Homebrew Setting Clans: Halflings

This is the final guide in a series on the most notable groups of people in each culture in my homebrew setting, Evanoch. These guides are perhaps the most important writing I have done here on this site, not for my reader, but for myself. I learned that my Daltoners were not a monolithic evil group. Until I wrote about the Faninites, I didn't understand how their society functioned over time rather than as a snapshot. My dwarves weren't distinct from the classic dwarf in fantasy until I explored how my dwarves could be different. The orcs live based on tradition, and their clan guide allowed me to see different ways of interpreting that tradition. My elves have always mixed progressivism with staunch traditionalism, and their clan guide helped me decide to elevate that tension to a real crisis of public faith in government. My half-elves, true assimilators, didn't have a defined set of cultural values to draw on, so I developed them into a true Chaotic Good group characterized by individuality. And writing about my gnomes helped me to build lore for a society I knew well but hadn't entirely built backstory for yet. I don't know what will come of writing about my halflings, my favorite of my homebrew groups. Here's a little about why: 

Elves, orcs, dwarves, gnomes, halflings, and half-elves have established cultures in D&D canon, at least in fragmentary form. For all but the halflings, I took inspiration from the original classic and added various amounts of my own imagination. My elves are more artistically inclined that classic elves but are pretty similar. My dwarves didn't depart from traditional dwarves until their article. My gnomes are industrious inventors with a strange sense of humor like D&D canon dictates. My half-elves are facilitators and trailblazers like the tradition suggests. My orcs are tribal like the classic depiction says, even if their culture is actually quite distinct from other depictions. My humans are quite homebrew, dividing humans ideologically and making neither native to the setting. But my halflings are entirely mine. I kept the detail of underground homes as a nod to Tolkien's hobbits, the inspiration for halflings, but have changed everything else. They live in lush rainforests, mastered alchemy, are anarchists and have no formal government, have bizarre parenting traditions, and are generally the most surprising for players to encounter for these reasons. Getting to explore the halflings is something I saved for last so I could enjoy it as a culmination of this series.

One last thing: halflings unconditionally refuse to be formally organized, and family structures don't really exist as known elsewhere, so clans do not truly exist among the halflings like they do elsewhere. Instead, this guide will describe social movements, which represent a similar function for us as DMs--just as the other groups' clans reveal what people care about and what power may lie with particular people, these social movements and some of the people involved in them will serve the same function even though an organization doesn't exist in the same sense. After all, social movements are the closest halflings get to organizing, so it's the next best thing. That said, here are the five most important social movements amongst halflings:

Homebrew Setting Clans: Gnomes

I'm nearing the end of this clan series, which has consistently helped me to understand my cultural groups better. This guide features my gnomes, classically a favorite culture of mine to write about. But going in, I'm going to learn from the earlier guides in this series: there's a lot I don't realize I don't know about my homebrew groups, and I expect that to be true here too. My gnomes are an eccentric variation on the D&D presentation--trickstery inventors like the archetype says who have elaborate social customs and a unique take on social issues and governance according to my homebrew. But that's a narrowly-defined gnomish people, and these clan guides are about broadening our understanding of these groups, and so the gnomish clans below will get at the things about gnomish culture that truly bring people together. And as an added bonus, I'm going to be adapting my best friend's take on the gnomes' philsophies in his world--the player of Carric in the Eastweald, Beor in the mystery campaign, Brokk in of Gods and Dragons, and the DM for Daisy in my experiences as a player has created a really fun and interesting way for gnomes to process problems, and I'm going to pay homage to that with a clan here. Remember: adapting is not stealing, so borrow ideas and change the details to your heart's content. Now, the gnomish clans: 

Homebrew Setting Clans: Half-Elves

I remember many years ago sitting down with the 3.5 Players Handbook to study more of the world I was trying to exist in. My favorite thing to go back and forth about was not what class I was or what backstory my character had--I liked to think about the races. I remember one time, I was reading about half-elves, and there was some stray, fragmentary mention of half-elves being treated as outsiders to both elves and humans, not quite enough of either to be one of a group. That struck me hard. I was a teenager battling mental illness and autism without realizing it, and I felt like those half-elves. I read that they were diplomatic and understood others well. This too felt like me. I didn't play a half-elf then, and I still haven't nearly 20 years later (I just haven't had that many characters). But when I was developing my world and characterizing my cultural groups years later, those half-elven identities were still with me. I made my half-elves outsiders to everyone, the only hybrid race on Evanoch. But their outsider status made them free--with guaranteed judgment, there's no reason to do anything but what you really want. And I kept the spirit of the diplomatic notion; in my world, halflings are most renowned for diplomacy, and I felt it more intriguing to have my half-elves be expert artists, reflecting how the see the world in more creative means. All of that is to say that as I approach my half-elves, I can't help but wonder what groups will characterize them in this guide. Let's see how we can diversify the half-elves of Evanoch. 

