Following on from last week’s post about the Wood Elves, here’s a look at Halflings in early Warhammer and WFRP 1st edition.

In the 70s and early 80s, the influence of Tolkien was so strong that to create a fantasy game without hobbits halflings was – well, pretty much unthinkable. D&D supported halflings as a playable species, cementing their position as one of four peoples without whom fantasy somehow wasn’t proper fantasy.

The first couple of editions of Warhammer included them as well, but they were never as popular as larger, more impressive miniatures. This didn’t stop Citadel from marketing a range of halflings, as the excellent Stuff of Legends blog records. There was even a Regiment of Renown, as seen in the image above: sold first as Lumpin Croops Fighting Cocks, and later as just Lumpin Croop’s Halflings. But cute as they were, not enough people wanted to field forces of Halflings.

Fast forward to 1986, and the development of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. Halflings were still technically in Warhammer canon, and miniatures were still available, but there were some serious discussions within the GW Design Studio over whether or not to make them playable in WFRP, but even as late as 1986 a lot of us simply couldn’t imagine a fantasy RPG without the “big four” playable species from D&D: humans, dwarfs, elves, and halflings. In addition to their Tolkien roots, there was also the consideration that GW firmly intended to establish WFRP as a direct competitor to D&D – until Management realized that this would not help sell miniatures, at least – and since D&D had halflings, WFRP needed them too.

For the roleplaying game, everything was fairly simple. Phil Gallagher wrote Halflings into the Empire background for The Enemy Within, creating the Moot as Warhammer’s equivalent of Tolkien’s Shire. (A piece of trivia: scyrgemot is an Anglo-Saxon term which translates to modern English as “county court,” with “mot” or “moot” meaning an administrative assembly or meeting.)

With the Moot established as a semi-autonomous electoral province within the Empire and a homeland for all halflings, the Ravening Hordes army book for Warhammer 2nd edition listed halflings as possible allies for an Empire or Dwarf army. Warhammer Armies for 3rd edition added Wood Elves to the list, but by 4th edition halflings wee only to be found in Empire armies. And that’s the way it’s been ever since, at least according to all the old books I’ve consulted.

Halflings stayed in WFRP as a playable species, but halfling NPCs were usually a fairly predictable bunch, working as cooks or herbalists inside the Empire and seldom encountered anywhere else. Beyond the initial treatment of the Moot in The Enemy Within and some very modest expansions like the one in Sigmar’s Heirs for WFRP 2nd edition, very little was done to develop their culture and their place in the Warhammer world any further.

Not heroic enough for the battle game, they were never made interesting enough to play a significant role in the roleplaying game – at least, as far as official publications were concerned. There have been some fan-made halfling supplements for various editions, but in Games Workshop’s eyes they will never be fearsome enough to anchor an army, which means miniatures sales will remain very low compared to other species, which means in turn that they have more or less faded from Warhammer canon. I’m not sure that Games Workshop even makes halfling miniatures any more.

Next week, I’ll take a look at another diminutive species that survived multiple attempts to strike them from Warhammer canon, but who always survived thanks to a vocal fan lobby – the Gnomes.

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