Where & When
The story takes place entirely inside one mid-sized house and its accompanying garden. It’s set in England during the 1960s, but it’s hard to be more precise about the location than that. The date is intended to be “contemporary” but that doesn’t necessarily mean 1964 and fans have suggested possibilities ranging from ’63 (the year for which the Doctor was aiming) to the “near future” of ’69. From our 21st-century perspective, it hardly matters.
Setting
Although the specific location of the house is not given in the story, it is at least possible to rule out some options. We know it’s in England, and it’s a detached house with a large garden, climbing plants on the walls and a few trees. It’s also far enough away from any neighbours that neither Forrester nor Smithers seem concerned that somebody might have heard a gunshot. It’s stated to be an “old farmhouse” and must be in a rural area, although not so remote that there wouldn’t be a village nearby – either way, it’s certainly not somewhere like London.
The flower seeds come from a supplier in Norwich but, even in the days before internet ordering, that proves nothing. Neither does the fact that everyone has an RP accent, although it may make it more likely we’re in the south than the north. More significant is the fact that Farrow says he has moored his boat ten miles away and is planning to take it on a short holiday to France. So, we must be within ten miles of the coast or at least a waterway navigable enough to take seagoing boats.
There isn’t a shortage of these in England (and there were more in the ‘60s than there are now) but it does at least rule out many inland parts of the country. That he’s going to France again suggests that the south is more likely than the north. Many places fit the bill including, for what it’s worth, the countryside around Norwich.
As for the house itself, it’s a moderately sized two-story brick building and, from what we can see, is on the small side for a farmhouse. We only see the back from the outside, which has a “storeroom” off to one side that could also be a garage. The only room that the protagonists see from the inside is the laboratory, which is a separate wooden structure – notably with a sink that runs to an external pipe and drain rather than directly to the mains. On the other hand, it is connected to the gas supply because there are taps for Bunsen burners.
However, the geographic location of the story doesn’t really matter, since nobody is going to be travelling any distance and the PCs are more likely to be hiding from the locals than communicating with them. Indeed, the point of this as an adventure would be exploring a familiar place from an unfamiliar angle so, for most groups, it would probably work best transplanted to a location they can identify with. For instance, for us, the modern day makes more sense than keeping it in the ‘60s – it’s weird enough without having to remember the differences that sixty years have made to domestic life and home features.
The plot as written could work pretty much anywhere that a moderately wealthy home would have no close neighbours – outside a village in France, rural Arkansas, the edge of the Australian Outback, and many equivalent places elsewhere. With some alterations to the plot, even the house being isolated might not be a requirement, opening up suburbia or even an inner city as options.
The basis of the story, of course, is that the characters have been shrunk by a factor of 70, so that they are now around 2.5 cm (one inch) in height. A significant corollary of this is that, since weight changes as the cube of the linear distance, they are also 70³ times lighter, weighing about 0.2 grams (0.07 oz. or 3 grains).
When this sort of thing is shown in film or television the usual assumption is everything works exactly as it would if the characters had stayed the same size, but everything else had grown – apart from the size, nothing looks or behaves particularly strangely. The reality would be more complicated.
One oddity, for instance, is that gravity would appear to operate differently. Since we can assume that strength scales with volume, objects would appear to weigh what you’d expect for something of their apparent size and volume. A matchstick that’s 70 times longer and thicker than it should be would weigh 343,000 times as much, which is still low enough that it could easily be lifted (about 34 kg). But if it was dropped, it wouldn’t fall in the way you’d expect.
Over a short distance, you might not notice, but let’s say that something fell from an apparent height of even 4 metres – about the width of the paving stones in the story. An object should take about 0.9 seconds to fall 4 metres, but the real distance is 5.7 cm, so it will actually take about 0.1 seconds to hit the ground. This could, for example, make it hard to catch, or to dodge out of the way, at least until you were used to the difference – and it would certainly be noticeable, making things seem that little bit stranger.
Let’s say you climb on top of a table 1 metre (3 feet) off the ground. Looking down over the edge you see what appears, to you, to be a 70 metre drop. If that were the real height, this would obviously be lethal, probably even if you landed on something soft. But, if you did fall, while you’d feel as if you were falling much faster than you’d expect (it would take less than half a second to reach the ground, instead of over three) you would actually be going eight times slower than you’d expect when you hit the ground. The end result is the equivalent of being hit by a car travelling at 10 mph (16 kph) rather than one travelling at 82 mph (132 kph); it’s going to hurt but it’s far more survivable than you’d instinctively think.
