I’ve always found giant ants to be a boring monster. The foot-long giant ant dungeon pests of 1e are actually OK for an encounter; but the horse-sized formians and similar races seem to require a whole adventure or episode of their own, and the idea of raiding an anthive and killing hundreds of identical monsters fills me with a naptime feeling.

Francis Rufus Bellamy’s 1953 adventure novel, about a guy who shrinks to half an inch tall and adventures among the ants, strikes me as the right way to go about using formians in a game. This way, you don’t need to put aside a part of your world to be ruled by a giant ant kingdom; you can vary the encounters with battles against giant bees and grasshoppers; and you can have a boss fight against a badass shrew. Those guys are super mean and scary looking! And they can be any size from half an inch to a foot long! You can use any of the excellent official D&D shrew minis already in your possession.

While your PCs are shrunk, have them make discoveries about their familiar surroundings they couldn’t normally make. Perhaps they climb into a tiny crack in the wall, and discover Diamond as Big as the Ritz, or a giant gold ring. When they return to their normal size, they can retrieve it. (Come to think of it, a ring makes some interesting defensible terrain for ant-sized PCs, forming a little fortress around one or four squares, behind which they can take cover.

The key to an interesting ant adventure is to make the ants sentient, as Bellamy did. Have the PCs choose sides in a war between an ant colony and a rival colony of slave raiders. Have them befriend ants, and ride them like mounts in daring cavalry attacks. When the PCs return to normal size, maybe they’ll have different feelings about the ants scuttling beneath their feet, over whom they now have such power.

The desert was carpeted with flowers.
“It’s the rain, obviously,” said Vandam. “But…”
Millions of flying insects had also appeared from nowhere, and now butterflies and bees dashed frantically from bloom to bloom, reaping the sudden harvest.
Billy said: “The seeds must have been in the sand, waiting.”

During and shortly after a heavy rain in the desert (an event about as common as a rare planetary alignment, which is to say once during the PCs’ career), giant, extravagantly colored flowers carpet the desert. Bees, butterflies, and flower fairies seem to be everywhere. For a day, it looks more like the feywild than the desert. The flowers are called desert blooms, and the PCs will make a fortune if they harvest and preserve them. They’re a magical ingredient coveted by wizards. The PCs will have to hurry, though, because the blooms will have disappeared in a few hours. Desert blooms hold water like cups, so for a short time, the parched PCs will have as much water as they can drink.

After my first Every Book’s a Sourcebook post, where I extrapolated a D&D adventure from the cover of a Babysitter’s Club book, my wife issued me a challenge: find D&D inspiration from the actual text of a Babysitters Club book.

I chose BSC #70, Stacey and the Cheerleaders, figuring that, if all else failed, I could just stat out some cheerleaders as ninth level monsters.

Luckily, it didn’t come to that. Stacey goes to a movie which could easily be turned into an adventure:

I hadn’t seen Mall Warriors 1, and I was concerned I might have missed something. Well, I needn’t have worried. A three year old could have followed the plot. It was about a group of teens who booby-trap a mall to catch a pair of world famous mall thieves.

Well, there are no malls in D&D, but we can easily move this to a village setting.

The village council receives a warning: “We will be stealing your precious village idol TONIGHT. There is nothing you can do to stop us. Signed, Kellik and Agia, the King and Queen of Thieves.”

Panicked, the village council hires the PCs to guard the idol. The DM warns the PCs that the two thieves are too strong to challenge in a straight fight – except, perhaps, alone and weakened.

The PCs have a few hours to complete their preparations, which may include hiding the idol, setting traps, and stationing a handful of useless village guard minions.

In this adventure, the DM should provide a lot of specific details the PCs can play off of: where are the equipment sheds, and what’s in them? What’s flammable? Where are the animals, especially the ones that make noise when strangers are about? Who’s aware of the PCs’ preparations – and how can the thieves get that information out of them?

The DM will have to secretly play the thieves, keeping track of what they are doing, keeping in mind their extremely high rogue skills and their limited knowledge of the PCs’ actions.

To keep this going for a full session, you probably have to allow the thieves to be slowed or caught by some of the PCs’ clever ideas; but the thieves have a lot of one-shot escape techniques they can deploy. In a reversal of normal D&D mechanics, the game is about NPC resource management.

To give the PCs some satisfaction as they wear down the thieves, it would be best if the PCs could watch the thieves’ resources being depleted. Maybe it’s common knowledge that, say, Kellik’s smoke-bomb gun holds three charges, and that every time Agia teleports, it consumes a portion of her health.