Familiar Ground

One of the silliest halfling sized mounts I can think of are Dire Chickens.

Back when I was one of several people in charge of the local RPGA group The Theocracy of the Pale (which was several hundred people locally), chaotic halflings riding dire chickens were, while not a common theme, seemed to appear with some regularity for some reason.  They appeared as PCs.  They appeared as NPCs.  They were in the background of some adventure scenarios (and no, I didn’t write them, nor was I in charge of editing those mods).  I was actually rather puzzled as to how the whole halfling on dire chickens meme came about.

Near the end of the campaign, I sorta threw up my hands and just went along with it.  Thinking that if people wanted halflings on dire chickens, then by golly, they’re gonna get them.

So that’s how there came to be a dire chicken farm just outside of Ogburg, where an overzealous ranger with too many ranks of Handle Animal (and not enough Knowledge: Nature) mistook some dire hawk eggs for overly large chicken eggs and decided to breed war chickens for the Pholtan Army.

They were basically dire hawks that thought they were chickens.

They had all the stats, but had to land after each flight movement.  Requiring them to land after each move was actually a balance reason, since it would be overpowered to give continuous flight to PCs and these were available at low levels.

The Dire Chicken restaurant franchise was some enterprising player’s idea and came later.