This ignores the effect of air resistance, which is perhaps fair enough for, say, a tiny pebble over a short distance, but not for many other objects. How much difference it makes depends on the cross-sectional area of an object and this means that a human being of this size won’t benefit as much from air resistance while falling as a squirrel would if it fell out of a tree. Even so, a falling human on this scale would expect to reach terminal velocity after a fall of 8 metres (26 feet) and reach a speed of only 12 m/s (26 mph). This certainly could kill you, depending on how you land, but it’s not guaranteed to be lethal.
Your momentum on hitting the ground is also considerably less than you’d instinctively think, which may play a role, although we have to balance against that the fact that the smaller size, including tiny fragile bones and so on, would make you more vulnerable to injury in the first place.
There’s also the issue of food, which is brought up in the serial itself. It’s debatable whether the human body could deal with nutrient molecules 70 times larger than they’re supposed to be, but if it couldn’t, the insecticide would be harmless for the same reason, so we can probably ignore that. This means that the issue is going to be finding anything edible, especially when it’s going to be hard getting into a closed pantry or cupboard. With the texture and composition of food on a completely different scale, whatever you eat is probably not going to be very pleasant, but if it doesn’t kill small mammals in the real world, most items should be sufficient to prevent starvation.
Water is less of a problem, although it wouldn’t behave as depicted in the serial, because the surface tension would appear much stronger, and the water itself would appear more viscous (since this is related to surface area). You could easily see blobs of water as small stable domes if they’re sitting on a non-porous surface, and there would be some resistance to pushing your hand into them. Having said which, you would be nowhere near small enough for surface tension to hold you up while standing (although it would probably be easier to float) and drinking wouldn’t be an issue.
One thing the serial gets right that other SF using the same concept doesn’t always do is the effect on sound. While the other senses aren’t affected because we’re ignoring any effect the difference in the size of molecules would have, hearing is based, not on proteins in the retina or molecular structures in the olfactory organs (etc.) but on the anatomical size of the cochlea in the inner ear. If it’s 70 times smaller, it should respond as if all sound waves do, indeed, have a wavelength 70 times longer than they really have.
This corresponds to about six octaves, so everything sounds that much deeper in tone than it should. This doesn’t affect the characters’ ability to hear each other’s voices, since their vocal cords are shrunk by the same amount, raising the pitch by the same six octaves. But it does make a difference when compared with normal-sized humans.
Six octaves sounds a lot, but the range of hearing in a typical, unimpaired, adult, is about ten octaves so it’s not as if there isn’t a fair degree of overlap. Raising the pitch of an average woman’s voice by six octaves puts it close to the limits of human hearing, with a man’s also very high - although we should note that they will also be quite quiet. Certainly, they’ll be hard to understand, and it’s worth noting that a telephone isn’t designed to pick up (or reproduce) sounds that high-pitched so speaking into one wouldn’t work – as correctly shown in the story. But a faint, high-pitched squeaking sound might be noticeable to someone standing nearby.
In the reverse, though, the fundamental frequency of any human’s voice drops well below the deepest sound we can hear if it drops by six octaves. That’s not to say they would be literally inaudible to our protagonists, since the higher harmonics would be in range, but the sort of deep unintelligible rumble we hear in the TV serial may not be too inaccurate.
We can also, out of interest, calculate the apparent size of various common items or organisms (see below for some more examples of animals):
|
|
Actual size |
Apparent size |
|
Ant egg |
0.5 mm |
3.5 cm (1.4 inches) |
|
Earthworm (length) |
20 cm |
14 metres (46 feet) |
|
Grass blade (well-mown) |
~ 5 cm |
~ 3.5 metres
(11’ 6”) |
|
Dandelion
(flower width) |
25 mm |
1.75 metres
(5’ 9”) |
|
Wheat grain |
3 mm |
21 cm (8
inches) |
|
.32 calibre
bullet (diameter) |
8 mm |
57 cm (22
inches) |
|
Raindrop |
up to 4mm |
up to 28 cm
(11 inches) |
|
Mist/fog
droplet |
10 µm |
0.7 mm
(1/40 inch) |
|
Sand grain |
0.1 – 2 mm |
0.7 – 14 cm
(0.25 – 5.5") |
|
Dust particle |
up to 0.1 mm |
up to 0.7 cm
(0.25 inches) |
|
Tardigrade |
0.5 mm |
3.5 cm
(1.4 inches) |
|
Pollen
grain |
~ 30 µm |
~ 2 mm
(1/12 inch) |
|
Amoeba |
0.3 mm |
2 cm (0.8
inches) |
|
Bacterium |
~ 2 µm |
0.1 mm (1/200
inch) |
|
Typical d20 |
20 mm |
1.4 metres
(4’ 7”) |
Scenario
The starting point for the scenario is the characters shrinking. In the original story, this is due to a malfunction in the TARDIS that causes the doors to open mid-flight, but similar possibilities exist in other genres. In Star Trek, for example, this could easily be explained as a transporter malfunction that also makes it difficult to lock on to the newly miniaturised away team until enough time has passed for the adventure to conclude. Other settings that use teleporters or portals of some kind (e.g. a stargate) could also have similar accidents without worrying too much about the real-world physics of how this could conceivably happen.
