Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Pillbo]

I think it would be cool to have extremely tiny people in the game, like Lilliputians from Gulliver's Travel. It's been suggested before but the thread is mostly people asking why it could be cool or disputing the use of the word 'vermin' so I made a new one to list ways it could be fun or brainstorm ways it could work. This likely doesn't make sense before the map rewrite and magic is finished.

Adventure mode:
 * Adventurer gets shrunk magically then finds a tiny settlement of people to to interact with.  There's no reason to think a shrinking spell needs a 'cure', I could see Toady deciding that once your adventurer is 4 inches tall that's just what you have to deal with now.
 *  Or the need to find a tiny mage to to you back into normal size
 * Easy adventure mode quests - being hired by tiny-folk to exterminate a badger or owl that's been terrorizing their civ for a clump of gold, or a magical secret.
 * Being attacked by swarms of tiny people like in Gulliver's Travels

Fort mode:
 * Diplomacy from tiny-folk who live in the area of your map (doesn't make much sense for them to be acting on the world stage).
 * Tiny necromancer stealing body parts from your crypt or battlefield. Stealing fingers, hands or animating vermin remains. IMO a wee necromancer raising an army of normal undead to attack you from inside your fort would be too overpowered and probably not very fun. It seems more likely they'd be stealing for their own tiny wars.
 * Tiny-civ invading/sieging a fort. If they behaved like vermin (mostly unseen) that could be pretty fun and difficult.  I don't think doors would keep them out. You could be at war without even noticing. Dwarves could be tied down and smothered/bled to death in their beds mysteriously.  You might have to defend from the invasion with animal traps.
 * A tiny-civ settlement could show up hidden in your food/drink stockpile.
 * Thieves: They could steal small artifacts/things of value, like tricky little intelligent keas.
 * Hireable as messengers/thieves if they have flying mounts to make travel realistic.
 * Tiny Fort mode - where you harvest grasses for building materials, build a colony into the soil, like in Sim Ant, or Smurfy mushroom villages. Battle spiders, rats, cats, owls, etc. Farm vermin or fungus.

Random thoughts:
 * Could be a civ option for pixies
 * It would make sense that a tiny-civ would be more likely to survive if it's magical.
 * Small humanoids can act as a social bridge for tiny-folk to interact with standard civs. Gremlins, Gnomes, etc acting as hired diplomats
 * Vulnerable to small predators like cats, dogs, kobolds, owls, etc.
 * Using small birds or bats as flying mounts would make them much more capable. Rat mounts would also be useful.
 * Ignored/unseen by Titans, FBs, Goblins, armies and undead for the most part. It doesn't make sense that they would need to deal with them anymore than a rats nest would.

[therahedwig]

Sounds fun, my initial worry was that the map code might not be able to handle the tiny towns, but then I realized DF can conceive of these the same way it conceives of separate planes, with a fairy door or house icon or whatever that acts as a portal for 'zooming in'... Not unlike how the Minish towns are depicted in Zelda: Minish Cap.

[Pillbo]

I haven't played Minish Cap, but yeah that's exactly how I was imagining it. Not exactly that you'd see a tiny town you can explore normally, but if you got shank the game could probably generate a small map like another plane.

I'd imagine for it to work there would have to be very few historic figures from these populations before a player interacted with them. So maybe there is a point to associate them with vermin in some way.

One way it could work is if you got shrunk it could just take the map tile the player is on a use it to generate a 2x2 or 3x3 embark type map for you to shrink into.  So if you're on a flat grassy tile you shrink into a mostly flat grass forest and find tiny little huts and holes people live in.  Regardless of tiny-folk, I'd imagine if extreme shrinking spells do ever become a thing in the game this is how they would need to work anyway.