Law Enforcement Officers, or at least, un-capitalized law enforcement officers, appear in lots of canons, but NCIS is a show absolutely filled with them, so it fits as a mini there.

As long as there's some kind of beastie that affects Forgotten Realms' plot, it would suffice as a mini, even if that creature also happens to appear in main D&D settings as well.

(But please, no more mini-dragons. We've already got the "regular" variety for Narnia, mini-fire dragons as part of Airbender's cadre of minis, mini-time dragons for Wicked, and mini-ogre-dragon hybrids for Ella Enchanted. (Apparently, EE fanfic was a terrifying place back when the original OFUers were writing?) Also, hello Narnis the mini-dragon!)

I'm going to put in my non-vote right now for mini-Gelatinous Cubes, because that sounds simultaneously adorable, disturbing, and terrifying.

Anyway. The issue with Drizzt is that, for a lot of people, he's actually the main character of the Forgotten Realms stories. Imagine how... well, uninteresting things would be if Miss Cam had started off with 'mini-Frodos', and Meir Brin had followed with 'mini-Harrys'... everyone would have a horde of small copies of canon characters running after them. Compare that to the miniature flame-demons and talking spiders we got instead - which universe do you prefer?

Then there's the question of sentience... the vast majority of minis are not copies of intelligent creatures. Mini-Aragogs are, but they don't act like copies of Aragog - they act like small acrowhatevers. Mini-Drizzt? You'd be making small copies of a specific person, who then proceeds to be shipped off to a university (if such exists) to be forced into being a security guard, forced to attack fangirls - and, generally, treated as a slave. Um... isn't there something in Drizzt's backstory about slavery, and how he ain't a fan of it...?

I'm not a fan of character-derived minis in general. Mini-Nick Furys disturb me (and I've cowritten a story with one in, so yes, I have experience); the idea that there are mini-Cadfaels out there disturbs me even more. There are a lot of words for people who treat other people as property - and not many of them are nice.

So they make me, personally, uncomfortable. I would vastly prefer people to stick with minor, powerful, and iconic monsters - not miniature pet adult human beings. But, like the no-one said (yet), it ain't up to me.

hS

Most of the continua that you've mentioned don't have beasties in them. So they really don't bear any relevance to this discussion.

The onea that do have beasties are anofher matter. To answer those examples I would say this: Just because it has been done, doesn't mean it should be done again or even that it should have been done the first time. Not all precedent is good precedent.

-Phobos

They're the Narnia mini, confusingly enough. Narnia had, what, two dragons in all seven books? Maybe three, if you count Eustace's temporary transformation? In a way, though, it's a good thing, because it keeps any continua with dragons from automatically defaulting to said dragons as the most distinct native creature and means that the mini species can be more diverse.

As for the Phaerimm... well, no other continuum is going to have anything similar, I'm betting, so they're certainly unique. We should probably pick a mini that wouldn't provoke in the majority of agents the instinctive reaction to smash its horrendous pate in with any nearby blunt object, though. Minis can be menacing, but they normally don't go as far as "blood-drooling flying polyp/lamprey with almost-humanoid hands".

Suggesting that all of D&D's campaign settings will use the same mini is like suggesting that Bioshock Infinite and Borderlands 2 will use the same mini because they both run on Unreal Engine 3.

One of the badfics I was planning to mission has characters from the Unicron Trilogy and G1 continuities tossed into it at random, with poor enough spelling to create a new mini just about every few paragraphs. If there's a mini of a character that could be in either, such Cyclonus or Jetfire(and the fic doesn't distinguish between continuities, before you ask, which is one of its many major charges, so the overlapping characters mentioned there could easily be from either reality), what would the mini be? Would it be a crossover mini, like the ones briefly seen in the OFUA, and contain aspects of both the Scrapmetals and the Ick-Yak, or would mini determination gravitate toward one continuity somehow?