I see a lot of people like to use subversions of classic tolkeinesque fantasy tropes, elves instead of orcs ravaging the countryside etc...
But where's the Dark Mayor of Hobbiton and his halfling red coats forcing the rest of the world to accept their fiendish pipeweed imports?
I feel like racist white trash would be better, maybe add in cannibalism for some justified by being gluttonous.
>You ain't in elf country no more boy
>Or maybe you ain't a boy at all its mighty hard to tell with you elves
>Grim Dark Hobbits
Dark Sun.
There are plenty of evil hobbits in the penultimate chapter of Lord of The Rings.
>Party of elves walking through the shire
>Duelling Banjos start playing
Lazy, hedonistic cannibals.
Done.
That's trying too hard.
Skavens are basically grimdark hobbits.
How is being white trash trying too hard? They are already the equivalent of folksy country people, this just adds in the likely racism and hatred of outsiders likely to result from rural isolationism. They don't need to rape the PCs when they enter town, they could just be racist dicks who try to con or fuck over the party and won't help them unless they get something in return. Just pepper their speech with outsiders with insults or attempts to extort money.
So rather than grim dark you want imperialistic and capatilist hobbitsiz
You can't have imperialistic halflings because of what they are, you nigger. They're short, rotund fellows who aren't even anywhere as strong or stocky as dwarves. Imperialism doesn't work when 90% of sapient creatures can wreck your shit purely on accident.
Though having them try would be hilarious. Having a bunch of halflings walk into a human city, plant a flag and declare it part of the Hobbit Empire. People would either laugh or ignore them, until one of them waves around a knife and accidentily hurts a child, at which point they just get their shit wrecked by a bunch of very angry human guards.
Hey, who says you have to take it by force? It doesn't matter if you're a tiny cunt if you've got non tiny cunt bodyguards and are bribing the mayor so hard you basically run the city.
Have another roast big Melvin. Have two, you're a hero now.
>It doesn't matter if you're a tiny cunt if you've got non tiny cunt bodyguards and are bribing the mayor so hard you basically run the city.
I wonder who could be behind this post...
This is the way to go. Even if the setting is grim dark, I don't feel hobbits ought to be quite as sinister as other elements of the world.
They represented englishmen and idyllic countryside. If you want to twist it, the logical direction is to keep the countryside aspect but change the carefree cheer to a real world equivalent of a countryside that is not as happy and welcoming.
Deep, deep, most backwater US south or exaggerated Appalachian mountain folk or even swamp dwellers if you want to take it a step further
>hobbits are based off good old traditionalist farmer folk
>what are the fucking farmer/hillfolk like near you?
Insular, backstabbing, inbred, xenophobic fuckwits that'll lure you in with country charm before drugging, raping, and then murdering you. You know, Trump supporters!
Sure it can work. See gnomes in Arcanum.
>Deep, deep, most backwater US south
You don't mean Florida hobbit?
ibtimes.co.uk
>he became a "monster" and inserted his hand inside his victim's vagina and began to pull out her intestines.
>Grim Dark Hobbits
Hobbits shoot to kill, user.
...
this was mah game
>Grimdark hobbits
user, please.
We all know that hobbits would be nobledark, kinda like the Chicago mafia.
Sure, there are violent gang wars and exorbitant business protection fees.
But there are also speakeasies and ballrooms where life is wonderful and drunk on pleasure, where pipeweed is sold by the pounds, beautiful shortstack hobbits spin around the pole and swing those hips and shake them down, and booze flows freely.
Hobbits are defined by their sybaritic lifestyles, so why the fuck not?
All hobbit women are whores because they consider it an easier way to make a living than actually working.
delicious shortstack whores...
Honestly Skaven are a bad example of a rat race, who are actually intelligent and are an animal species that can explicitly display compassionate behavior, also much more hygienic than the 'filthy rat' stereotype suggests.
A 'noblebright subversion' of skaven as a ratfolk civ in a setting might actually be pretty good.