The downside here is that you may lose the “familiar objects from an unfamiliar angle” aspect of the story if the away team is beaming down to an alien world. One way to minimise this is to have the accident happen on the return trip to the PCs’ base/starship – which will at least be familiar to them. This would probably cut out most of the plot from the original serial but if they return to find something bad has happened in their absence, they not only have the challenge of trying to fix it while only an inch tall but also have to do so before anyone else can get them back to full size.
In the serial, after exploring their environment and working out what has happened, the protagonists stumble across a murder victim and then, while trying to hide, end up separated, with some inside the laboratory and others remaining outside in the garden. From this point, they have three objectives: to try to alert the authorities about the murder, to avoid being poisoned to death, and, of course, to make their escape.
The first of these is something that may or may not appeal to a given group of players. They, or at least the PCs, may regard it as none of their business, or consider the task beyond their means to complete. If they do pick up on that plot thread, the question becomes how they’ll pull it off. They’ll need to get a telephone or other transmitter capable of contacting someone, or perhaps use their technical skill to construct one, and then find a way of using it that (most likely) doesn’t rely on their voices alone. It’s worth noting here that it is possible to send a 999 call (or equivalent) using a text message… but, at least, in the UK, this requires that the phone be registered for this purpose and that it be unlocked at the time.
The DN6 insecticide is, perhaps, the key feature of the plot other than the miniaturisation, deliberately playing on 1960s concerns about DDT. It’s not necessary for one of the PCs to be poisoned by the stuff, although it adds a ticking time bomb element to the story if they are, and all you have to do to ensure they are not is have the fly land on the grain before they get a chance to touch it themselves. Hopefully, they will find the mystery of why all the insects are dead something at least worth looking into.
In a campaign or one-off scenario based around a time agency of some sort, the PCs could even have been sent on a mission specifically to prevent DN6 from being developed – which should be simple but proves otherwise when the miniaturisation problem arises. This gives them a reason to go inside the house or to explore outward from wherever they have arrived.
Finally, there’s the challenge of simply getting about and/or escaping, whether using the plumbing as in the story or by some other means. If using the insecticide plotline, there’s a slight disadvantage here that the PCs won’t be facing many hostile insects or the like – although a kaiju-sized cat is always going to be a problem. But, as with the fly that lands on the grain in the story, there might still be a few around that haven’t died yet. Alternatively, we could do away with the DN6, replacing it with some other objective or challenge that wouldn’t have the same side effect.
I’ll also note in passing that the basic idea of being shrunk works perfectly well in a fantasy game, involving some sort of accident with a potion or spell. We can even use much of the DN6 plotline without alteration, replacing Smithers with an alchemist and Forrester with an evil wizard or member of the local thieves’ guild.
Rules
To deal with the simplest point first: we need to describe what DN6 does. It’s a skin contact poison that takes several hours to kill inch-high humanoid targets, although it eliminates insects more or less instantly. (We don’t know how long it took the earthworm to die, but presumably longer than the fly, if only because it was much larger). This is easy enough to model in a system like GURPS, but 5E tends to have the target either die instantly or survive – although DN6 clearly would give the victim the "poisoned" trait. In this case, however, we could model it as delivering a certain amount of poison damage every hour until it’s either eliminated or the target succumbs.
But what about the more obvious feature of the story?
