claims about Humans in our world, it would look exactly like the most disgusting and repulsive of 19th century racism.

Imagine for the moment that I took the word "Gnome" out of the equation, and simply talked about "the four subraces." Let's go through them:

• The first subrace is also called the normal subrace. They are industrious, intelligent, kind, and good.
• The second subrace are the dark subrace. They are stupid and ugly, but also sneaky and greedy.
• The third subrace are great but foolish inventors. They invented practically everything, but they make bad decisions and lack organization and never accomplished much.
• The fourth subrace are closer to nature. They live in harmony with the wilderness and have no use for civilization or wealth.

Now, if you just posted that on say, stormfront.org, people there would assume that you weren't talking about Gnomes, but instead Caucasoids, Negroids, Mongoloids, and Australoids. It wouldn't even occur to them that you were talking about anything else.

Now obviously it's a fantasy world and these are Gnomes, not Humans, and blah blah blah. But isn't it weird that someone would make a racial classification system for a fantasy species that mapped so well to real world abhorrent racism?

-Username17

[TiaC]

I prefer Pathfinder-style alternate racial features. These are things that some members of the race have, but they aren't hereditary.

[Username17]

On the halfling stealth thing: In Rules Cyclopedia 1E, halflings had an 80% chance of hiding in natural settings and 33% chance elsewhere assuming there was something for the halfling to hide in/behind/under. That might have been what the book was referencing.

That's probably it. 2nd Edition AD&D is such a fucking organizational trainwreck that I suspect many authors saw rules in OD&D and simply assumed they had some equivalent in AD&D somewhere. So in this case, the Author noticed that the OD&D Halfling had a woodlands hiding power and the fact that he couldn't see any equivalent ability in any place he looked in the 2nd edition rules simply led him to conclude that he had not found it yet, rather than that it didn't exist. So he wrote in references to this hidden rule, but doesn't actually quote the hidden rule. And then the editor let those references through because the editor was also not confident in his ability to declare that a rule didn't exist merely because he couldn't find it. Mystery solved.

Book 1 & 2: Chapters 3
Gnomish & Halfling Culture


Gnomes wouldn't actually get to face Tanuki until 3rd edition.

I know we just had a chapter about how the subraces were different, and most of the interesting parts were about various cultural differences such as food preparation and the various colors of dyes accessible to Halflings, but now we have another set of chapters about “culture,” which is pretty much just a continuation of the same thing. Anyway, the Gnome chapter begins with a continuation of the story about Gnomes filing into a valley to stare at the moon and then watch a Garl Glittergold based laser show. The big problem with these continuing stories is that neither one of them is particularly good and take way too long to get to the point. Also, there really isn't much of a point in either case, because at the end of the day all you get is that Halfling children ask a lot of questions which get patient answers from a grandmother when she's telling them a bedtime story – and that Gnomes are Clefairy and like to rock out to Laser Floyd.

The actual Gnome chapter proper is a set of unconnected essays each with their own medium heading. The essays are Festivals, Fires, Marriage and Family, The Nose Knows, Food and Drink, Gems, Craftsmanship, Trade, Taboos, Emotions, Humor, Animal Friends, Warfare, Magic, and Wandering. If that sounds like there are a lot of essays, then yes but a lot of them are really short. Gems and The Nose Knows are just a single paragraph long. If some of those sound redundant with each other and even more redundant with some of the factoids about the Gnome Subraces from the previous chapter... yeah. I don't have a lot to say about that. With all the discussion of Gnome foods and brewing in the subraces chapter, having an essay on Gnome Food and Drink in the culture chapter seems pretty redundant. That essay in particular seems to have missed the joke, and tells us that Gnomes are “excellent” at preparing what foods they do make – which are then explained to be wild game soaked in nearly lethal amounts of salt and then cooked until it's black.

A few of these micro-essays have their own italicized in-character bits at the beginning, but there is no rhyme or reason to any of that which I can see. I think my biggest complaint about all of this is that few of these essays ever bother to specify whether they are talking about Rock Gnomes or Deep Gnomes and none of them ever breach the subject of whether they are talking about Greyhawk or Krynn. I assume that being 2nd edition this is almost all about the cultures of Rock Gnomes in the Forgotten Realms, but the only thing I can find to actually justify that assumption is a mention of Thay in an italicized quote.


It's not in the main text, but one of these guys is mentioned so the Faerun assumption is defensible.

