Many many years ago, like ten or eleven, I backed a Kickstarter featuring halflings. I can’t remember which one it was now, but I found myself in possession of a few units of cool, oldhammer-esque halflings. Then I backed another one, with more cool halflings. Now I was committed. Gradually over the years my box of halflings increased. I would see something and think, that’d look good in my halfling army. When I moved to Cymru and unpacked all my minis I put them all on a prominent shelf so that I would start work on the army. That shelf got added too. I added treemen, and some spites from the current Sylvaneth range. I bought some animals to go with the army, perhaps for halfling beastmasters. I bought war machines, a hot pot, a steam tank. I even backed the Half Tilt Kickstarter on the grounds that it provided a game to play with all the halfling minis I have. But I never actually painted any….

UNTIL NOW!

Greenwood is a small town in the west of The Moot. Being in the west, it doesn’t need to worry about undead incursions or gobbo raids or orc hordes out of the mountains. Being part of the area that was formerly human-occupied, its mostly smallholdings with its local woods just remnants of the ur-forests that cover most of the Empire. The human farmers didn’t respect the trees and were in a state of casual war with the treefolk, but the halflings love the woods and have formed an accord with the treepeople. They are not a warlike people, but rumours of war have reached Greenwood, and so a militia has been mustered.

General of Greenwood’s militia is Idada Featherbraid, a former adventurer who retired to Greenwood to take over the running of her elderly father’s pub. She spends most of her time writing her memoirs and leaves the day-to-day running of it to Pappy Featherbraid, just stepping in to move barrels or eject troublesome drunks. For the last year she has been training her younger brother Ardal in the arts of fighting, kitted him out with decent armour and weapons, and now he acts as her equerry. But is he a case of all the gear and no idea?

Isafice Rumblemoon is the local priestess of Esmerelda, who likes to affect witchiness and wisdom. Tall and skinny for a halfling, her magic is mostly concerned with healing and feasting, but she likes the idea of battle magic!

Mayor Nedon Ambermantle and some of the town’s self-appointed elites have had some basic military training and have co-opted Greenwood’s giant chickens to form a cavalry squad. (Every chicken painted according to a genuine domestic chicken off the internet.) Let evildoers beware the feared charge of the fat brigade!

Finally the townsfolk have been roused, challenged to arrange themselves arms and armour, and are attempting to learn some basic manoeuvres. Idada is positive about the work of her militia, but her friends are concerned at the amount of spiced honey wine she seems to be drinking these days.

I enjoyed starting this project finally and hopefully one day I will have a fine and large halfling army. It would be nice if halflings were to re-emerge in AoS somehow, I would hate to think that Idada, Isafice, Nedon and all the rest just got eaten by chaos. I don’t know where many of these minis came from. The militia and Isafice are all Midlam Miniatures. Ardal is a vintage GW LOTR Pippin from their 80s range, not the modern ones. Idada might be from Bad Squiddo. The drummer and standard bearer are late 80s, early 90s GW. The chicken riders were a Kickstarter I backed, but whose I cannot say. My apologies to their creator for my memory lapse.