What if you give the halfling imperialists machine guns?
incase plz
Shadowmoor Kithkin. The thing you are looking for is Shadowmoor Kithkin. They are literally 'hobbits' forced into a grimdark world and their unity and community becoming extreme xenophobia for anyone who isn't one of them.
furry spotted
Its true though. Rats are highly social and intelligent animals, these qualities make them much better as pet species than mice.
Bad hobbits are a subversion of Tolkien now?
Scourging of the Shire.
Gollum.
Then again, given what it is applied to, Tolkienesque would seem mostly to mean "fantasy that's nothign like Tolkien's works".
I had a pet rat. He was the best.
Then of course there's the violent gangwars between bands of Goblin and Hobbit whores as each tries to corner the midget-prostitute market.
Uncommon instances. Saruman's goons were mostly men and Gollum was perverted by the Ring's corruption.
The topic is about 'what if majority of the hobbits were bad in some way'.
across all three counties of the Sweetwater creek, no man's crotch was safe during those dark times
Grimdark Hobbits?
Regular Hobbit society exists BUT the Hobbit Intelligence Agency goes around committing atrocities and inciting war among the other races. All with a goal of destabilizing the realm and keeping the larger races from expanding into Hobbit lands.
Hobbit SAD (Special Adventures Division) goes on wet ops deep into human, elf and dwarf lands to assassinate kings, princes, dukes, and merchants to keep the pot stirring and the Hobbit way of life intact.
>>Heilary supported
Report for deportation, subhuman.
We're done with your kind.
Reminds me of the Trust of Zilargo, in the Eberron setting. Those guys will fuck your shit up.
They have no problems switching their sleeping-cycles to sync up with human's and they like being petted and enjoy closeness with their human owners.
All the same, folks keep buying hamsters, who're noctural, and rabbits, who're fucking terrified of being in the vincinity of humans.
FemBilbo is something so pure I want to corrupt and twist it.
Yes, because they're more conventionally cute rodents.
Pet rats are cute to many, else they wouldn't be a thing, but they seem to require a bit more discerning eye.
The image of common rat as a sign of filth and pestilence is so ingrained to us culturally that some just can't get over it even if the rat in question is a selectively bred domestic rat.
This.
>FemBilbo is something so pure I want to corrupt and twist it.
Reminder that The Ring did it before you.
Actually funny.
Merge hobbits and goblins. You are welcome.
...Hobgoblins?
Like the Asuras from guild wars 2 maybe?
The only thing I have against rats is how short their lives are. I know we'll outlive all our pets that aren't African Greys or a dog we buy when we're old or recently diagnosed with terminal cancer, but two or three years for an intelligent and fun animal is kind short for the emotional sting it'll be when it dies. I really like pet rats, but don't think I'd ever get one.
Grimdark hobbits are making them small slave people, totally brutal victorian child labour type shit, except with hobbits.
They're not likely to be the evil ones, but the victims of such.
I'm not even a chick and I closed my legs.
There are some things you just don't do.
I like it. Like a whole race made of Rumpelstilstkin.
That's Dwarves.
A gobbit you say?
Made my day.
Gobbet makes everyone's day.
I consider it more neutral but I have been considering religious separatist hobbits on the fringe of the wild maybe in the wild
I saw a pathfinder video of halfling gods and I wrote that they are religious separatists of the god of community who want only to be associated with their community(because while most halflings like humans they are insulted they took their god and made him the god of hearth and home)
>I feel like racist white trash would be better
As somone who's spent his entire life in the American south, I'm absolutely fucking sick of that caricature. Shit you see in Deliverence is fringe groups at worst and pure flanderization at best. Yeah, we don't drink our mineral water with our pinkies raised like they do in the overcrowded cities. The meth and moonshine is real, but there is nothing inherently evil about the lifestyle.
Neither rural and rustic nor isolationist and their attitude is only somewhat condescending.
And certainly not uneducated because the whole race is built around the stupid idea of 'we are all super geniuses, you can't even begin to undesrtand our intellect xD'
full gollum folk. cannibal tribe of halfling that hunt done people at night. Plus it connect to their fay-folk origin.
