Up to 50 people live in a single household, and the landmass they cover is speciifed as "nearly ten million acres of some of the most fertile farmland in the Empire." They don't live in cities, but damn are their villages and towns densely populated.
Because they don't involve themselves in most any politics. Their happy just to sit in the Moot and farm food. No great adventures, normally no big wars. These things are important in the empire but the Halflings don't really care about them.
That's from 4th Edition, which expanded on them significantly. Read every section on them from 2nd Edition and you'll understand what I mean. Every time the books try to explain how humans are racist to them, the next line says "well, it's true that Halflings are thieves and fatties who only care about eating food, but they don't like it when people say that!" or something like that. Especially if you try to compare the way Halflings are portrayed to humans, Elves or Dwarves. The other races get entire pages, the Halflings get half a page to a page in comparison.
The Elector position officially ends up in the hand of one person though. And that person occasionally has go to Elector Meets and decide what to vote on without their highest Elder Council. At most they have a few councillors that come along as advisors and/or to represent other major Halfling interest groups. So whoever gets elected to that position has quite a bit of personal power by necessity. On top of that most other Electors and otherwise powerful individuals would be used to one-on-one in person negotiations, so the Moot needs someone with decision making power to engage with them. So at the very least the highest Elder Council of the Moot has something akin to a president that needs to somehow be chosen or elected, even if their only personal remit is "foreign" policy.
I mean, this is the election process according to 4th Edition:
Hisme Stoutheart is exceptional actually.
IIRC Boneycanon is that metal armour is very strongly attuned to Chamon - and so makes it far harder to pull any wind other than Chamon passed it (due to repulsion) and binds any Chamon pulled into it. As such no-one can cast if their body is covered in a coating of Chamon-absorption, even Chamon casters.
Not quite:
So maybe Golds might wear armor at the start of their Journeys, since they'd be able to acquire armor that provides more protection than what their magic provides, but strong Journeymen and Magisters on up have no reason to.
I might just be bad at names today, but wasn't Hisme the leader of the K8P Halflings with the current Moot Grand Elder/Elector being someone else in Quest canon?
Ah. I was looking for the WHF equivalent, but my Google-fu was failing me.
Gnomes appear in 4e only in Rough Nights and Hard Days and the author, who'd been around since 1e, had permission to introduce them only in that book. They aren't a thing in any of the other 4e books and I think the intention was to make them a one-off thing some players might enjoy, rather than properly reintroducing them to the Warhammer setting.
