The curious thing about the halflings’ origin is that so many humans, elves, gnomes, icons, and yes, halflings, seem to care about it. Races like the elves and dwarves, and even the humans, have their own creation myths, but they seldom come up in daily life and are generally regarded as extremely ancient history. Halfling origin stories, on the other hand, are both widespread and diverse. It’s generally agreed that halflings are younger than the other races. But that’s where agreement stops.
What the gnomes say:
Some gnomes say that halflings were once a lost clan of gnomes who strayed to the surface, liked it there, and began to spread themselves across the world. You’ll probably never meet a halfling who believes this story, or even thinks about it twice unless they are talking to a gnome. But there are gnomes who regard halflings as distant kin and speak wistfully of the “halfling-path” as if it were a possible alternative to the gnomes’ strange underground existence.
What the wood elves say:
Wood elves point to the halfling villages of Burrow, Old Town, and Twisp as the original homes of the halfling race. These villages sit in the calm center of the Empire’s strongest amity ward. The elves say that the ward has nothing to do with the Archmage. They claim that it flows from a different magic than the Archmage’s tradition, and that the earliest halflings lived within the ward’s protections while being hardly noticed by anyone outside it.
The inhabitants of Burrow and its neighboring villages sometimes agree with the wood elf story, but they are generally too polite to bring it up themselves. Their own story is that they were nomads who found a good place to live and stuck with it, astory that gives them something in common with the rather more adventurous halflings who live outside the ancient amity ward.
What the river runners say:
A few halflings live as nomads on the rivers, traveling in riverboats that take advantage of the Inner Sea’s calm waters to dart along the coast and enter into different tributaries. Some of the river nomads say that the first halflings lived in the middle of the great sea and were pushed out of the ocean when the Dragon Emperor drove all the monsters from the Inner Sea. Depending on the speaker, this pronouncement could be a tongue-in-cheek jest or more or less earnest.
What the Priestess said:
Once, and only once, the Priestess gave a sermon that told the story of how the Prince of Shadows broke into the minds of the gods and found a people there who were destined to save a future world. The Prince thought they showed promise and brought them back with him. The Priestess has never told the story again and says she doesn’t remember telling it the first time. But the tale has gained life of its own, partly because urban halflings whose activities may safely be deemed “sketchy” like the idea that the Prince of Shadows has been on their side from the beginning.
The truth: . . . may not be out there. Divinations and scholarly research support each of the stories, a fact that may point to the Prince of Shadows’ involvement in some fashion. Self-contradictory divinations are a trademark of the Prince when he wants to cover his trail.Halflings generally aren’t troubled by their contradictory origins. In fact, one of the common ways of drawing a long and implausible tale to a close is to say, “And that’s the story of how halflings came into the world.” Halflings always laugh.