Mites kidnapping children...

[EldonGuyre]

I have this idea, but I'm not sure where I'm going with it.

I want to use a gang of mites working with a few gremlins, kidnapping kids in a city...but I haven't figured out the why.

Help me flesh this out?

[Quixote]

Faeries are often depicted as stealing children for unfathomable purposes. Maybe they want servants or apprentices. Maybe they'll be playthings or friends or adoptive children, or just a snack.

I think the biggest factor is that it's unknown. There are hints and the beginnings of motivation, but nothing is ever sure.

Mites and gremlins aren't the unknowable, alien gods that powerful faeries are portrayed as in those sorts of stories, but maybe they're working for one. Or maybe they're just imitating their old masters in a sad attempt at climbing the villainous ladder.

Vengeance or some kind of weird ritual to...steal their potential? Their sense of wonder? Maybe they're bait for an adult otherwise too powerful or crafty for them to get at?

[VoodistMonk]

Why are they kidnapping children?

That's obvious.

They have to keep a fresh coat of blood on the wall in the basement or the Beast comes out.

OR...

500 children, that's the number I figured when I was a kid. 500 child sacrifices you could consider yourself a legitimate evil guy. You need them for experience. To develop leather skin. So I got started. Of course along the way you stop thinking about being evil and all that. It stops being the point. You get past the silliness of it all. But then, after, you realize that's what you are.

[Mark Hoover 330]

Mites have Doom 1/day; a Fear effect, this causes Shaken in the victim. In game terms, that's pretty standard, but what if a whole group of mites can do something more... something worse?

Consider that mites bond with vermin, vermin like Dream Spiders. It might be that the mites, using the toxins secreted by said spiders, are employing their Doom ability on children for extended periods of time. They keep them locked up in a perpetual nightmare of hallucinations and fear for days. The gremlins are just there to add fuel to the fire and change the luck... or the fortune of the hapless children.

As time wears on the weird energies, toxins and utter terror makes the children into something else, something hideous. While they are conditioned to respond to their fey makers, these pitiful creatures are not magically compelled. They serve the gremlinkind as muscle and enforcers, creeping through the night to continue the cycle of fear and loathing in a desperate, futile attempt to end the living nightmare their own mind has become.

In game terms, turn the kids into Thawns or Bugbears with feats and skills around Intimidate. The PCs can get involved trying to save the kids and turn them back, or perhaps tragically realizing that once the transformation is done it can't be undone, however you want to work it.

[Shorticus]

Quote:

Faeries are often depicted as stealing children for unfathomable purposes. Maybe they want servants or apprentices. Maybe they'll be playthings or friends or adoptive children, or just a snack.

IMO, this is the best angle and keeps things from going TOO dark. Don't think in terms of evil, overblown plots. Think in terms of what a whimsical fairy creature would do, however evil it may be.

So, one mite decides it wants a kid for... whatever reason. A friend, a servant to clean up after it, whatever. Well, that mite brings a kid back, and all the other mites are jealous. So another mite steals a kid. Then another one does, and another...

These mites could even be trying to compare who has the cooler kid:

"Dis kid be REALLY, REALLY TALL!"

"Oh, yeah? Well, DIS kid be make good picture! SEE!"

"Oh, YEAH?! Well, DIS kid count higher than you kid!"

"NUH UH!"

...And so on and so forth. They're mites. They're not especially bright creatures.

[Shorticus]

Alternatively, and I just thought of this, have the mites working for a greater power. Perhaps go a more traditional fairy route with why they're kidnapping them and have their leader be a powerful Fey being. Mites make good servants for evil Fey!

[VoodistMonk]

Mark Hoover 330 wrote:

Mites have Doom 1/day; a Fear effect, this causes Shaken in the victim. In game terms, that's pretty standard, but what if a whole group of mites can do something more... something worse?

Consider that mites bond with vermin, vermin like Dream Spiders. It might be that the mites, using the toxins secreted by said spiders, are employing their Doom ability on children for extended periods of time. They keep them locked up in a perpetual nightmare of hallucinations and fear for days. The gremlins are just there to add fuel to the fire and change the luck... or the fortune of the hapless children.

