Revisiting the Fiend Factory Mite and Embracing the Pathetic Aesthetic

If you're looking for monster inspiration you could do much worse than the old (pre-Warhammer) White Dwarf. Personally, there's something about UK D&D that really hits the spot for me. I think part of it is that they were always happy to embrace the "pathetic aesthetic". As Andy Bartlett put it in his Known World, Old World blog:

"Pathetic [pəˈθɛtɪk] 
adj.
- arousing pity, sympathy or compassion,
- arousing scornful pity or contempt,
- miserably inadequate, 
- affecting of moving the feelings.

From the Greek pathos: suffering.

Now that I have your attention, are you ready? Ok? Ok.

What I am arguing is this; old-school D&D, WFRP1e, early WFB, W40K1e, and other old school fantasy games, hell even Fighting Fantasy, all have a healthy dose of the ‘pathetic aesthetic’ running through their design."

Note that UK projects are over-represented in the quote. US D&D of the same era sometimes seems to stumble into a Pathetic Aesthetic due to being written by an accountant and illustrated by amateurs, where as the Brits just really go for it. I'd say the Mite is an excellent entry into the Pathetic Aesthetic oeuvre - a real rotter. 

 

The Mite first appears in the Fiend Factory in White Dwarf issue 6. The Fiend Factory is where we got a lot of our weirder, more idiosyncratically "D&D" monsters from. Readers and the White Dwarf team would submit their own monstrous creations and they'd be published in this column. The "best" ultimately made it into the Fiend Folio. That book became so cannon that we have some of these monsters to this day. 5E seems to have consciously looked back into the archives for inspiration, but even before then a bunch of these horrid monsters were still D&D mainstays: Xvarts, Aboleths, Necrophidii. Some were just a touch to weird to be immortalised like that though: the Ning, the Gluey and the Squonk for example. I do think that the OSR is now ready for the comeback of even some of those little freaks; e.g. many readers have probably heard of the infamous Nilbog by now. 

Anyway, back to the Mite (invented by none less than Ian Livingstone). 

 

While it did stick around for a few editions, I think it lost some of its original charm and was instead demoted to a D-grade humanoid. Below I'll highlight some of the things I love about Mites while giving you a basic rundown of what they are.

Great setup 

Mites are only about two foot tall and inhabit extremely tight tunnels above and below the halls of dungeons. Their scurrying feet and high pitched twittering can be heard from the walls. Note how good a set-up that is for these little guys: you'll hear them way before you see them, but you'll probably assume it's just rats in the walls.

Sneaky and trap-like

Mites will never attack outright, instead they'll pick off straggling dungeoneers with trapdoors, tripwires, and snares. So in effect, you can play them as a series of traps. The original texts never really go into how this would work mechanically. More on that later...

When Mites do get their hands on an adventurer they drag them into their tunnel networks, beat the snot out of them, strip them of all their gear and then return them to the main corridor later on. So they're not even necessarily a lethal trap. More of an impediment.

Nasty and memorable 

There's something about the fact that they don't kill the adventurer, but instead subject them to a sever beating which just sticks in my brain. These little guys aren't necessarily as murderous as the murder hobos they're trapping. They're happy to just shake them down and teach them a lesson. It's so gangster. It's also extremely humiliating and honestly comedic. I can imagine just how annoyed this would make some players. It would create an instant vendetta. I'm reminded of how the 3D6 Down The Line guys reacted to Plumthorn and his gang shaking them down in Arden Vul. 

A puzzle to be solved 

To get their stuff back, the adventurers are going to have to find the hidden trap doors and enter this tight tunnel network. Presumably they'll be crawling on their stomachs, and at an extreme disadvantage. Is that even a viable way of fighting? Maybe they'll decide to smoke the Mites out, or ally with another tiny race to take the fight to their halls. There's a lot of problem solving potential there.

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Some ideas on playing Mites

The Fiend Factory entry, and the subsequent prints of the Mites never really drill down on how to actually play Mites in practice. For example, how do you determine whether someone is straggling enough to be singled out? A better designer than me can probably formalise this better but I'm going to have a crack at a few angles here:

- Players love to have the thief scout ahead. This seems like a perfect opportunity for the Mites.

- Have them strike the front or back of the marching order when the lights go out.

- Punish players who decide to sleep in the dungeon with a Mite abduction. 

- Once you've established the Mite threat, you could even formalise it somewhat. Let players know that if they move a certain distance from each other, they're at threat of a Mite ambush. And then present situations where it might be beneficial to split up.

- Treat them as a static trap. There's no reason that the Mite trap couldn't "spring" on someone at the front or the back of the party. What that looks like will depend on the DM style. There might be some sort of save against traps, or trap detection roll, or it might be sign posted and have a diegetic resolution.  

- It could be a mix of a "trap tax" and a diegetic scenario. If the trap successfully springs then the Mites just drag the adventurer away. If it doesn't then maybe they just yank his ten foot pole out of his hand and retreat. Or, if it goes really poorly for the Mites, maybe they are forced into combat with the party, and the players get to enjoy another element of the Pathetic Aesthetic: a one-sided beat down. 

Some DMs might not like this stuff because it encourages cautious play, or is in some sense a solvable problem (e.g. once you know what's up you can rejig your marching order appropriately) but I think that's fine. There's nothing wrong with one trick ponies in a game of infinite possibilities.  

Depicting the Mite warrens

Again, a better designer may have something more to suggest here, but I think there's a few ways of approaching this. You could simply draw a warren of tunnels on top of your map, or you could use a hex flower , or random table of some sort to represent the inscrutable complexity of the tunnels. In terms of combat I would definitely give the adventurers a major penalty on hitting anything in such a small tunnel, and maybe make it so that only the adventurer at the front can even attack (where as multiple small Mites could attack the front runner each round). 

So, there there you go. Inflict some psychic damage on your players. They'll jump every time they hear a rat squeaking after they encounter Mites.