Halflings 101: How to Apply

[Vox]

stuff

You just want to play a halfling whiran with your half-giant buddies in tuluk...

Yeah... so?!  

[Dalmeth]

You know, since most of my characters have been rangers operating out of Tuluk, this halfling activity is going to cut my characters' life expectancies in half.  






No pun intended.

[LoD]

Find out IC.

You'd probably get much more information that way anyhow.

The door swings open with a reckless heave from the sweaty man slumped over the threshold.  One hand clutching his stomach, his other grasps the door frame with a desperate strength.  Hauling himself to his feet, a pained grunt escapes his blood wet lips before stuffling over to an old, rickety desk.  Shaking violently, a callused hand worms into the dank pocket of his trouser, gingerly retrieving a translucent green pill smelling faintly of herb and dirt.  For a moment, his eyelids lift enough to reveal an expression of relief and morbid amusement before stuffing the pill between yellowed teeth and swallowing hard.  His eyes close, breathing shallow and ragged as he lowers himself to the chair.

With considerable effort, his right hand lurches forward to snare a quill pen patiently standing guard from within its well.  Blobs of blackish ink dot the parchment beneath him as he moves the quill's tip toward the bottom of the page.  With barely a scribble, words mark the crisp page as the man coughs into a gnarled fist; the hoarse and wet sound of something sick.  Suddenly, he heaves.  Violently.  Spittle mixed with blood mixed with wet flesh best kept inside bursts from his mouth like a rotten milksack.  His body spasms for a moment, as a spider flailing in a pool, before an audible crack sounds from the base of his neck.  Sloppy vomit welcomes his pallid cheek with a moist caress as it crashes down to meet it, his widened eyes staring lifelessly toward a bloodied intestine, cradling so gently a greenish pill.

Beneath the morbid stench and scene lay the text, quickly absorbing the ink and sickening fluid of death.  A quick read reveals the following words written in a varied state of physical ability:

:arrow: They don't like me entering the woods.
:arrow: They don't like me hunting their food.
:arrow: They tried to eat me today.
:arrow: They eat kank.
:arrow: They employ some kind of pois

Yep, that'll work out much better than documentation.

-LoD

[Larrath]

Nice story, but you left out the part where the hunter is killed for being literate.

Now, I stand behind what I said before - I'd very much like to see the What You Know document for halfling be available only to players playing halflings, because otherwise everyone going to know how halfling culture works and who leads them and what they behave like.
Cale Knight specifically asked if players that do NOT want to play halflings can read that document - players playing halflings should have all the appropriate information handed to them on a silver platter.

Now, it's very possible to find information about halflings:
1) Try to use the Way.
2) Sneak around the Grey Forest.
3) Use magick.
4) Talk to scholars or bards.
5) Find a halfling, torture it and devise a way to communicate.
6) Find a group of halflings and make them teach you Kentu.
7) Use magick some more.

[bloodfromstone]

I share Vox's concerns. As it stands, it seems like halflings will be nothing but an iso clan that occasionally pks people to eat them. The docs and staff have stated that it is nearly impossible to communicate with them verbally; they have trouble learning to understand other languages, and, even without that, the concepts within the languages are alien to one another. They cannot be Wayed, because the inner workings of their mind is too alien to communcate specific thoughts and words, rather emotion and flashes of color/images, etc. Also they see everything but halflings as food, so no one in their right mind would try to befriend them. And, even if they did, they would be eaten, either immediately or eventually.

I'm not a fan of iso clans in general, but at least tribal elves and humans can communicate with non-tribe folk. I really hope that the Imms have some plans to make halflings more than a bunch of isolated, pking hunters that, if played by their help file, have little potential for tension and intrigue within their own tribe.

I don't mean to come across as overly negative. I'm not saying anything bad about the Imms or the people who want to run halfling PCs. I'm just concerned about the way it will unfold in game.

[LoD]

Nice story, but you left out the part where the hunter is killed for being literate.

Now, I stand behind what I said before - I'd very much like to see the What You Know document for halfling be available only to players playing halflings, because otherwise everyone going to know how halfling culture works and who leads them and what they behave like.

Well, you assumed he was a hunter rather than a literate bastard doing undercover research for a powerful noble, but I was mostly being silly.

You also seem to assume that a player's knowledge of a subject or people will bleed into their role-play despite whether their character would know of such things or not.  I'm not saying that doesn't happen, but once a player has created a halfling, then they will be privy to the documentation.  Will their future characters demonstrate an amazing and insightful understanding of the halfling culture because they've read it?

Do players demonstrate an uncanny knowledge of desert elves when playing city characters because they have access to their documentation despite them having infrequent interaction?  I'm not saying the answer to my question is inherently "yes" or "no", it's just a question, but it makes you wonder if halflings are so mysterious simply because they are new (again)?  They haven't been an available PC race for awhile?  They are more alien than the PC races with currently accessible documentation?

