One very minor thing about Balance that I nonetheless really appreciate is how it treats its halfling characters. It’s not a big deal, but it makes me feel warm and fuzzy because I’ve got a soft spot for halflings, and because I feel like they’re often relegated to Generic Background Farmer Throwaway Race in a lot of campaigns/stories—or else their characters/character arcs are centered around them being cool and useful despite their size/homebody tendencies.
But there’s just a lot more going on with the halflings in TAZ? Like ok obviously you’ve got Hurley, who’s so cool and who impresses everyone but not because she does things in spite of her size, just because she’s objectively a badass, and her life is just? So goddamn weird??? Drag-racing halfling monk cop with a secret criminal girlfriend who survives fatal poisoning by turning into a minor nature deity, what the fuck, we stan
Then there’s Noelle, whom we find out later actually was sort of a typical halfling in life, the usual farmer type, except that she’s introduced as an actual fucking robot and turns out to be a disembodied soul in the form of a robot who then makes herself into essentially a fighter mech and works alongside local fellow badasses Carey and Killian. Fucking superb you funky little ghost bot.
And then
there is
fucking
Pringles