Intro to Tiny Steps World

Thirty years ago, humans ruled the world, their buildings and their nations spreading across the world, dominating it, creating masterworks of technology and of culture in a billion different ways in hundreds of different places. Then, one day, they disappeared from the world that they had so widely ruled without so much as a struggle or a gasp, leaving behind their structures, their roads, and all the little devices and accoutrements with which they lived their lives, undisturbed.

Thirty years ago, little creatures crawled and skittered and buzzed and fed and laid eggs mindlessly, living out their diminutive lives in remarkably complex little actions and organization shaped by millions of years of evolution. Then, one day, they were abruptly aware of a very odd situation. No longer did they have their many-legged, exoskeletal forms, no longer were they driven by instinct. Instead, they woke up with soft bodies, bigger than most were used to, with pink and brown skins, strangely shaped appendages with small, flexible graspers on them, long strands on the head with little immediately discernible purpose and internal skeletons.

And they could think. They couldn’t live the lives they used to, lives that they couldn’t seem to remember but that they felt the loss
of deep inside, but they could construct lines of logic, synthesize, reflect, feel. Stuck in a new and strange form in a now-unfamiliar world, these tiny people began to carve out places for themselves, to come together in cultures, in polities. They began to build, to scavenge, to use tools and weapons, and to use magic.

And, even if it was in a strange and unfamiliar way, life went on.