The Halfling section is frankly less interesting. It has generally more of the italicized intros on the essays, which uses space without conveying information or being interesting on any other level. Mostly, this is because what passes for humor in these bits is transcribing Ogres as saying “Dey” instead of “They.” But also because every time it cuts back to the grandmother storyteller it's basically just reiterating a point that was already made and was kind of dumb the first time.

The actual essays in the Halfling section are less interesting or poignant than the Gnome ones. They are: The Name “Halflings,” The Hearth and the Burrow, The Family, Growing Up, {Sustenance, and More}, The Village, {Crafts, Labor, and Products}, Trade, Society Norms and Taboos, Joy and Humor, Sorrow and Anger, Riddles, Villages and Shires, Warfare, Tactics, Magic, Why Most Halflings Are Homebodies, and Why Some Halflings Pursue Adventure. That's two more essays than appeared in the Gnome chapter, but holy shit is there a lot of redundancy. More importantly, a whole lot of that is just reiterating that these Halflings are Hobbit expies, which is a piece of information you could get across with a single sentence: “These Halflings are Hobbit expies.” There, done.

The 2nd edition Halfling is pretty painfully uninteresting. This book would have been a place where they could have made them more interesting, but the challenge was not risen to. These Halflings are boring but likeable farmers. And that's as far as it goes. As a player character, you're supposed to expend some of your narrative capital on being special enough to be an adventurer at all. It's basically the same position as the Drow.


Except instead of doing that, once you use up all your narrative capital to explain why you can be an adventurer, you're a guy who happens to be short.

Basically, I guess I'm saying that the Halfling section suffers from a lack of ambition. The task the author set for himself was merely to set LotR events into D&D land. So we get (and I am not making this up) an explanation for why “some wizards” have fondness for Halflings. But the task the aauthor should have set himself was making Halflings into a race that lent themselves towards the creation of new D&D characters and stories. So while the author succeeded in his goal to write LotR expies, that goal is itself so modest and unintesting that the chapter is basically a failure.

The Gnome section could certainly be improved upon and is perhaps excessively vague about where all this shit is taking place, but it presents a civilization that is part of the world and has obvious adventure hooks and could very plausibly throw up major characters who are PCs or NPCs. Just the trade aspect where it posits that Gnomes have tiny communities which export small amounts of high quality textiles and jewelry in exchange for much larger amounts of low value bulk goods like timber and food is interesting and obviously creates a lot of hooks.


A Gnomish plot hook.

Aside from a sample village for each race in Chapter 5, the fluff portions of each book are pretty much over. Chapter 4 is a collection of character kits, because 2nd edition. So here we can really take stalk of the book as a whole in how well it managed to get us to care about the two races it was sent to cover. I would say that it was a partial success for Gnomes and an almost total failure for Halflings. That's interesting, because of course it is historical reality that by the time 3rd edition came around, they had found a presentation of Halflings that people could get behind and were still completely flailing with Gnomes. In both cases, I believe that was because this book was simply never taken as the last word for either race. The later fluff is pretty much unrecognizable as having been descended from the stuff written in this tome. If you didn't know that Forest Gnomes literally didn't exist before this book came out, you wouldn't guess that this book made any impact on future fluff writers at all. Even trivial decrees you'd think would catch on like the statement that Gnomes keep their hair shoulder length or shorter and that Gnomes don't use dairy products but put a fuck tonne of salt on everything are flat out ignored in Races of Stone. Races of Stone walks us through Elly's day and becomes unrecognizable as the Gnomes of the Complete Book of Gnomes and Halflings as soon as she has sweet cream and soft goat cheese with her breakfast. And it doesn't get any closer when Elly comes home at night to find that since 2nd edition the Gnomes have apparently started baking with sugar.

The Gnome of this book seems like something you could work with. Yes, it still labors under a bunch of bullshit 2nd edition anachronisms (for fuck's sake, they are anti-magical magic users by default), but the culture described is something to conjure with. The fact that this book was ignored by future Gnome authors is thus a tragedy. Moving the Gnome forward, I believe the correct choice would be to revert to this book and modernize from there. Halflings, not so much. I don't see anything in this whole book that's interesting about Halflings except for possibly their matriarchal religion and proliferation of small gods.

[Prak]

The concept of the subrace is more inherently racist. Broadly speaking, the races correspond to actual species-level differences. Orcs and Elves are both hominids (as evidenced by the fact that they can breed with Humans and Ogres), but they are a different species – more different from Man than Neanderthals and maybe as different as an Australopithecus Robustus. The subrace on the other hand, promises solid game mechanical differences for differences that are well below the species level. In short: they promise real racial distinctions for differences on the level of ethnicity or skin color. That is basically extremely racist.

It might be kind of interesting to split bonuses between culture and genetics, with the sidenote that a sufficiently distant member of a given genetic group could very well not reflect the genetic bonuses at all, saying that part of a character's attributes comes culturally idiosyncratic mate selection (so, yeah, spartans have +1 str because spartans extol the virtues of strength) and another from culturally idiosyncratic nurture (so spartans have another +1 str because they train super hard), so you could have stuff like "Spartan born and raised: +2 str, +2 con" and "Born Spartan, raised Athenian: +1 Str and Con, +1 Int and Wis," but then you're asking players to care about +1s or only play Born and Raised characters or characters born and raised by synergistic cultures.

Sorry, it's possible that my rambling made things unclear. My point was that different cultures will have different standards of beauty and desirability, and if you took a bunch of people that all valued strength and hardiness far more than agility, and put them on an island for, lets just say, a thousand years, after that time you'd have a culture where people tended to be strong and hardy and not very dextrous, and yeah, it'd be small, so these people, translated into D&D, would probably have a +1 to Str and Con and -1 Dex due to their mate selection, and if you add in the fact that they might have a culture that encourages, say, weight lifting, a given adult would probably qualify for another +1 Str and maybe another +1 Con, so an adult born from Ahnold stock and raised in the culture would have +2 Str and +2 Con, and we'll just say that the culture de-emphasizes flexibility for a -2 Dex; whereas a person whose parents were both Ahnolds, but, lets say was stolen by fairy pirates from the crib and raised by a culture that extols the virtue of physical and mental flexibility (+1 Dex and Int) and doesn't much care about force of presence (-1 Cha) would have something like +1 Str, +1 Con, +1 Int, -1 Cha.

As I said, it would require people to care about +1s to stats, which they don't in D&D, but it's an interesting set up to think about. I also didn't say it would actually be a good thing to do, just interesting.

[Username17]

Book 1 & 2: Chapters 4
Gnome & Halfling Character Kits


Some of the kits in this book returned to 3rd edition as Prestige Classes.

Kits in 2nd edition are a window into madness. Well, really any rules in 2nd edition are sufficiently messed up that if you look at them hard enough you find out that it's full of crazy. My attempt to find out what the effects of being a Halfling on your ability to sneak around and the multiple layers of craziness that uncovered are hardly unique. This was an edition where the skill system, the entire skill system was an optional and experimental subsystem that the lead designer wasn't sure was going to catch on. That's why the rules for doing anything are always layered patchworks of bullshit. The rules for surprising foes do not plug in to the rules for sneaking around, because it cannot be assumed that either of those rules are actually being used. Kits were 2nd edition's primary means of really customizing a character's abilities, and there is no rhyme or reason to any of it. Each one is written to do something that some author wanted done, and your guess is as good as anyone's what rules the author did and did not assume were being used. And as with the Halflings and their forest hiding, the author might seriously have written a kit without realizing that there was a basic rule that covered the same context or in reference to a rule that appeared in an entirely different edition of the game.


The Roots of rules craziness in 2nd edition are tangled and deep.

Despite the fact the no one used those fucking things, this book endeavors to remind you of the various level limits for a race pursuing different classes and the adjustments to those level limits for having high attributes. These are of course terrible, but again I've never seen anyone use them in an actual home game. Race/Class limits were almost as bad, but I actually have seen those used. In the bad old days it was simply accepted by people that Dwarves couldn't be Wizards and Gnomes could only be Wizards if they specialized in Illusion. As specialists in Illusion, they thus could never learn Abjuration, Evocation, or Necromancy because 2nd edition had a fixed school opposition chart.

Specialist	School	Race	Score	Opposition School(s)
Abjurer	Abjuration	H	15 Wis	Alteration & Illusion
Conjurer	Conj./Summ.	H, ½ E	15 Con	Gr. Divin. & Invocation
Diviner	Gr. Divin.	H, ½ E, E	16 Wis	Conj./Summ.
Enchanter	Ench./Charm	H, ½ E, E	16 Cha	Invoc./Evoc. & Necromancy
Illusionist	Illusion	H, G	16 Dex	Necro., Invoc./Evoc., Abjur.
Invoker	Invoc./Evoc.	H	16 Con	Ench./Charm Conj./Summ.
Necromancer	Necromancy	H	16 Wis	Illusion & Ench./Charm
Transmuter	Alteration	H, ½ E	15 Dex	Abjuration & Necromancy

But it wasn't the same fixed chart as in other editions, because go fuck yourself.