As time wears on the weird energies, toxins and utter terror makes the children into something else, something hideous. While they are conditioned to respond to their fey makers, these pitiful creatures are not magically compelled. They serve the gremlinkind as muscle and enforcers, creeping through the night to continue the cycle of fear and loathing in a desperate, futile attempt to end the living nightmare their own mind has become.

In game terms, turn the kids into Thawns or Bugbears with feats and skills around Intimidate. The PCs can get involved trying to save the kids and turn them back, or perhaps tragically realizing that once the transformation is done it can't be undone, however you want to work it.

This sounds like the makings of a Bogeyman...

[Mark Hoover 330]

I mean, I always tend to lean into the dark horror/overarching plots, but that's just me. If we want to keep it light and airy, there's yet another angle to go:

Monsters Inc.

Mites kidnap kids to scare 'em, that part doesn't change. But the gremlins have hexed a machine to collect their screams. The gremlins use canisters of scare energy to power greater machines, or fuel big hexes, and so on. They ARE supposed to be associated with breaking machines right?

So in this scenario, the kids are a resource they're using. If you don't like that one, here's yet another:

Comedy Night

The mites have Sleight of Hand as a racial skill and get Prestidigitation at will. They've gotten bored entertaining themselves with these parlor tricks but every time they've tried to impress the mortals they're chased off in horror. They've been reduced to running pickpocket scams for gremlins and stealing what they need from local villages.

Some kids saw a few of these "living cartoons" in the market one gloomy day. When mites argue they bop each other on the head, causing silly blue birds to tweet around their heads; their faces bulge and swell to exaggerated proportions; from their sleeves they produce fake mallets, breakaway vases, water-sqirting flowers and so on.

The kids, instead of being horrified, giggled and clapped. The mites, having finally found a new audience, came back a couple times to entertain the children in secret. When the grown-ups found out their progeny had made friends with a gaggle of Small sized strangers on the outskirts of the village they naturally got suspicious and worried.

Now the mites can't get at their fans, so one night in desperation they went and kidnapped them all. The gremlins are simply muscle, to keep the grown-ups away. After a day though, the kids are starting to get scared and sad; they want to go home and the mites don't understand why. It's up to the PCs to rescue the children before the mites do any serious damage.

Finally, I think we're overlooking one of the more obvious ones:

Ransom

Make one of the PCs a parent or a kinfolk of one of the kids. Have a gremlin or a particularly magically inclined mite get in touch with that PC remotely, telling the PC where to meet to recover the kids for money paid to the fey. This sets up the PC to respond as follows:

"I don't know who you are, I don't know what you want. If you're looking for a ransom, I can tell you I don't have any money. What I DO have is a particular set of skills; skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my (insert relation to child here) go now, that will be the end of it. I won't come looking for you, won't pursue you. But if you don't, I WILL look for you... I WILL find you... and I will kill you."

To which, inevitably, the fey on the other end of the communication will respond "good luck" and so will begin one of the greatest franchises of gaming history!

Other plot reasons:

1. children's innocence/tears/laughter/whatever is needed as payment for something from the Wythmarket from the First World

2. the kids were in the wrong place at the wrong time

3. the "kids" are actually a jock in an ascott, his purple-favoring girlfriend, their brainy female associate, a stoner kid and his dog; these children went hunting to solve a mystery and got taken prisoner by the fey

4. Duke Igthorn has dispatched his little minions to snatch the kids of important NPCs who in turn guard the secret of Gummyberry Juice. They'll get the kids back if they give up the formula. While the NPCs plan their own rescue, a bunch of good fey spirits in the form of Small sized, anthropomorphic bears come and recruit the PCs to help

5. BEES!

6. The mites and gremlins started with orphans, but when they ran out of those they started grabbing kids with families, intending to MAKE them orphans. This is how their criminal enterprise will grow. Bonus points if one of the kids taken is named Oliver or Nicholas Nickleby

7. How do you think Mites reproduce?

8. Each of the children has a unique ability from a sorcerer's bloodline that is needed for some arcane ritual

9. "Only by a child's hand may the Mistress of Swarms be released" is what it says on the vault door the mites found at the heart of their new lair. But... WHICH child?

