We were watching the Fantastic Voyage spoof episode of Futurama last night where the characters use vr controlled microscopic robot duplicates to go inside Fry's body, and it brought to mind a couple other instances I've come across with that concept (a very surreal Harlan Ellison story had almost exactly this same premise) and an anime called "Angelic Layer" where people fight by telepathically controlling little robot-dolls. I also love "mouseworlds", where the protagonist is either a mouse or other tiny critter, or a tiny humanoid (the Borrowers, the Littles, Arietty) trying to get along in a human sized world, and thought that might be a fun premise for a LitRPG. With robot bodies, you wouldn't need to worry about things like a mouse-sized human not having enough brain cells to think properly or needing to constantly to keep their metabolism stoked. You could have the players in a perfectly miniturized laser-tag style arena and then be forced or escape out into the real world. Why would this setting use little robots rather than digital worlds? A couple of ideas - maybe not everyone can use the usual "plug-into-brain" or VR pod technology for medical reasons, or they don't trust brain uploads for fear of getting their mind hacked? Maybe the local government outlaws the usual type of VR tech? Maybe this is an alternate world where the technology just developed differently, so robots have been around for a long time (the Greek and/or Japanese and/or Victorian automata caught on rather than just being curiosities)? Or maybe it's just a steampunk setting's version of a total immersion video game? Anyways, this could be a really fun setting, with the tiny players having to do stuff like craft buttons and sewing needles into shields and swords to battle their way past housecats and swarms of cockroaches instead of dragons and goblin hordes, with regular-sized humans in place of godlike AIs. I dunno how viable an idea this is, any thoughts?
It does look similar to his Threadbare covers. If anyone used it it would be 99% instant buy because of Chip'n Dale Rescue Rangers TV show that played when I still had hair.
