Customer Reviews

The Complete Book of Gnomes & Halflings (Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 2nd Edition, Player's Handbook Rules Supplement/PHBR9)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

I recommend this for anyone who wants to develop a character of these races. The book gives knowledge of who these characters can be portrayed as. I love it, and use it a lot in my campaigns. I recommend it for yours too.

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.

A good book that suffers from dividing it between two races. The biggest saving grace: Halflings aren't presented as a race of thieves like they are in Forgotten Realms. This book presents them more as the rural, bucolic type thrust into adventure unwillingly. The kits for Gnomes and Halflings are uniformly good.

For anyone who wants a Gnomish or Halfling campaign, or wants to add more depth and character to a Gnome or Halfling PC/NPC, this book provides very helpful information. It introduces a ton of new sub-races, it gives all the stats and special abilities for each, it gives out a huge amount of kits and it even goes the extra mile to give out a sample village, automatically drawn up and described, for any DM who wants to use an automatic setting or map for an encounter or homebase for the little folk. Of course, the book contains two sections: one for gnomes, the other for halflings. It describes their culture, personality and mthology in greater detail, and it gives out more special abilities. On the down side, however, since this book has to be divided for two different races, there are some sections missing that are commonly found in other "Complete Guides". This book contains no special equipment, no special role-playing personamlities, and no special non-weapon proficiencies. But it is still a very elaborate and helpful book for anyone who wants to make a Gnomish or Halflingish campaign more enjoyable and colorful.

I ORDERED SEVERAL BOOKS IN THIS CATAGORY AS A PLAYER OF 30 YEARS STARTED A COLLECTION FOR MY GRANDSONS, ITS A GREAT GAMES AND A WONDERFUL SET OF LEARNING TOOLS FOR CHILDREN LIKE MATH, READING, COMPREHENSION, DEALING WITH WINS AND LOSSES, STRATAGY, AND A GREAT WAY TO SPEND TIME WITH KIDS DOING A ROLE PLAYING GAME.

I have this book and it has helped me a lot with making my Paul Con-Con Gnome chararcter. It gives you all the facts about gnomes and halflings whether you be a stalker like me or a tunnel rat halfling like my brother this is the book you'll want!

I liked the book and some of the kits were useful in my campaign, but why are there no proficiencies listed like the complete book of dwarves? Good book but it doesn`t beat the complete book of elves and dwarves.