Alternatively, if you want hobbit in a grimdark, imagine them forced to live in an industrial revolution setting, working in factory, living in crowded slum, and getting spat on by superiro races (elves/humans/other)
Kind of like if saruman would have win
You don't usually get rats as singular pets anyway due to their inherent sociability. They like people but kind of need another rat or two as buddies.
You'd have to go through multiple deaths and then procure 'new ones'.
What about a set of Hobbits forced into cannibalism by scarce resources in the grimderp hell of no sun, no crops, only industrialized plunder, podunk anti-tech, or blood magic and secrecy in the setting where evil won?
Yeah, that's grim as shit. Death is the way all things go, but you get emotionally attached to pets and that kind of cycle would be depressing as shit. I've heard if you get ferrets that aren't breeding farm ones you might get up to eight years on them and have been thinking of maybe getting a pair. I don't have much living space to myself (and work five days a week) so couldn't really countenance getting a dog but have been wanting a pet. I was thinking about a couple ferrets, since they can keep each other company in their cage during the day and come out at night. Unlike a dog which will, especially when new to a home, not be especially happy to be left alone in a small apartment all day.
Is there readable/bearable/not full retarded fanfiction of Saruman win scenario
Yeah, I know
>fanfiction
but I've just never thought about this and it sort of sparked some form of interest in me.
Settle down Cletus, go back to fucking your cousin after getting her smashed on moonshine.
Don't you have some Starbucks to get before your Polynesian literary history class?
You think anything in grimdark is at all based in reality?
I can't hear you over the sound of a Somalian raping you and your family.
>this triggers the redneck
Rabbits just need to be socialized properly. If you handle them a lot when they're young and respect their space, they're fine.
Yeah, when you fuck your family it's consensual.
At least I don't have to lock my doors at night and pray to god that niggers don't shoot yet another of my neibhors.
>Be from the rural North.
>See this fight.
You knew what you were getting into when you chose to live outside of the tropics.
>rural North.
you mean Canada?
Upper Michigan. Honestly I don't even mind the snow and cold. I'd rather deal with that than heat.
I'm the opposite. I'll sit there in boiling soup-air and not give a shit or happily do yard work, but when the temperature drops below 50 I shut myself inside and layer blankets
> Oklahomafag here
I agree with this sentiment, but I don't mind redneck stereotype carciatures as long as there are other stereotype caricatures in the setting.
Also, your libcuck tears are delicious.
I have four-wheel drive and an extreme resistance to cold. I like it where I live.
I think WH40K has a race of tiny furry hedonistic snipers
> *Billie-Jean hollered from a distant hilltop*
Yeah, locking the door wouldn't do you any good when your brother-father-cousin wants his turn with grandmaw's ass and he's got a shotgun in the next room.
I lived in central Texas up until I was 18, lived in the Midwest for a few years, and now live in Coastal Maine.
Gotta say, while it's nice to have Spring and Autumn be shorts and t-shirt weather, I'd rather deal with the chill of a New England Winter, than live through another Texas Summer.
I'm the opposite, I will happily roast rather than freeze. Raised in south Louisiana, live a bit more north than that now. Where winters might actually do an ice storm or some bullshit like that. Unnatural, I feel.
Actually, now I really like the idea of some imperialistic hobbits.
A human army lines up against regimented rows of tiny hobbits in sharp 18th century british styled uniforms. "Look at those little shits! All they brought to battle are some sticks!"
The halfling commander gives orders and the sound of hundreds of muskets rocks the medieval battlefield. "By the Gods! They have boomsticks!"
That's literally how halflings operate in our campaign. They're secretly the real reason why society doesn't get wiped out every time the Apocalypse happens by being the ones that actually run everything behind the scenes. The result is a giant mafia that keeps tabs on literally EVERYTHING in the kingdom and typically leads to cultists getting thier throats slit before they can leave royal archives and a lot of poisoned spelunkers.
As someone who has to deal with both the insane heat and the insane cold (living in Syberia), I prefer the cold.
I mean, sure, winter is shit, but at least you can still think comparatively clearly during the cold. When it's hot, I feel like my brain overheats.
