The Megadungeon Garden and the Borrowers Campaign

My house has a big back garden which stretches many yards up a steep slope and meets a copse of trees to the rear. When we moved in a few years ago it was like a jungle, which I am now gradually civilising through great toil and much shedding of blood and tears - it's like suburban England's answer to The Oresteia.

At the very top of the slope the garden is at its wildest, and in May it suddenly decides to remind us that the fell on which we live was once verdant temperate rainforest. You can practically see the plants growing in real time. And this in turn produces a home for a vast throng of creepy crawlies - frogs, spiders, beetles, millipedes, woodlice - as well as a kind of public square for bigger wildlife, from blackbirds to magpies to a family of foxes. It would almost be a shame to curate it too much, as it's practically a miniature nature reserve, but I also have my eye on building a study-cum-personal-bar up there, too. Beer or blackbirds? A genuine quandary. 

At any rate, yesterday, while surveying my domain, I was reminded of an old post I wrote about a game set in a garden, in which the PCs are insects:

[T]his is a three dimensional, complex environment. Ant burrows and cracks in the earth lead to tunnel networks akin to dungeons. Shrubs and bushes are like gargantuan jungle trees bigger than anything a human can comprehend the scale of - like sky scrapers, in fact, rather than trees. What's in that watering can? A cold, stagnant lake full of hunting larvae lurking in its depths. What's under that flagstone? A tribe of armoured woodlice muttering to each other in the damp darkness. What's in the corner of the shed? An undead spider lich and the dusty, dead cobwebs it uses for its spells.

In this environment the enemies would be spiders, intelligent hunting sorcerers who play with the bodies of their victims; robot-like ants who simply swarm and devour with mindless purpose; dragon-like birds with sharp eyes which will swoop and attack the instant you cross open ground; and many other threats from above, below, or under the nearest stone. Treasure would be the different nectars produced by flowers, or the bonanza of a dead rat or fledgling. Quests would be to rescue kidnapped comrades from the lair of the termites, to assassinate an ant queen just beginning to set up a new nest, or to raid a neighbouring garden for the toxic ingredients to repel a blackfly invasion. 

Or perhaps the goal is simple survival. The PCs as a group of insects with a certain sentience who live under the constant threat of death - death from hunting, death from starvation, death from the weather, death from poison, death from sheer twist of fate - and who, for some reason, have the rudiments of cooperation necessary to rise above the nasty, brutish, short lives of their peers and achieve something approaching rest, peace, security, calm.

I still like the idea; it still works. But what appeals to me about it now is not so much the concept of the PCs as insects themselves but rather as tiny people - something more like The Borrowers (though probably not in the same benign tone). This may be because of watching the Ghibli film Arrietty at some point since writing that old post (who isn't enchanted by that idea?), but it almost might simply be because when one spends a lot of time in a garden - especially a wild one  - one starts to see it as a kind of fractalized version of a forest, in which flowers are trees, stones are boulders, puddles are lakes, and beasts are monsters. Get yourself crouched down in that kind of environment next time you have the opportunity, and look at it with all that in mind:

To somebody half an inch high, that environment would contain as much adventure as a few square miles of Amazon rainforest would to us  - and more, if we are allowed to postulate spider sorcerers or tribes of intelligent woodlice. 

Of course, once one brings up the Borrowers one immediately also starts to think about the house itself (whether abandoned or full of dangerous giants) as an environment in which to run games. The interesting thing about that concept is that more or less everyone lives in one - so you could in fact set a campaign in your own home which you and the players move about in as the in-game focus shifts from place to place. You could actually envisage events taking place against their real-life surroundings; if the PCs are fighting on top of the drinks cabinet, for instance, you could actually congregate it around it to see how it all shakes down. Or, if they are being chased by a cat on the attic stairs, you could go there to measure exactly how far away it would be, and check out if there are any hiding spots. 

Of course, you could do this in your garden too - the issue is that where I live you so rarely get the weather.