I agree that halflings are an iso-clan which has certain parts of its documentation that hould be hidden from the rest of the gameworld.  However, it'd be nice to create some mild version of a "What You Would Know" for halfling documentation that people could read.  There are plenty of very different cultures within the gameworld that are documented and described.

The unfortunate fact is that most players haven't had the opportunity to "Find out IC" without an Imm spending time to help, and now both sides are being thrown together.  If accessible documentation facilitated some non-violent interaction with the halfling PC's, then I'd say it might just be worthwhile.

-LoD

[Cale_Knight]

Knowledge about halflings has always been one of those jealously guarded topics at the forefront of the "find out IC" crowd, often with a subtextual snicker since, of course, "finding out IC" about halflings has been all but impossible for the last few years.

Now that halflings are open again, I guess that specialness at being privy to the "secret" is being threatened. I've seen posts from players implying that only folks who are knowledgable about halfling culture will be allowed to play halflings. Which is of course a Catch-22. You can't play a halfling unless you know about halflings and you can't know about halflings unless you play a halfling.

And to be fair to the staff, I don't think they're going to limit halflings to those folks who have already played them. I certainly hope not, at any rate.

I don't even know if I want to play one, and I can't know and won't know unless I find out a little more about them first. From where I'm sitting, they look like an iso/PK clan.

Is there more to it than that? I don't know, but I'm not going to kill off my current character and create an explorer who spends 2 RL years studying halflings just to find out if that's what I want my next PC to be.

[Twilight]

At some point (I don't know exactly when) the help file for the halfling village changed.  In the helpfile for Ptar Ken, it states that:

It can also be guessed that there have been no conflicts with the
Ptar Ken tribe from outsiders in the entire history of its existence. Only
in the last few hundred years were these halflings known to exist, and
explorers reported no instances of walls or other fortifications around the
village.
  For a halfling residing in this village, life may indeed be very good.
The forest provides much, if not all, of what is needed to survive, and the
utter lack of greed, avarice, and war must make for a truly idyllic
environment.

So if there has been no conflicts, or really interaction, it could be there is a plan in place to increase it.  Beyond just food.  Who knows.  Should be a fun mindset to try.

[Ktavialt]

Personally, I think people should attempt to submit halfling
applications and get rejected, then if the staff feels the application
is WAY far off of halfling culture they flat out reject, and if not,
then they ask if the player wants to tweak it in a way that's more
halfling-like.

Also, RP that generally ends in death isn't always bad RP. Tension
and conflict can create plots, I suppose.

- Ktavialt

[Anarchy]

:arrow: If they aren't deceitful and they don't steal, there would be no halfling raiding parties.

:arrow: If they are tolerant and learning, they would not savagely murder those they found wandering in the forest.

The catch here is that Halflings view everything as food stock. They do not see other humans and demi-humans as people with souls, and feelings..etc. They are clever cattle. Even to use the real world as an example, there are counties that are tolerant and learning and understanding, etc yet still eat cows, chickens, pigs, deer, kangaroo, emu, turkey, fish, squid...Shall I continue? No, I figure you got the idea.

Dwarf, elf, human etc - all just wild animals in the desert to the mind of a halfling.

If your into dark sun, I sugguest you read some of their books, while Armageddon is somewhat diffrent from them, the books can provide some interesting infomation about the world in general.

[Angela Christine]

I'm asking this because currently it states that halflings are tolerant, learning creatures with a love for nature, they also do not have it in their nature to deceive or steal. How and more importantly why would such wise and learned creatures not attempt to communicate or trade with the other sentient races.. or for that matter, eat them.

Excuse me, your cultural bias is showing.    Wisdom doesn't necesarily have to lead to being pacifistic or capitalistic.  


I like the dicotomy of canabilistic hippies, but that's just me.  Flower Power:  the flowers are also poisonous.  Peace and love and eat the interloper.


It is possible that in the past they attempted to communicate, trade and negotiate with humans and elves, and then they learned that both humans and elves are dishonerable bastards who will attempt to screw you over at every opportunity.  They might even be smart enough to figure out that if they act like a city-state with an army and valuable resources, then the evil sorcerer who rules Tuluk will try to conquor them.  As long as they act like barely sentient savages the Tuluki government will ignore them, the same way they ignore gortoks and tembos.

They are aliens, who knows what they think?


 *  *  *


I do hope they find a way to interact with parts of the outside world, PK iso tribes suck.

Angela Christine

[Vox]

The catch here is that Halflings view everything as food stock. They do not see other humans and demi-humans as people with souls, and feelings..etc. They are clever cattle.

Dwarf, elf, human etc - all just wild animals in the desert to the mind of a halfling.

Well, if that's the case... Why don't we see Halflings attempting to herd themselves a tribe of elves?

Or keep some fat dwarves as livestock?

