The Complete Book of Gnomes & Halflings (Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 2nd Edition, Player's Handbook Rules Supplement/PHBR9) | Date: 05 May 2011, 14:43
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The Complete Book of Gnomes & Halflings (Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 2nd Edition, Player's Handbook Rules Supplement/PHBR9)
By Douglas Niles
* Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
* Number Of Pages: 127
* Publication Date: 1993-03-09
* ISBN-10 / ASIN: 1560765739
* ISBN-13 / EAN: 9781560765738
* Binding: Paperback
Summary: Whats in a hole? More than a hobbit!
Rating: 4
Have you ever been contemplating your AD&D game and realized that all your halflings are Tolkien hobbits? Or realized that all your Gnomes are tinkerer illusionists?
Come on, the small folk have lives and personalities. There are halfling guards after all, and gnomish warriors of great elder tales.
Get an inside look at the society of the small folk, what they do, what specialty classes have evolved.
Add this, and as many of the other supplements as you can to your game. All are valuable resources.
Summary: Complete perhaps, but uninspired
Rating: 3
Third edition Dungeons & Dragons changes the veteran races of gnome and halfling, but those resistant to such change shouldn't pick up this volume to see what it is they preferred about the older versions, nor should enthusiasts of the races, of any version, think they're getting something that will be of much use to them, either for ideas or actually crunchy rules stuff.
Part of the problem is that both races had (and perhaps still have) something of an identity issue. Second edition AD&D (and previous) halflings are hobbits, and all the protestations in the world can't make that go away. There have been successful AD&D and D&D supplements about halflings, but they chose to ignore this fact and give richly detailed backgrounds that would fill in why halflings are how they are, without the looming presence of the Tolkein estate hovering in the background. Ed Greenwood did an especially nice job with the D&D "Five Shires" Gazetteer, for instance.
Here, though, we get few new details, other than a reiteration of what we already know (halflings like community, food and comfort ... all of which we picked up in the first 10 pages of "The Hobbit"). Instead, there's a comprehensive gathering of halfling information from previous AD&D sources. While there may well be campaigns that would like to import the kender from the Dragonlance world, some of the other inclusions are baffling: Wouldn't anyone who wants the cannibalistic halflings of Athas have bought "Dark Sun," and not this book? Who needs the polar halflings?
What makes this more frustrating is that space is at a premium in this supplement, as the two least-popular races are forced to share the same space. So the pages wasted on polar halflings, Athas halflings and (arguably) the kender, could and should have been used for something, anything to round out the standard races that the consumer presumably purchased the book for.
If the halflings are too identified with their source, gnomes suffer the opposite problem. Most D&D players asked to describe gnomes draw a blank, mumble something about illusions or Dragonlance tinker gnomes, and then change the subject. The simple fact is that most gamers (and D&D authors) don't have the cultural grounding to use mythic gnomes in D&D and gnomes were something of a blank slate until the Dragonlance novels were published, filling that blank slate with something new of Weis' and Hickman's invention.
For better or worse, the tinker gnome idea caught on, with even TSR allowing the idea to spread to other game worlds: A far better supplement than this is "Top Ballista," for the OD&D game, detailing the flying city of Serraine, built by the tinker gnomes' more successful cousins in the world of Mystara, the skygnomes. Today, hundreds of thousands of EverQuest players are familiar with the tinkering gnomes of Norrath, and the idea has appeared in other versions elsewhere.
Now, if there wasn't a desire to use the tinker gnome template more widely in this book -- although we already got Spelljammer, Dark Sun and planes-hopping references in this book, and sometimes in the mouths of the characters used in the game fiction -- surely the all but untapped origins of the gnome could have been explored. We would have also gotten a breath of fresh air in a D&D cosmos that often smelled like Tolkein's musty old study, where little fresh air had entered in decades.
This isn't a horrible product -- and there were those in this line of Complete Books -- but it's also not very good. This is really only worth purchasing if you're a D&D completist. If you're a fan of either of these races, you'll most likely be disappointed. Go hunt down "The Five Shires" or "Top Ballista" instead.
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