Halfling private racial

# Creation Myth

It’s true that halflings have a relatively collective culture, but the scale of the number that halflings reach is not well understood by outsiders. Halflings rival goblins in fecundity. A single couple, over the course of their productive years (which, in fairness, is considerable, as halflings tend to live a life and a half as long as humans, and halfling women do not go through menopause, and thus, can keep having children even past a hundred years old. Additionally, there are subtle differences in halfling physiology that makes death by childbirth quite rare) could very well produce over a hundred children.

This is also true. So, in addition to their veritable horde of biological children, their mythical parents have led to a culture of adoption. It’s almost instinctual for halflings to care for anything smaller than themselves, and to keep caring for them, even as they grow larger.

This is partially true. Halflings don’t have many straight-up traditions, but one of them is the Casus Belli. Only when clear lines have been drawn do they commit themselves to conflict. After all, farms can be rebuilt, land can be found elsewhere, but people are priceless.

This is not seeing the full picture. The Wander is kind of like a highly prevalent form of disorder within halfling populations. It is genetic, but it’s so common that trying to trace it is near impossible. In some communities, the Wander rate is near 50%. In some, it’s as little as 20%. The rate appears somewhat tied to available resources, which means when food is scarce, you’ll find more wanderers. The Wander affects mostly pubescents, but other ages are rarely known to be affected as well. In most cases, halflings are only affected with The Wander once during their lifetime. Rarely, though, halflings will go into periods of domesticity and Wander throughout their lives, leading to a very difficult life indeed. It is of note that there are Domestic Halflings that still become great adventurers. They simply don’t suffer the instinctual urge to spread as Wanderers do.

This is straight up false. The Wander does nothing to steel a halfling’s nerves. The sad fact is the only Wanderers who live long enough to become known adventurers are those who learned to overcome their fear and think clearly in the face of a world much bigger than them.

This is true. If you’re familiar with the concept of Primary Succession, it’s pretty much that. Halflings are like grasses that quickly settle in areas that other communities would find uninhabitable (or just gross), and swiftly build up functional communities, effectively terraforming their surroundings into livable space. This is so true, in fact, that many human cities and towns across Kai'la are actually built on the bones of halfling communities that were either subsumed or chased out to form the new settlements.

This is a mystery even to halflings. It’s not that they’re more hungry than other races. (in fact, due to their size and lifestyles, they actually tend to require less calories than many other races) It simply seems they can push past their feelings of fullness more easily than other races, to a frankly gross degree. What’s especially terrifying is that they can eat more than what could conceivably fit in their entire bodies without eliminating waste (to an as-of-yet indeterminate amount), which leads to the question of “where does it go?”. Nobody really quite knows.

**Additional Notes Not Covered By The General Packet**

Halfling culture is unusually uniform. This is not because of a recent development, but simply due to the frequency with which halflings exchange community members due to The Wander. New halfling cultures don’t really have much time to develop before more wanderers appear from the “mainstream” halfling culture. There are a few exceptions, but most culturally unique halflings are that way because they were subsumed into a different culture than a halfling community.

Halflings not affected by The Wander (Read: Domestic Halflings) tend to have a family or clan name related to their ancestral home in the community (Underwood, Overhill) or their ancestral function in the community (Goodbarrel, Berryfarm). Wanderers, on the other hand, tend to abandon their family name, instead replacing it with “of (whatever community they originated from)”. That is, until the Wander fades and they return to domestic life, typically adopting a new surname as necessary.