[Xygax]

Because they don't control enough land to farm.  They hunt what they can when they can.  Also, elves and dwarves are far more uppity than cattle and so make terrible livestock, and halflings know it.

-- X

[Socko]

Keeping animals or humanoids as livestock, keep in mind, is a distinctly Agrarian-Human-Non-Outer-Race trait.

Why would the halflings need or desire a stockpile of anything if they're only going to take what they need? If they don't get an elf, they'll just get a tregil or a vestric.

The forest is the stockpile.

[Vox]

Well, sure.. if yeh want to be all logical about it.

Still, I'd like to see a halfling in a set of mini-overalls go out at the crack of Krath to milk himself a buxom half-elf...

But maybe that's just me.. :shock:

[Xygax]

Well, who wouldn't want to see that?

Let's get back to the original thread topic, though.

Thanks,

X

[Jherlen]

Sooo...
:arrow: Halflings see other races as food and have no wish to communicate with them.
:arrow: Halflings have no real effective means of communicating even if they wanted to.
:arrow: Halflings live in their own little villiage, away from everyone else.
:arrow: The halflings in their villiage all get along in enlightened harmony and don't have much if any inner conflict.
:arrow: Halflings haven't had any outside troubles or threats to their villiage in some time.

IF all of this is true... what exactly are PC halflings going to do? What interaction will they be able to have with anyone besides other halflings? Won't this just fracture the playerbase?

I fully acknowledge the above might be misconceptions, but they're all things that can be gathered by reading this thread. If they're wrong, I hope somebody would PLEASE correct them. I also think that making some form of docs about halflings public would help immensely. I think "find out IC" in this case is valid in some areas, but a general overview of the race (enough to form a reasonable concept and know how to play it) would be very very helpful.

I hope the tone of this post doesn't come off on an attack on the staff, it's just questions I'd really like to hear addressed.

[bloodfromstone]

Ditto.

[amoeba]

I don't know about you, but I like to see options. The chance to play in a different mindset, one that is totally alien.  This hasn't been played yet and it's already being torpedoed from the sidelines.  Personaly, I'm curious to see what becomes of them and where this is all leading.  A clash of alien cultures could lead for some interesting play.  Two thumbs up for options, creativilty and an open mind.

[SpyGuy]

I think staff know of the current misgivings some players have with the design of the halfling race as a viable PC option that would add to the game world, ie. that they add nothing to it if they can't interact.  Hence I think this time around they're going to have a push to interact on some level, whether that is raiding Tuluki loggers or having pow wows with desert elves in their tree houses.  Only time will tell.

I'm going to be waiting a few RL months after the race option opens before I say anything, I imagine that as happens in Arm there will be IC events and actions taken to change the halfling culture/situation in such a way that it adds to the game world.  That's what I'm hoping at least  :wink:

My suggestion for those apping halflings, expect to be watched closely and as the early bunch to take a strong role in helping determine what the future of halfling RP will be.  You'll be the trend setters so don't mess up, because if you do then other people are going to have to come in and undo all the bad stuff that got messed up  :twisted:   Nah I'm just messing around, good luck to everyone who plays an ankle biter and hoping to see you become truely involved with the game world.

[Tuannon]

Can halflings codedly eat people (I.e skin a humanoid PC/NPC and get meat)? I think that would be really neat.

"The skinned body of the tall, muscular man lies crumbled on the ground."

Well, I know this is a tad late, but according to what I understand of halflings, they would take meat, bones.. skin.. gear.. everything of use back to the village for recycling into goods and consumables.

Sure, halflings are have savage but 'honest' ways of doing things and do not value your goods enough to steal them, but if they decide to kill you for whatever, you as a being vanish. You as a waterskin, a tent section and a set of pan pipes however live on until you break.

[spawnloser]

This command causes your character to consume the named object. Except for halflings and mantises, the object in question must be a type of food. These two particular races are also able to eat corpses which lie on the ground.

They 'eat' the corpse, it would seem, not skin it for meat and hide and then eat the meat.

[Anonymous]

This command causes your character to consume the named object. Except for halflings and mantises, the object in question must be a type of food. These two particular races are also able to eat corpses which lie on the ground.

They 'eat' the corpse, it would seem, not skin it for meat and hide and then eat the meat.

Why the heck not?

[ShaLeah]

This command causes your character to consume the named object. Except for halflings and mantises, the object in question must be a type of food. These two particular races are also able to eat corpses which lie on the ground.

They 'eat' the corpse, it would seem, not skin it for meat and hide and then eat the meat.

Why the heck not?

That's definately on my wish list for coding tweaks.

Imagine all the nifty things one can make off of "civilized" folk!  Elf steak kabobs, dwarven kidney pie, human filet mignon, half-giant gizzard bread. Human teeth necklaces, femur bone stilts (for those halflings who have size issues), dwarf skin leather skirts, hats made out of elf ears.  That would be soooooooo sick.  LOVE IT!

[Anonymous]

spansil rope.