In Defense of Rats in the Basement

In parallel with my Strangers on a Train game, I’ve also been running Nightmare Over Ragged Hollow by Joseph R. Lewis. It has been refreshing to run Nightmare, as a change of pace from the relatively high-concept Strangers premise, because the idea is straightforward: The local temple is mysteriously surrounded by a golden dome, trapping people inside. The PCs are locals who need to figure the problem out. A small adventuring region around the town provides different opportunities to tackle the problem. Classic fantasy adventure stuff.

In the first session of the game, the PCs decided to make some money by clearing vermin out of the local tailor’s basement. If you’re already groaning, you’re familiar with the rats-in-the-basement cliche; an RPG trope in which novice PCs are given a trivial, one-dimensional fight against low-HD monsters to kick off the game.

Tropes have their place, though. “You meet in a tavern” is another cliche, but it is a cliche because it gets the PCs together and into the action quickly. “Rats in the basement” provides an immediate problem with a straightforward solution that PCs can solve quickly without taking up much session time.

But there are both good and bad ways to run a rats-in-the-basement scenario. A few details can make all the difference. Here’s how I ran this scenario.

There’s a reason for the reward. One of the players quite reasonably asked why a tailor was willing to pay 100 GP for someone to clear vermin out of his basement. I decided that he had an order from the nearby kingdom for some elaborate finery (something like the “London Season” in England in the 19th century, which fueled much of the textile industry at that time). He needed to retrieve the raw materials from his basement in time to complete the work. That was reason enough to justify the reward, and also did a bit of background worldbuilding.

The situation is at least somewhat unknown. The vermin in the basement are not ordinary rats, but spider-rats, and they have some great art (below, by artist Li-An). Always show the players the art! Mechanically, the spider-rats are not too different from mundane rats. But they feel different. Just like the rattagator and the doom cow, the spider-rodents are mechanically ordinary, but the players don't know that, and they are flavorfully evocative enemies. 

Something is at stake beyond HP. After the lead PC failed a roll to start the encounter, I ruled that a spider-rat would drop from the ceiling and crawl into his clothes. So when the resulting fight broke out, there was also a non-combat situation (spider-rat in clothes) with a non-combat goal (eating the PC’s rations). This was simple and low-stakes, but it made the situation feel three-dimensional instead of two-dimensional.

There is an x-factor. The encounter describes the webbed nest of the spider-rats, which serves as a visual reminder that these aren’t ordinary rats (even if they are ordinary rats in terms of mechanics). The web is ultimately harmless, but the PCs don’t know that, and not knowing makes the fight more interesting.

Tactics are weighed against risks. The PCs decided that igniting the nest would be the fastest way to deal with the spider-rats… which might be true… but it would also be the fastest way to destroy the fabrics that were the reason for the job in the first place. A terrible roll nearly lit the tailor’s precious fabrics on fire, and only some quick thinking on the PCs’ part saved them.

There is a choice. The spider-rat that started out in the PCs clothes was the last one left at the end of the fight. The PCs decided to spare it and gave it a nickname. The spared spider-rat goes in the bag of threads, where it can get tangled up with other threads, and potentially reappear later in the game. Players love callbacks like this for multiple reasons, not the least of which is that it shows that choices they made changed the world, are remembered, and come back in unexpected ways.

The World's Largest Rewrite: Floating Heads, Mother Fungus, Cellipedes

Last time: The World's Largest Rewrite: Dungeon Is Wet, Tortoise Foreshadowing, and 30-50 Feral Hogs

 #51: Green Slime. This could again be interpreted as a connection to the dragon, but I don’t want to make an entire section of the dungeon oops-all-slimes. I’m instead going to put the green slime(s) below the pixies – in both senses of the word. We haven’t been very specific about verticality yet, besides some broad strokes, but I’m thinking that the upper left corner (where the fresh water comes in from the "roof") is near the top of the dungeon, while the lower right corner (where seawater comes in from the ocean) is near the bottom. I like the idea that the green slimes are forming on the ceiling on the level below where the dragon is, as runoff from its breath attack, and moving laterally through some point of connectivity that could potentially be exploited by explorers. 

#116: Stirge. I’ve got a bit of an order of operations going for responding to these random rolls. Some of these immediately suggest a fit based on what we’ve already established about the dungeon. Others become clear once I check the OSE entry and notice some evocative bit of flavor, or an ability I didn't know about.

