Part 3, Halflings and Gnomes, lets get it over with

So I've always felt that the halfling character class was a bit weak. It's a fighter with a lower hd of d6, a nice bonus to avoid giants, a decent bonus to ranged attacks and a piss poor excuse for the ability to hide. Well you should first know that I mix up a good deal of stuff from AD&D 2nd edition including spells and the values/variable thief skills with my labyrinth lord game (chocolate and peanut butter baby,sticky but great). With this in mind I've tried to offer up the class as something that rings more true when I think the word halfling. Now I did not want to steal the thief class's thunder but I felt the best way to fix the halfling class was to allow it a real ability to hide and move silently just like the thief. I also felt that climb walls made great sense and tacked on detect noise as well. I've also added a penalty of chainmail being the heaviest armor they can wear and of course the 2nd edition armor penalties apply to thief skills.  This with their already existent weapon restrictions adds up to the halfling being what I think it was always meant to be. A class meant to scout ahead and still fight effectively.

Now of course we come to the gnome. I have always been a fan of this underdog character race. I've never liked the interpretation of them being little more than skinny dwarves. I've always felt that gnomes are a much more magically inclined race and such should be reflected in their class. I decided that since we're already making the thief's skills available that the Gnome would probably benifit from such. Open Locks and Find/Remove Traps makes perfect sense to me as Gnomes are supposed to be tinkerers (and no I'm not just thinking dragonlance). Plus pick pockets makes a kind of sense considering how much gnomes enjoy pranks and tricks. Then we have read languages and this makes sense too. Gnomes are usually very well learned so they would be well versed in multiple languages. Beyond this half thief what is the gnome supposed to be. An illusionist of course ! So where the halfling is a half fighter/half thief the gnome class is a half thief/half illusionist. I've allowed them a d4 for hit die and access to four of the 8 major schools of magic from AD&D 2nd ed. Those are illusion/phantasm, conjuring, abjuration and enchantment/charm. These four schools allow the gnome to generate illusions which allow him to not sneak but to change form or go invisible and enter the midst of the enemy. The mix of spells allows a gnome character to do many of the things all wizards should without taking too much of the steam out of the magic user class by allowing his best spells to another class. Another added restriction is that the gnome class is not allowed the usual bonus spells per day I allow the magic user. Like specialist wizards in AD&D 2nd ed I allow magic users one extra spell per spell level per day. Also they have access to the cantrips spell list from 1st ed AD&D which you may have seen on the web for use with Labyrinth Lord as well. They can cast their level plus their int bonus per day in these cantrips (more on magic users later).

So there we are. The halfling is fixed to the point that I feel it's playable and we finally have the gnome as an available class in and old school game. I haven't figure out the exact xp table or save throw tables to use but I have a good idea thanks to the class creation tool from the 2nd edition DMG and once I've finished up all the details and had a chance to play test I think I'll publish the two variant classes under the open game license. Before that can happen though we've got to get a game going. All this over time is killing my still burgeoning campaign.