Halflings

Halflings are cheery, and value hard work and art, as well as storytelling. They are the wanderers and observers of the wider world, taking care not to dive into fights they cannot win and happy to be impartial with the knowledge that they will have a great story to take home to their warrens.

Civilization and Culture

Naming Traditions

Halfling first names are often very obviously designed to be said by someone who speaks halfling. A halfling may adapt it's name when around other races to save them the embaressment of misspronunciation.

Halflings have a slightly different approach to surnames, when they are young they will be "of [parent's name]", which is denoted by the prefix Yr in halfling (and is often translatednto common). As Halflings gain reputations, they or someone else will start calling them 'of' something else, eg. Rhysa of the Oaken Bull.

Beauty Ideals

Halflings' love of good food makes the most of them slightly podgy, so their beauty ideals are quite loose and not focused on physical form. Cleanliness and evidence of it are the most important thing, a muddy and unwashed person, however pretty they are normally, will be scorned by halflings. They do have ideas about beautiful appearence, and value bright and friendly-looking faces. A halfling might compliment someone's beauty by saying they are "blessed by the light".

Gender Ideals

Male halflings are expected to be clean-shaven in polite company, and take good care of the rest of their hair. Long hair is common among men, and almost universal in women. There are no other expectations, other that in warrens halflings usually form small groups of only one gender, seemingly without outside motivation. (This is possibly a hangover from when warrens were much more cramped and these groups would share rooms. Halfling culture is expected to be reasonably modest and innocent, but this isn't nessicarily a representaion of how individuals behave.)

Relationship Ideals

Halflings are strictly monogamous, and try to stay with their partners for life. Love and partnership is a very serious matter for halflings, while they may have companions in their youth, they do not claim to love most of them, only be very fond of them. True love has an almost divine association, and a declaration of love is something a halfling may only do to one of it's many companions.

Major Language Groups and Dialects

Common and halfling. Halfling is an odd language, with slight similarities to old human dialects like tanna. It has a gaelic sound, almost welsh, and is similarly very difficult to write in common. Halfling had very little influence on common as a language during it's development phase.

History

While some of the first people fully committed to living below the ground, the ancestors of halflings only used caves and small dugout burrows to stay relatively safe, venturing to the surface frequently to find resources. These underground hiding places became small villages of cosy tunnels and small earthy rooms, called warrens. Halflings spend their underground time telling each other stories, singing songs, and usually drinking too much mead. They have a strong storytelling tradition, their greatest bards can recite books of poetry and stories.