This
Everyone always talk of their rats int he past tense. Apparently they live no longer than a gnat's fart, which makes me not want to get too emotionally invested.
They sell WEED
They become fat NARCOS that invest heavely on real state.
HOBBITON HAS INVADED CHINA
I honestly cannot get the cold stance here. I get in the cold and even under a million layers I'm miserable. Heat, sure it kind of sucks but I'm so used to it that it barely registers besides needing to drink (a lot) more water
Hobbits are a slave race of the orcs. They castrate something like 90% of the men, treating both them and the women like cattle.
During the cold, you can keep warm simply by wearing a lot of clothes.
During the heat, you need refrigeration/conditioning just to remain at a comfortable temperature.
Most domestic rats come from laboratory stock somewhere down the line, which means that they're generally prone to health conditions that shorten their lifespan to about three or four years at the most.
I've heard anecdotal evidence that some breeders crossed wild rats into their domestic stock, and the resulting offspring lived for around seven years.
You can always put on more clothes to warm up, but you can only take off so many. Save money, keep the thermostat down.
That's retarded. Hobbits are English as fuck and racist white trash is an American stereotype. You might as well make your elves surly mountain-dwellers with beards and a fondness for ale first, how fucking original. Racist stereotypes don't make for good worldbuilding, just lazy worldbuilding.
>If you want to twist it, the logical direction is to keep the countryside aspect but change the carefree cheer to a real world equivalent of a countryside that is not as happy and welcoming.
Stepford Halflings?
Sure as hell better than making them redcoats because reasons. Hobbits and halflings are simple country folk, if you want to make simple country folk grimdark or scary utilize the fact that they are simple country folk instead of just going "yeah my Hobbits are imperialistic redcoats." I am sure British have their own negative stereotypes for people who live in the country, if the idea of "Americanizing" hobbits gets your britches in a bunch just use those stereotypes.
Changing hobbits to be more American isn't like making elves into dwarves, you aren't changing their physiology at all and are keeping the core of their culture, it is more like making wood elves into jungle elves. Now they have tribal body paint and are darker skinned, maybe throw in some cannibalism if you want it to be grimdark. The elves are still light, graceful people in tune with nature, the hobbits are still simple country folk.
>goblins: chaotic douchebags
>hobbits: lawful gentlemen
>hobgoblins: lawful douchebags
Son of a bitch...!
Chaotic countryfolk are an ageold stereotype.
>Hobbits and halflings are simple country folk, if you want to make simple country folk grimdark or scary utilize the fact that they are simple country folk instead of just going "yeah my Hobbits are imperialistic redcoats.
They're not "simple," you dipshit. Not every Hobbit is Merry, or even Sam. Starting from there means you're already confused about the foundational aspects of hobbits. I'll show you:
>agrarian, generally inhabiting fields and hills, but not especially connected to nature or shamanism
You could play with this by tweaking their naturalism: what if hobbits were even less invested in nature, and existed in boroughs instead of villages?
>generally insular and/or distrustful of outsiders and outsiders' businesses. See: opening chapters of the Fellowship, the opening and closing chapters of the Hobbit.
You can play with this, as many other sources have, by ramping up the insularity and xenophobia to higher degreees. Somebody else here has already mentioned Shadowmoor, I see.
>family- and comfort- oriented, but not above petty squabbles. See: the Baggins -- Took grudge.
You can play with this, as has also been suggested, by making Hobbits even more family and/or grudge oriented: this is where the idea of hobbits as Mafiosos or mob leaders emerges.
>fond of festivals and shows of luxury, sometimes shown via acts of required generosity. See: Bilbo's birthday party and the noted customs of hobbits in this segment
You can play with this by tweaking how this is expressed. In Arda, it's usually shown off with picnics, banquets, and presents, but what if hobbits were bankers instead, and had to show off with jubilee celebrations where debts are forgiven?
I expect you'll try and retort by accusing me of clinging to Tolkien tropes, but considering that Tolkien literally invented hobbits tells me that his works are the best possible source for informing any argument on what constitutes the fundamental nature of halflings.
Faggot.