D&D General Honey, I shrunk the party!

[Shades of Eternity]

A classic trope is when our plucky adventurers are shrunk to fun size and must deal with the consequences.

Have you ever shrunk the party? How has it changed the dynamics? Who does it in DND (and which editions do it best?), and what monsters would you throw at them and how?

 

[James Gasik]

Once I actually did it, with a trap that cast Mass Reduce Person in 3e, but other than a minor debuff to the melee it wasn't that big a deal.

I kind of did it in the old Ravenloft adventure, The Created, where the players had their minds put into tiny marionette bodies, which featured a deadly fight with an old tomcat- back when a regular housecat was lethal to 1HD creatures, lol.

I think the easiest way to do it would be to scale up any enemies faced. Regular humans could become ogres or giants, there's plenty of giant regular animals in the Monster Manual and other books. That way you don't have to putter about trying to accurately nerf the PC's by massively reducing Strength scores or increasing damage dealt to them. That is, if fair combats are your aim.

Forcing players to avoid combat with a foe they couldn't possibly fight at a tiny scale through stealth or ingenuity is a perfectly cromulent adventure- think of the old sci fi movie, Dr. Cyclops, where some people reduced to 1/12th scale have to take on a regular sized mad scientist. The trick, I think, would come down to magic. While you could say that spells do less damage or have smaller areas of effect when cast by smaller characters (something not well supported by any edition of D&D, for example, thanks to the myriad of small Fey magic users), that doesn't reduce the utility of magic.

Though you could shrink the characters and not their gear or spell components effectively, but that's just a "you got captured/imprisoned" type scenario by another name. Most characters do not function without equipment, unless you have a party of Monks, lol.

 

[J-H]

I have a complete module I wrote for the DM's Guild a couple of years ago. I playtested it. The "final boss" was the familiar of the wizard who owned the house.

The problem was that you can only fit in so many "tiny sized" encounters plausibly that aren't beasts, and even somewhat magical snakes, spiders, bees, wasps, mice, etc. get boring after a while (or fall prey to a DC 15 Charm Animal). It didn't quite have the right spark of fun, and I haven't figured out how to fix it.

 

[Quartz]

I have a vague recollection of an adventure in Imagine, White Dwarf, or early Dragon called 'Down the plughole' or similar. The PCs are shrunk by a wizard and sent into his plumbing system.

 

[aco175]

I have never done it myself. I had once played in a convention game back in the 80s where the party was shrink down to mice sized and needed to go up or maybe down a tree for some reason. We encountered bees and a squirrel. I cannot recall if we fought the squirrel or needed to ride it down to another level, but I recall not really liking the adventure, so I never done it to the players.

 

[Lazybones]

The Dungeon adventure "Chadranther's Bane" in issue #18 is based on this exact scenario. I included a similar one in the 5e 2024 campaign that I'm currently working on. Note that changing one's size that much creates some weird impacts due to the height-mass discrepancy, but I sort of hand-wave that because it's "magic." Here are the game effects I used:

• Subjective scale is reduced to one eighth of normal; distances are calculated based on the characters' new size
• Falling damage is halved
• The short and long ranges of ranged weapons is halved (spell ranges are unaffected).
• Any magic that would change a character's size does not function

This adventure is in Fantasy Grounds, so it was easy to create a duplicate of the map and alter the scale. The foes were jermlaine and their pet rats; basically they became ogres and dire wolves respectively after the shift takes effect. Borrowing from "Chadranther's Bane," I had the effect radiate from a crystal in the jermlaine leader's room that the party has to destroy to reverse the effect.

 

[Chaltab]

I've never done it, but if I did I don't think I'd use normal rules but some unique magic effect for the actual Honey We Shrunk the Kids experience. A bunch of 'giant' insects that are actually just regular insects, pixies the relative size of hill giants (but they can fly)

 

[DEFCON 1]

The opening descent down the rabbit hole in the AD&D module Dungeonland involves shrinking the party (and then facing off against now-oversized animals in the interior lake.) I ran my group through that adventure over quarantine as part of my Lost Mines of Phandelver campaign during the pandemic.

 

[Oofta]

I've done it before and had fun with it, I shrunk them down far enough that they were basically the size of miniatures. For simplicity all damage from weapons, spells and falling was scaled down as were area of effect and so on. All sorts of animals were dangerous, from various insects to now giant mice. The housecats were something they had to watch out for and try to avoid at all costs, fortunately for them they were easily distracted. Nobody had animal friendship because they didn't know it was going to happen and there wasn't a druid in the party. But even if they had it, the animal only really considers the caster a friend which likely would have caused issues and of course not all animals get along with each other. If I were to run it today I may consider having the animals in the house immune because they've eaten or been exposed to so many magical spills and accidents they are no longer considered normal beasts or disallowed it simply as part of the shrinking process.

In my case it was caused by a magical accident by a bumbling wizard who didn't realize what they had done. The wizard had also accidentally created some miniature golems out of badly painted toy soldiers. A lot of the adventure was just how to get around and, of course, avoid the cats. Then they still had to get the wizards attention.

We had a lot of fun with it, even if it was so long ago I don't remember most of the detail. Now I'm thinking maybe I should do it again.

 

[Richards]

I did up a "shrink the PCs" adventure at the beginning of my current 3.5 campaign. The PCs were at the home of a wizard who raised "minimals" - miniature animals, which I converted from AD&D 1E/2E since they didn't seem to have made the conversion to 3.0/3.5 - and ended up betrayed and shrunk down themselves.

The write-up is HERE, for those interested - it's post #12.

Johnathan