Halfjinks Kickstater

About More Than Just Halflings

The Kickstarter for Halfjinks: A Roleplaying Game of Innocent Mischief went live today at 10 AM EST. I had planned to have a substack post ready to go at the same time, but life demanded other uses of my time. So now, it’s 9 PM EST and I am pleasantly surprised to report that Halfjinks is currently funded at almost 120% of its goal with 13 days still to go. If you’ve not backed and are mildly interested, toss $5 in the kitty for a PDF and you’ll get a complete, family-friendly, stand alone roleplaying game. That’s cheaper than a lot greeting cards these days. Up it to $10 and you’ll also get a print-on-demand softcover copy at cost. Again, cheaper than a pizza.

The idea for Halfjinks wasn’t originally mine, believe it or not. Pete Spahn (no relation) over at Small Niche Games had the idea for a halflings-only RPG and had said he was never gonna do anything with it. This was probably five years ago. My halfling obsessed brain immediately fell in love with this idea. Given that he said he was never gonna do anything with it, I asked him if he’d let me literally buy the idea for him. He was open to this, so I did. And then it sat on a shelf for years as freelance jobs and other BRG projects popped up.

Among those freelance jobs was my work on The One Ringer Starter Set. When I was writing the Shire supplement for that product, I realized as I was writing about hobbit culture and hobbit values that I was writing as much about my values as I was about those of Tolkien’s fictional small folk. I spent 80,000 words exploring that corner of Middle-earth, but I was still in love with halflings as a whole.

Not just hobbits, but halflings as they’d evolved to become distinct from hobbits over the decades in tabletop roleplaying games. Because there are halflings who desire adventure, who desire excitement, and who aren’t thought strange because of it. That’s a far cry from, as Tolkien said “having something a bit queer” in their make-up, to use an archaic phrase.

So with Halfjinks I wanted to explore halflings. But halflings can be quite adventurous, but they’re almost never war-like in any incarnation (Dark Sun halflings not withstanding). So I had the idea to write an adventure game that minimized combat as a way to resolve conflict. As this self-imposed challenge began to grow, I thought “Well, children are adventurous without resorting to violence. Thy have to be clever, and brave.” So, suddenly, I had a game about halfling children. But in going with children as my central PCs, I opted to remove combat entirely.

But when you remove combat you implicitly remove death as a consequence of failure. This implicitly lowers the stakes, which by extension can lower the tension while you play. I thought back to my own misadventures as a kid. Back when childhood friends like Craig or Blair and I would attempt to sneak into the local school while it was closed for the summer, dodging custodians and repairmen as we slipped from hall to hall, classroom to classroom. Why did we do it? What was the point?

Well, in the end I found two answers: One was just to see if we could. The other was simply for the fun of it. This led me to a revelation that’s so obvious it’s often forgotten.

That’s why we play RPGs. Simply for the fun of it. No one never really dies. No one ever really recovers a tangible gold piece they can spend to pay a bill. No one actually saves the proverbial princess. It’s all just for fun - and in our years of playing the game we often forget this thing that is at its very core. Fun.

So, then I thought about some of the most fun I had as a child. Not as a teenager or an awkward adolescent, but as a child. Those fun times were always with my friends. The way you have more fun is to share it. Fun is strange like that. I think that’s part of what makes it elusive as an adult. We forget that part.

So Halfjinks became a game about having fun with your friends. Silly, ultimately inconsequential fun. But as I wrote the game, that seemingly trivial fun became anything but. Because when those fun times were over, you still had those shared moments - and you always would. I’m 45. I haven’t seen my childhood pal Craig in 35 years, or so. But if I called him up tomorrow, that bond of fun would still be there and would be strong enough that if I was in a real, adult, life or death situation, I have no doubt in my mind he’d be there to help me.

Fun matters. And it matters because its shared.

That’s what Halfjinks is really about.

I’ll be exploring some of these bonds of friendship in future games like Hearthtales: A Game of Fairytale Heroes and the forthcoming patreon exclusive The Road Home, but those games are a touch more traditional than Halfjinks. Halfjinks is, by design, meant to be played by kids, adults, and anyone who appreciates fun for its own sake. I constantly call it family-friendly because it is. Because fun is universal. More importantly we need fun. Without purpose, without ulterior motive, without objective. We need it for its own sake.

Anyway, like I said, Halfjinks A Roleplaying Game of Innocent Mischief is live and funded on Kickstarter and runs for another 13 days. I really hope you’ll consider supporting it. Because we all need a little fun in our lives.