Over the last 2 years I have been slowly working on collecting Halfling miniatures to build up a custom Halfling Army. When I started, I considered many rulesets like older editions of Warhammer, Kings of War for large scale battles and Song of Blades and Heroes’s for skirmish. I never totally settled on something until recently with Kings Of War’s Uncharted Empire‘s release, which had an army list for The League of Rhordia, a mercenary army, heavily supported by Halflings.
In my quest to figure out what miniatures were available to use and how I could build entire units of them, I came across an issue, most Halfling miniatures made have bows and slings or involve the Lord of The Rings. Along with that, some of the most plentiful miniatures for wargaming that are Halflings come from Games Workshop, from a unit box they used to produce called Lumpin Croop’s Fighting Cocks (aka Lumpin Croop’s Halflings). So I spent a lot of time on the internet digging around seeing what I could find and came across Stonehaven Miniatures. They were running an entire Kickstarter capmaign making Halfling miniatures for RPG purposes mostly, but they fit some of my needs for sure.
I decided to back their Kickstarter Campaign in July of 2015 for 5 miniatures, as I was looking for characters, leaders, wizards, mages, etc. Thankfully they spent the time creating very unique characters that will lead units and armies of Halflings going forward. I’ve taken front and back pictures of each miniature I received from them, but please visit their page for better images of their miniatures. I took pictures for reference to what I’m about to describe quality wise. I was able to fill out the ranks of characters with this Kickstarter Campaign. The Ratcatcher will become an army standard bearer, the cleric will be a wizard (hopefully with healing spell!) and the mini napoleon will either lead a unit or the army, I haven’t decided yet. The Honey Mage is a very unique miniature in terms of theme and design, it’s something that really drew me to the sculpts this company is producing. The last one I picked up was the Wizard, very traditional, just short in stature.
Overall there is a great attention to detail, with the Bee in the Honey Mages Hand, the Cleric’s staff, and the Ratcatcher’s ‘catch’ on his pike. One thing that drew me into this Campaign wasn’t just the concept art they posted, but the other miniatures they had sculpted in great detail at such a small size. They size up well compared to the 28mm standard as they are about 15-16mm to the eyes. For those who don’t know what that means, 28mm (milli-meter) miniatures are measured, typically, from the bottom of their feet to their eyes to determine scale. This varies wildly across the industry, but I wanted to make mention of it because I feel like they did a great job keeping things closely in scale with other ranges of miniatures that make Halflings.
My only hangup was the amount of time it took to get the miniatures in hand, right around a year, or 5-6 months late based on their estimated ship date. Ultimately, this isn’t a huge deal, these guys are a small outfit and were using Kickstarter to help bolster business and create a new line of products, so using this as a complaint is really only a minor one. Bear in mind, plenty of Kickstarter Campaigns never even ship a final product to their customers, so months late and delivering their original product is a good thing. Their concept art was largely lived up to in final miniature form, but as usual there was more detail in the art that didn’t get translated to the miniatures themselves, mostly in facial features. Given the small stature of the miniatures, it’s hard to capture lots of detail in a miniature that’s approximately half the size of their ‘normal’ sized human counterparts.
I’ll end by saying that I’m pleased I came across this Kickstarter Campaign and backed them, I think the quality of work they put out holds up and they are filling a niche within a niche in the hobby that is Tabletop Wargaming. I will continue to follow what Stonehaven Miniatures is doing and look forward to their future releases.