Although I’ve used some space above to lay out some of the plausible consequences of being shrunk to an inch in height, we needn’t use all of them. We necessarily have to handwave away questions about whether, for example, an oxygen molecule 70 times larger than it’s supposed to be is going to diffuse effectively through the lungs and, as noted, above, whether the poison is going to work if the molecules it’s supposed to bind to are the wrong size. And, if we’re ignoring that, we could also ignore some of the other problems if they get in the way of the plot or make things just a bit too strange.
Even assuming we don’t do that, for most purposes, the rules of the game system don’t change just because the PCs are smaller – they just scale appropriately. So, in 5E, a map square would now represent an inch instead of five feet, and that’s close enough to a 70-fold change that everything will still work the way it should. Things like missile weapon ranges could be scaled accordingly and we can provide stats for any living insects, spiders, etc. as if they were regular monsters.
Many systems have some mechanism for dealing with the relative scale of objects or creatures. Here, we simply assume that an inch-tall PC is still medium size, or whatever the equivalent is, and set everything else relative to that. 5E uses only six size ranges, for which we can give examples on our reduced scale as follows:
- Tiny Ant
- Small Ladybird
- Medium Wasp, grasshopper
- Large Shrew
- Huge Mouse
- Gargantuan Mole, sparrow, or larger
Other systems can be more detailed, as we can see below with the Savage Worlds size table and, without repeating the examples, the GURPS Size Modifiers:
|
Size |
Size Mod |
Height/Length |
Examples |
|
Tiny |
|||
|
-4 |
-6 |
0.1” |
Mite |
|
Very Small |
|||
|
-3 |
-4 |
¼” |
Ant, house
spider |
|
Small |
|||
|
-2 |
-2 |
½” |
Ladybird |
|
Normal |
|||
|
-1 |
- |
2/3” |
Wasp, fly |
|
0 |
- |
1” |
Grasshopper |
|
1 |
- |
1 1/3” |
Ground beetle |
|
2 |
- |
1½” |
Hornet |
|
3 |
- |
2” |
Small shrew |
|
Large |
|||
|
4 |
+2 |
2 ½” |
Stag beetle |
|
5 |
+2 |
3” |
Mouse |
|
6 |
+2 |
4” |
Willow tit |
|
7 |
+2 |
5” |
Goldfinch,
mole |
|
Huge |
|||
|
8 |
+4 |
6” |
Sparrow |
|
9 |
+4 |
8” |
Starling |
|
10 |
+4 |
11” |
Rat,
hedgehog, pigeon |
|
11 |
+4 |
1 foot |
Grey squirrel |
|
Gargantuan / Kaiju |
|||
|
12 |
+6 |
18” |
House cat |
|
18 |
+6 |
6 feet |
Human |
|
Length |
SM |
|
0.1” |
-6 |
|
¼” |
-4 |
|
1/3” |
-3 |
|
½” |
-2 |
|
¾” |
-1 |
|
1 inch |
0 |
|
1 ½” |
+1 |
|
2 ½” |
+2 |
|
3 ½” |
+3 |
|
5” |
+4 |
|
7 ½” |
+5 |
|
10” |
+6 |
|
15” |
+7 |
|
2 feet |
+8 |
|
6 feet |
+11 |
Character hit points, or equivalent, don’t change either, because everything is now relative to them. For falling damage, we can assume that the reduced momentum due to their small size is offset by the fact that they can sustain less damage in the first place, and have them take the same damage they would take if falling that (real) distance. However, allowing for terminal velocity, as described above, would mean that this would max out at 8 metres / 25 feet. In some systems, however, that may make falling rather trivial – in 5E 25 feet is just 2d6 damage, which isn’t going to worry anyone above 1st level and possibly not even if they aren’t. So you might want to shift the damage up a bit.
Another issue arises when miniaturised PCs come up against regularly sized foes. While a cat, for example, can be treated as an enormous monster, when the opponent is the size of a human they’re probably just off the scale, and the only protection for the inch-high human is that they’re a very small target, especially at range.
It’s reasonable to assume that any regular attack that would deliver damage is simply going to kill an inch-high person. Hitting them with something that normally doesn’t do damage – like say, a fly-swatter – can be modelled as it would be if you were hit by an object of the appropriate apparent size. The reverse also applies; a miniaturised rifle or phaser is going to hurt but it’s probably no more likely to seriously inconvenience a human-sized target than would stabbing them with a pin. So it’s just zero damage… unless the PCs have something like a rocket launcher or a fireball spell.
Or, for example, they deliberately explode a full-sized aerosol can.
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