Stirland is a poor and stubborn province of heath, low hills, and hedgerow farms, its folk clad in undyed green and mocked across the Empire as bumpkins and turnip-eaters. The mockery lasts precisely until the fighting starts. Life on the moors is hard and unglamorous, and it breeds soldiers to match: patient, enduring levies who do not rout, having never owned anything soft enough to run home to. Wurtbad upon the Stir collects what little coin the province earns, and Stirlanders husband it like men who expect each winter to be worse than the last, because it generally is.
Stirland's true burden is written on its map. Within its bounds lies Sylvania, the black county where the dead do not rest and the counts of a bygone age dabbled in horrors the Empire would sooner forget entirely. Stirlanders learn young to bury their kin with silver on the eyes, prayers said twice over, and a sharpened spade kept ready by the door, for a grave in this province is not always a place where things consent to stay. No people in the Old World dig better graves, and none fill them more reluctantly, or keep a warier watch over the earth once the digging is done.
Order of battle
The Stirland field the units of the Empire of Man, a detachment from the roster:
Other Empire of Man formations
AverlandThe gold-and-black province of the southern grasslands, grown fat on cattle, grain, and the trade roads to the dwarfholds, and kept forever watchful by Black Fire Pass at its border. Every greenskin surge out of the mountains breaks on Averland first, and its yellow-coated regiments have held the pass so many times the province calls it their second home and their first graveyard. Averlanders are open-handed, sun-loving, and a little eccentric; famously, on occasion, their Elector Counts most of all.
MiddenlandThe great forest-province of the north, where blue-clad regiments are hardened by the haunted dark of the Drakwald. Middenlanders keep faith with Ulric, the old god of winter, wolves, and war, and regard southern hammer-piety with a fighting man's suspicion. They ask nothing of the Empire but a hard front line, and they usually are it.
ReiklandThe Emperor's own province: the richest, proudest, and most powerful of the Empire's great states, seated on the river Reik with Altdorf (capital, cathedral city, and home of the Colleges of Magic) at its heart. Its white-coated regiments are the pattern the rest of the Empire drills to match, and Reiklanders never forget that Sigmar himself was born of the tribes that held these lands. The other provinces call it arrogance; the Reikland calls it inheritance.
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