I decided to follow a fairy tale theme to keep with Nocturne. The little men will improve your stuff, but if you get too greedy, they'll send you away. They'll also help out everyone else, except the "bad kids" who've already offended them. They're not the same as the Cobbler's elves, but instead come from the "good person is good to a stranger and gets rewarded, bad person hears and tries to imitate it but is bad and gets punished" line of tales.
This was an interesting State to make a card for. I had three objectives:
- Make the card affect other people, either as an attack or as a benefit.
- Make the decision whether to take Forbidden an interesting one.
- Make the card not be a Confusion if you take Forbidden, since that's too boring, especially if you don't have trashing.
I tried to make sure the card was not only balanced relative to its cost and but also as to the decision whether to take Forbidden. Do you keep upgrading you trash, or sacrifice your future benefits for a big card? You can gain Potion-cost cards (or Debt-cost cards), which I thought was thematic, but doing so will get you Forbidden unless you trashed a similarly-costed card. I had to really fine-tune the wording to make sure it worked this way (if you trash a Copper for a University, the gained card costs $2+P more than the trashed card, which is not less than $5). If you avoid getting Forbidden, Strange Little Men is kind of like a cheaper and more flexible delayed Mine that gives your opponents Silver, which I thought was balanced at $4---Caravan vs. Laboratory implies that the cost difference is appropriate for the delay (treating the flexibility, nonterminality, and VP as balanced by the Silver-giving), and it keeps you from opening with two, which might be too dominant otherwise. Finally, while a Victory card worth negative VP is a bit odd, I thought it was worth it to add a bit more weight to the "non-Forbidden" side of the decision and keep it relevant (albeit as a pseudo-Curse) if you take Forbidden. This would likely take a good amount of playtesting to get right, but I'm happy with the concept.
As a bonus, here are some Outtakes I went through on the way here:
Helper Elves was the first card I tried, and is obviously a prototype of Strange Little Men. I thought the Alms-ish nature of counting your buys against you was nice for flavor, but when I thought about how it would work in practice, it didn't work out. The self-trashing reaction was so it wouldn't stick around as a Confusion, but it was too boring to be a good reaction, so I switched it to the VP bonus/penalty.
Chieftain's Hall was my next attempt. I wanted to do something interesting with the set-aside action, but also have the attack still work if you couldn't set anything aside so the card wouldn't be useless with Forbidden. I thought of several options (e.g., making copies of the set-aside action cheaper, requiring other players to buy that action to avoid a penalty, etc.), but it ultimately proved too complicated to make work. Originally, you got Forbidden by buying/revealing a Province: The chieftain's authority fades once the crown (you) formalizes its own authority. This kind of flips the flavor of Forbidden as a state, since it's the chieftain's laws that are forbidden instead of you. I later thought making Curse get you Forbidden helped players who were being hit hard by the attack, similar to Mountebank, instead of helping players who were already doing well.
Finally, I thought: Forbidden can stop its accompanying card from pinning you, so it could let a card do things that would otherwise create a pin. Unfortunately, I didn't have any scrapped cards on hand that could have been good but for pin potential.
Ascetic Order was my attempt to make such a card, but making a potential pin card just because you can didn't seem like a good idea. So I returned to Helper Elves and fixed it up.