Miniature Beasts

Miniature beasts, known as *minimals*, are uncanny half-sized copies of familiar animals, a bear the size of a house cat, a wolf no taller than a hare, a stag you could cradle in two arms. Each is a faithful half-scale copy of its full-grown cousin, keeping the same coat, horns, temperament and habits, only shrunk. Folk tales credit hedge-wizards and woodland sprites with conjuring them; whatever their origin, they breed true and thrive in pockets of land where larger predators never reached. They eat little and need scant range, which makes the tamer sorts prized by small folk as pets and pocket-mounts. Hunters welcome them too: a knee-high boar still yields a hide and a meal. Most are harmless, though the shrunken meat-eaters can be startlingly bold for their size.