10. Even gremlins like to be entertained.

11. Every 27 years, the creature needs to feed. Its meals must know fear. Conveniently, these mites excel at fear (change racial bonus from Sleight of Hand to Intimidate, make it a class skill, and change their Cha to 10; alternatively or perhaps in addition, give them a feat that gives them +2 on DC for Doom ability)

12. The kids are slave labor for the fey, making clothes, shoes, handbags, etc

13. Payment to a hag, or a hag coven, in return for power

[Quixote]

Shorticus wrote:

IMO, this is the best angle and keeps things from going TOO dark. Don't think in terms of evil, overblown plots. Think in terms of what a whimsical fairy creature would do, however evil it may be.

You could certainly run it that way. In my experience, the fae are every bit as, terrifying as daemons (in a lot of myths, they're basically the same thing).

They're like children that have been given the power of a god; they might place you in a gilded cage and listen to you sing, but they could grow bored of you at any moment and pluck off your wings just to watch you struggle. They might not do this out of any kind of traditional, hand-wringing love of evil for its own sake. It may just come from a profound lack of empathy or understanding of human emotion. But that's not exactly comforting when you're the subject of their torments, and it makes them impossible to predict.

I personally like the stories where fae go to great lengths for seemingly small victories. A decades-long plot involving the ruin of several noble families, civil war and a plague in order to secure an especially handsome servant for your hall or whatever. There's complexity, subtly, endless machinations...but in the end the mind the heroes must contend with is simply too far removed from their own.

Dark does not need to equal violent or taboo or "mature" content. Those things have their place, but a well-crafted story doesn't rely on them, necessarily. I think Neil Gaiman is a great example of that.
Then again, if your group wants to get down in the sticky-awful depths, that can be profoundly potent as well.

[EldonGuyre]

Wow...so many great ideas. I'm thinking something of a blend of a few of them - they're feeding a hag that feeds off of fear - in this case,induced nightmares, ala City of Lost Children. (fantastic film, btw!)

They found her almost dead,and fading quickly, but she's told them how to help her. She's slowly regaining power, but she's fighting a curse...

[Mark Hoover 330]

I followed a similar plot with the first quarter of a campaign. The mites were changed from Vermin Empathy to specifically having empathy with rats; otherwise I left them as is.

The mites were serving a NE F Human Witch 4 named Vanya Mooncrazed. Essentially she was a very pretty girl living in the woods near a town with her woodcutter father. Vanya was teased by the other kids in town for not having a mom, being prettier than the other girls, having such a gruff old man for a dad, etc. She got bullied so much that she would sneak off into the deep woods, where her father forbade her from going, to cry and get it all out.

A strange voice began to greet her, telling her that it was a spirit of the woods. The spirit promised power to deal with her bullies, so long as the other girls got brought to this place in the forest. The hag doing the whispering was capturing the Cha of the girls brought to her, turning the cursed girls into Thawns; each thawn the PCs encountered had a locket with an image of what they USED to look like inside of it.

The bully boys were all turned into rats by a draught provided to Vanya by the mites. They delighted in leading the rats around in the swamps, humiliating the beasts and basically just being mean to them. Of course the rats became another encounter the PCs had to fight their way through.

Of course Vanya's NE alignment was easily subject to change. She wasn't really evil at heart; more like N with NE tendencies. She just wanted to stop hurting all the time. Of course, the hag harbored a secret: She'd been the one that killed Vanya's mother soon after the girl was killed.

Mom had promised the baby to the hag, but reneged on the deal and almost succeeding at destroying the old crone. The reason Vanya's father didn't want her going in the woods was to protect her from exactly what she was becoming.

If the PCs can somehow convince Vanya to voluntarily forgive her bullies and return the "grace" or Cha back to the girls being cursed into becoming Thawns, they can redeem her. Another road to redemption was to turn Vanya against the old hag.

[EldonGuyre]

Nice, Mark, very creative. :)