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: