@RP Impact:
the [contentblock id=playlink1] is the defacto starting point for characters and races of the Steel Realms. The Halfling of the Steel Realms correlate to the Halfling of DnD. Where the appears notes a Role-Playing challenge/opportunity.
Unwelcome:
Accepted
Welcomed:
Flight of Fancy: Close to the cultures of their Skraeling kindred, they possess a strong sense of fanciful style and constant humor. Constant invoking or irony, sarcasm or jokes; especially laughing at their own jokes. Bright colors, adopting a posh or crude accents/manners (sometimes to mock and ridicule), hum and whistle a lot. Talk or refer in third person to themselves. Though amusing, shopkeepers, guardsmen, crafters, bureaucrats and the like have no patience for such obvious superficial things and often become irritated and have a negative reaction. A common merchant saying is that “A halfling never knows when bartering is done.”
The halflings as a race have no set faith. By default, most make up an a-la-cart menu from the Wylde Horde, The Rimbus (faerie earth-spirits; Uorfek), Rempheros (dead faith of the Bronzemen) and other more obscure and esoteric offshoots of mainstream doctrine.
The Afterlife: Really, the halflings dont care much. If pressed, most will say its “just like here, but better!” Thinking too far into the future is not really something they are terribly interested in – much like their Skraeling kin. Most would love to believe the game of life never really ends, the rules just change as you go from one square to another.
Halfling are the result of the original blessing of the Tear Gift of Ezrilus, interbreeding the Skraeling and Human stock.
Halflings have a unique temperament (shared with their Skraeling kin) that, while welcome in small doses, most find irritating and annoying. For this reason, they have congregated together in scattered smaller communities, or in three places especially in the realms.
Free States: The halfling folk are not especially fond of tight laws, and “bowing and scraping” to lords. They band together for defense and to have a place where they are safe. They use terrain as barriers to these “Free States” (Freeholds) that keep outsiders from making easy inroads. At the edges of the states, they trade, conduct diplomacy, and keep many active scouts, called “Freewardens“, on the lookout for incursions by other races and forces outside their casual outlook. In several places they are under a formal charter of a Protectorate and there they are protected as a Duty Station for the High King’s Army.