If I need more beyond those two steps, I’m going back to the Monster Overhaul once again. The stirge (“skeeter” in Overhaul terminology) has a table for reskins that are mechanically identical, but very different in aesthetics. I rolled and got “Rotting floating head. Lank hair, no eyes.” This immediately sparked some ideas. Perhaps some number of the prisoners in this prison were executed by beheading, and now those severed heads are mindless blood drinkers, wandering the halls. I’m going to place them near the wights, on the assumption that the execution chamber would be near those undead wardens.

#137 Yellow Mould. No entry in the Overhaul, possibly because yellow mould is more of a dungeon hazard than a “creature” per se. It is also possible that its functionality is captured by the lavish two-page spread for myconids. OSE doesn’t appear to have myconids, so we can liberally use the Overhaul tables to figure out what is up with this yellow mould.

Rolling on the “spore attack” table, we get “fungal curse,” which means that a creature failing the save will eventually sprout a “mother fungus,” forming a new colony. I like the idea that this fate befell a prisoner who was interred here, and a new colony formed in the dungeon.

Riffing off this idea further, I imagine these fungi are somewhat like the mycorrhizal fungi that allow trees to communicate in some forests. Rather than a purely parasitic dungeon hazard, I like the idea that the fungi are symbiotic, and are probably a major source of food, exchanging (non-toxic) edible mushroom growth with other dungeon denizens for things they want (especially water and fertilizer). Because tiny fungal filaments connect many parts of the dungeon, they can provide information or facilitate communication. We’ll place the mother fungus near the fresh water, but assume that their filaments have spread to many parts of the dungeon where there is at least some moisture and not too much heat.

#21: Centipede, Giant. A classic, flexible dungeon monster that can go anywhere. OSE notes they favor damp areas, but we need to narrow it down further than that (remember, dungeon is wet). The Monster Overhaul includes both a monstrous vermin category, and another section for ancient anthropods. Going with the latter because it has an intriguing “why fight these ancient anthropods” table, we roll a prompt that “one of them ate the key to this chest.”

I’m going to tweak that and combine it with the other tables in the entry that generate weird head-shapes for these bugs. These “cellipedes,” known colloquially as the prisoner’s best friend, have evolved key-like protuberances on their heads. They are drawn to places like prisons; the more locked doors, the better it is as a breeding habitat for these sickos. They can be used to open some doors, and particularly rare specimens have a skeleton key ability, and are able to open many locked doors. 

#99: Roc. I love that OSE has giant roc, large roc, and small roc. Given that the roc’s brand is “very large bird,” I'm kinda skeptical that three categories were required. We don’t have manual entries for “tall halfling” or “non-animated skeleton.” 

OSE notes that rocs are lawful creatures who react negatively to non-lawful creatures, and can also be trained as mounts. So let’s associate them with the prison builders. We haven’t yet decided pinned down the builders’ whole deal, but for the prison to make sense as an adventuring site, it helps to presume that their authority and control has partially or completely lapsed. 

To put a twist on the roc here, let’s make it a big egg. Not every monster has to appear in its fully grown adult form. And finding an egg is a classic sort of unusual “treasure” for PCs; a player in one game I ran took a deep interest in the unhatched egg of a giant carnivorous parrot, which became a focus of downtime work for many sessions afterward. We’ll drop it near the wights, on the assumption it has or had something to do with the builders/jailers.

#78: Mule. Another mundane animal. My first thought was to make them a population descended from working animals when the prison was built, like the wild burros of the southwestern United States, who descended from domesticated donkeys brought to the area by prospectors. Then I remembered that mules are, uh, by definition not the type of animals you’re going to find breeding in the wild.

So we’ll go with a more ordinary explanation, and say that mules are survivors of adventuring parties that have entered the dungeon. Some of them have gathered here to dwell among their own kind. I like the idea that mules regularly appear on the dungeon's random encounter table as well, with each mule encountered giving hints as to the status (or final fate) of the adventurers who brought that mule into the dungeon. Mules also have a few useful sundry items on them ("found a mule" is local dungeon slang for a stroke of good fortune; more dungeons should have custom slang). An amusing recurring motif is mule-as-evidence of a TPK. Somehow the lowly pack animal always survives.