Halflings were not allowed to be Wizards of any flavor even though the fluff told you that Halfling Wizards were merely very rare. Because fuck you for wanting to play a unique and special hero. Don't you understand that your Halfling adventurer is a rare and special snowflake just for leaving the house?

Meanwhile, multiclassing was a thing for non-human characters. With three classes available to Halflings and four classes available to Gnomes, and the game supporting 2 and 3 class combinations, that's a lot of multiclass combinations for each race. This book provides distinct kits for multiclass combos rather than doing something vaguely sensible like letting you take separate kits for your two classes. That might seem like there would be a lot of demand for content that is honestly incredibly obscure. And yeah. It's honestly worse than Prestige Class bloat from 3rd edition, hard as that is to believe. Still, this book actually just leaves itself incomplete by announcing that certain multiclass combinations are “rare” and aren't getting any kits. Also go fuck yourself. Note that the normal rules for specialist wizards is no multiclassing, but that doesn't apply to Gnomes because 2nd edition AD&D is like Icelandic fucking law.

There are 10 Gnome kits and 18 Halfling kits. But I really have to say that the Gnome kits sell themselves way better than the Halfling kits. Most of the Halfling kits don't actually seem like they are “Halfling” kits in original concept. They seem like just random stuff the author had lying around that he spruced up with some minimalist Halfling colored paint at the last minute. The Halfling kits include such generic concepts as: Archer, Mercenary, Squire, and Bandit. Note that there are no fucking adjectives on those, and every single one of them is a noun which has at one time or another been used to refer to a Human in the real fucking world. The Gnomes at least get concepts like the Breachgnome, the Vanisher, and the Rocktender, which all at least sound like something that Gnomes might have exclusive access to.

Each kit does... stuff. Some of them are disadvantageous. Being a Halfling Burglar gives you a small bonus to your Open Locks percentages in exchange for taking a penalty on attack rolls. Some of them are raw powerups. Being a Halfling Bilker gives a completely arbitrary (and totally incoherent) method of cheating people which is supposed to be usable only a limited number of times but because of 2nd edition's bizarre backwards roll-under bullshit for ability tests is actually written to be usable an unlimited number of times, and you get bonus meaningless skills, and the only drawback is that in a completely MTP fashion you're supposed to run into enemies from time to time (note: you are a D&D character and will thus run into enemies every session). Some have extremely harsh level cutoffs in one direction or the other. For example, the Rocktender sucks monkey ass (being disallowed metallic equipment), but if they somehow survive to be high enough level to get access to summon elemental, they instantly win D&D by always getting highly loyal Earth Elementals of maximum size.

But of course, 2nd edition AD&D was Caster Edition as much as any edition was. While low level Fighters could be pretty bad ass (and stuff like the Breach Gnome with its raw unfiltered AC bonuses could thus be pretty sweet), at the deep end of the pool it was always and forever about how awesome the spellcasters were. So it's no surprise that the big winner is the Image Maker, a Gnome kit where you trade having a slightly shorter spell list in exchange for giving enemies a penalty on saves against the spells you do have and straight up ignoring immunities to your spells, unless I guess they are immune to spells things that negate their immunity to spells, because lol 2nd edition.


I trace you, buster.

Really, there are a lot of mechanics here, but it's all a confusing mess. I should spend a bit discussing where this shit went. Breachgnomes were canon in 3rd edition as a Prestige Class in Races of Faerun. You didn't care about them, because being a small sized defensive fighter high enough level to have a prestige class was a fucking joke in 3rd edition, but the concept endured. The Tunnelrat came back in Demihumans of the Realms in 1998, but it was now open to Dwarves and Rock Gnomes in addition to just Halflings. But of course, the game mechanics for the 1998 printing of the Tunnelrat kit are completely different from the game mechanics for the 1994 version. Because 2nd edition, and go fuck yourself. In fact, I'm not even sure that was intended to be a reprint, they might have just reused the name because it's 2nd edition and it's entirely possible to have two different kits available to characters of the same race and class that have exactly the same name and are not the same.

There is fluff in these, but it's so lost in the kit descriptions that it might as well not exist. I mean, a fair amount of fluff about how law and government works in Halfling communities is in the “Role:” subheading of the Sheriff Fighter kit, but are you seriously going to look there if you want to know the structure of Halfling village authority? Of course not! Even if the subsequent books hadn't pretty much completely ignored all the good and the bad in this book, the material in these chapters is so hard to reference that it was almost destined for the memory hole.