Homebrew Setting Clans: Elves

This is the fifth of eight entries in a series on clans in my homebrew setting, featuring the elves of Evanoch. In the first half of this series, I covered my humans, the Daltoners and Faninites, as well as my dwarves and orcs. I noted in the orc article that my favorite groups to work with are generally not the humans or dwarves--I'm very satisfied with my homebrew versions of them, but we always have favorites, and my favorite groups in my homebrew setting are simply not humans or dwarves. I enjoy my orcs a lot, but I feel like much of my efforts to characterize my orcs is based on making them not the stereotype. The second half of this series, then, are the groups that I identify with more, the groups who have bold visions of the future with fairness and integrity and innovation in mind. Daltoners, Faninites, dwarves, and orcs, look to tradition, while elves, half-elves, gnomes, and halflings look to the future. And so I'm very excited to get started with my elves, whose culture has always been very enjoyable for me to write about. So let's get started taking a closer look at the elves of Evanoch. 

Homebrew Setting Clans: Orcs

This guide to important groups of orcs is part of a larger group of articles on clans in my homebrew setting, Evanoch. In this series, I have filled in a large gap that has existed the whole nearly two decades I've been DMing in my world--who are the important people? I'd decided who was in political leadership long ago, but there are more forms of power than political power. And in really thinking about who the important people in Evanoch are, I've learned more about the cultural groups in my world--what values does a group hold that allow a certain person or people to be famous or successful? This has been monumental in changing my homebrew versions of D&D groups into multidimensional populaces instead of monolithic caricatures. With the orcs, I'll be looking to add depth and variation to a group that is much closer to my heart than the humans and dwarves I've already written about. So let's get started. 

Homebrew Setting Clans: Dwarves

This guide is part of a larger series on clans in my homebrew setting, Evanoch. This series, which I'm working on nearly ten years after beginning this site, does a lot of things that are so useful that I'm shocked I'm only just now getting to this. Not only does a detailed list of important groups in a society give me a variety of names and backgrounds to go to for important NPCs, but also, I'm able to diversify how I think of my cultures. My Daltoners were always evil imperialists; my guide to their clans showed a much more complex face. And similarly, my Faninites were always humble hippies; my guide to their clans showed them as a far more complicated people. So this guide to the dwarves' clans will help me to expand how I think of and present dwarves whenever I DM. 

Homebrew Setting Clans: Faninites

This guide is part of a larger series in which I delve into the clan identities of the groups in my homebrew setting. This accomplishes a couple of important things--partially, it allows me to have a number of important families and organizations in my world to refer to; it also gives me the opportunity to think more in detail about the way my cultural groups work; and third, as I saw in the entry for the Daltoners, my setting's other group of humans, it lets me add some variation to the group. Before I created my entry for the Daltoners, I treated them as a uniformly evil and colonial group of people who embrace racism and misogyny, so every time a Daltoner appeared in a campaign, they adhered to this group of unsavory traits. But as I wrote the guide to their clans, I started to recognize that the group is not homogeneous and created a few clans that departed from the evil stereotype I'd had in my head. Think about that--an entire eighth of my homebrew setting was a vague archetype that kept all encounters with them very similar, but writing about their clans allowed me to vary and differentiate them in ways that will enrich my DMing. Similarly, I'm setting out to find out the depths of my other groups of humans, the Faninites, who I've always treated as natural-loving, peaceful folks akin to Vikings, but more calm and gentle. So let's see what groups are the foremost among the Faninites. 

Homebrew Setting Clans: Daltoners

I've recently begun writing a novel based on a D&D campaign I was lucky enough to take part in over the last few years, and doing so has involved revisiting the worldbuilding of the DM who ran the campaign. One very rich element of his setting is that most civilizations, particularly the elves and orcs who were featured in the campaign, are very detailed in terms of leadership and clans. In the process of writing the (as of this article's writing) most recent chapter, I got to really dig into the orcish clans, their leaders, and how they are all specialized. It inspired me--I realized that despite the years of development I've put into my world, I've never really gotten into the specifics of how people organize themselves into factions. That seems like a sad oversight now, and so this will be the first in an eight-part series of guides to the major clans of each cultural group. Let us begin with one of my human groups: the Daltoners, sun-worshiping extremists who have always aimed to colonize Evanoch and spread their way of life. 

In this series of guides, the general organization will explain the overall role of the clans in the profile as well as the clans themselves--who runs them, their history, and how they function in the world. These will be partially constructed in order to give more life and detail to my world, but as always, the more important aim is to provide the world with jumping-off points. What I mean is this: should a group of Daltoners appear in a game I'm running, I'll have a reference point to do something detailed in the moment without having to improvise entire structures on the spot. Let's imagine that I'm DMing, and a group of Daltoners becomes a part of the story. Before this clan guide, I would be forced to generalize about the worldviews of Daltoners at large. But with this clan guide, I'll have a more rich and varied take on what makes Daltoners a broader but also diverse group, and I'll have this more detailed information to improvise based on in the moment, freeing me up to make stronger and more specific stories based on a foundation. This is, to me, the point of worldbuilding--to provide a framework for improvisation with details that can inspire further details as they impact the story. So without further ado, let's get started.