#65: Kobold. Our first humanoid! OSE uses the old-school characterization of kobolds, noting they are “canine,” while the Monster Overhaul goes with a modern take, describing them as "reptilian" and dropping them in the “dragon” section of the book. I’m sympathetic to Skerples on this taxonomic decision, given how much more prevalent that portrayal is these days, and I'll go the same route since I'm sticking to OSE where I can. But I cannot continue without mentioning that the very good boy Kuro makes a strong case for the canine kobold. I love the Dungeon Meshi portrayal, especially because “dogfolk” never really clicked in D&D the way tabaxi did. It’s a minor gripe, but I always thought the dogfolk in Thracia were the least interesting of the beastmen faction members.

…What were we talking about? Oh yeah, the World’s Largest Dungeon. Kobolds, regardless of aesthetics, are known for being numerous and individually weak, so I don’t think they make much sense as prisoners. Instead, let’s imagine they have entered the dungeon while delving underground. Did they get here intentionally or accidentally? Rolling on the Overhaul tables for prompts, we get “geckotian” kobolds (“sticky pads, marbled eyes”) with a current activity of “prodding a corpse” and “bucolic mushroom farms” as a current scheme. I think this is already more interesting than just making them dragon servants and calling it a day. 

Let’s say they entered the dungeon seeking the yellow mould mother fungus. Prodding a corpse suggests they are corpse retrievers (and possibly even grave robbers) because they’re gathering fertilizer to bring to the fungus. There may be some tension with the mother fungus; the kobolds ideally would like to domesticate it, while the mother fungus wants to infect them. So they want different things and are in tension, which is a good scenario for the PCs to crash into.

#59: Hobgoblin. The humanoid hits continue. Modern D&D treats hobgoblins as martial warriors, something like how orcs were originally portrayed. OSE reverts hobgoblins back to their earlier presentation, but that doesn’t give us much to work with, as they are just “bigger goblins,” a trait they share with bugbears. At least bugbears have the element of surprise. The Monster Overhaul (correctly) just folds hobgoblins into the orc category, which we’ll save for when orcs come up in this dungeon. So that’s no help. Hobgoblins, hobgoblins, what do you do with those hobgoblins?

It’s a thin sliver of lore, but the OSE hobgoblin entry does note that thouls sometimes serve as bodyguards to hobgoblin kings. If you’re not familiar, thouls are an infamous monster from early D&D that combines aspects of hobgoblin, ghoul, and troll, and probably originated as a typesetting mistake.

Perhaps we can make our hobgoblins more interesting by playing up the connection to goblins, ghouls, and trolls. Let’s say that hobgoblins are themselves goblins who are particularly susceptible to mutation, something already implied in other treatments of goblins. Mutation has made them bigger, for starters, but some of them have also been able to mutate into traits from other creatures. We’ll hold further specifics of their mutative powers for a future monster that hasn’t been placed yet. I’m also not sure whether they are prisoners, tresspassers, or something else. We’ll revisit that later.

#32: Driver Ant. Part of the fun of this exercise is looking at the stripped-down presentation of creatures in OSE. There’s a less-is-more vibe to these monsters. At first glance, driver ants are giant bugs with a standard bite attack and not much else to distinguish them. But on second glance…

• Omnivorous and rapacious: “Consume everything in their path, when hungry” – I feel seen.
• Morale: “Attack relentlessly, once they are engaged in melee (morale 12). Will even pursue through flames.”
• Gold: “30% chance of 1d10 × 1,000gp worth of gold nuggets, mined by the ants.”

So there are a couple of adventure vectors here. The ants are driven by hunger and can eat a lot of different things. We can imagine them chewing through barriers made from organic material, invading and connecting different regions of the dungeon.

The morale aspect is compelling for games that use morale rigorously. One of my biggest complaints with modern-style play is the strong presumption that every fight only ends when all the monsters are dead. When I run games, I stress how advantageous it is to compel monsters to flee or surrender, rather than slaughtering all of them because of video game logic.

Contrasted with our expectation of how morale may quickly end a fight against hobgoblins or kobolds or mules (please, do not fight the mules), a monster that goes into a 12-morale frenzy when you melee with it is a big problem. PCs who study their behavior could distract them with food, pelt them with arrows from a distance, or trick other monsters into fighting them. But also… the ants may have gold in their lairs. So there’s also a strong incentive to risk engaging with them further.

#135: Wraith. This is our first incorporeal undead. OSE notes that they “Dwell in deserted regions or in the homes of former victims.” I think this suggests that they are prisoners, perhaps murders or other capital criminals who persist after death, but are trapped in the "deserted region" of the prison. 

We had previously decided that our wights could be guards. Perhaps part of their role is to guard the wraith prisoners? The OSE SRD description of energy drain doesn’t specifically state that it wouldn’t work on undead, but it follows logically from the flavor of the power to say that wights would be immune. 

Next time: The World's Largest Rewrite: Grey Horse, Devil Swine, and Normal Humans

*Slaps Roof of Wikipedia Article* This Bad Boy Can Fit So Many Monsters In It

Wikipedia is the DM’s friend. Even just hitting the random article button a few times – or spinning a virtual globe and looking up a real-world place – can produce ample gameable content. So let’s see how many ideas we can spin out of a real-world monster: The helmeted hornbill.

The casque (helmetlike structure on the head) accounts for some 11% of its 3 kg weight.

We don’t usually need to think much about the weight distribution of our monsters, but it can be an interesting way to flavor them. How is a giant flying creature's body built to accommodate that activity? Many of the prompts in my flavorful dragon post concerned that question.   

Here I’m picturing a huge flightless bird with a heavy casque on its bill. It basks in the sun on ridges and mountain crests until it sees interlopers on its territory. It then curls into a ball and tips forward to roll down inclines to smash into its prey.  

Unlike any other hornbill, the casque is almost solid, and is used in head-to-head combat among males.

This kind of behavior is pretty common in the real-life animal kingdom, but it rarely comes up in monster ecologies. This is a great way to present dangerous monsters that don’t care about the PCs; monsters fighting in this way are more like a hazard than a combat encounter. 

It is a belief among the Punan Bah that a large helmeted hornbill guards the river between life and death.

There’s nothing wrong with Cerberus, but mixing in mythology from other parts of the world is refreshing.

[The casque] and the bill are yellow; the red secretion of the preen gland covers the sides and top of the casque and the base of the bill, but often leaves the front end of the casque and the distal half of the bill yellow.

OK you don’t need to worry about preen glands for most of your monsters, but the secretions imply things about the monster. Does it protect them from some form of moisture endemic in the dungeon? Is it a unique and valuable resource that adventurers would want to harvest?

Their call is two parts, the first consisting of a series of loud, intermittent barbet-like hoots, sometimes double-toned and over two dozen in number, which sound like the "toop" or "took" noise of an axe. These hoots gradually accelerates to climax in a cackle reminiscent of laughter; this is thought to advertise information about the caller, such as age, size, and fitness, to listening conspecifics.

Conveying the idea of sounds to players is challenging. How many distinct ways can you describe bird calls? Unless you are a birdwatcher yourself, probably not too many. Copying a description like this can add a lot of flavor over a generic “you hear birds.” All the better if a player hears the hoots and uses magic that allows them to understand animals… and gets the hornbill’s dating profile for their trouble.

Because of this call, the Helmeted Hornbill is also known in Malay as the "Kill your mother in law" bird (Tebang Mentua). It is said that there once was a man who disliked his mother in law so much that he chopped down the stilts that supported her house while she was still inside of it to get rid of her. As punishment, the gods transformed him into the Helmeted Hornbill and so he was condemned to relive his crime forever by mimicking the sound of an axe striking foundation posts, followed with cackling glee at the house crashing down.

This could work with little or no change in a folkloric campaign. More generally, this is a much more compelling and specific idea for a monster than a lot of the standard book creatures. Many of modern D&D’s monsters have cursed origins, but they tend to be abstracted or attributed to broad cosmological forces. The genius loci flavor here is much stronger and more actionable.

Helmeted hornbills mostly eat the fruit of strangler figs.

One easy way to populate a wilderness hex or fill out a random encounter table is just to take real-world terms literally. Strangler figs become literal constricting plants that kill unwary adventurers. Studying the hornbill’s behavior (and how it feeds without being caught) is a useful survival strategy for an adventurer. 

I’ll leave it there, but there’s more we could harvest just from Wikipedia’s high-level view. But one last note. The real-world helmeted hornbill is critically endangered. I just donated to a group that supports conservation efforts for helmeted hornbills and other animals in Borneo. Go ahead and throw them a few bills, and enjoy the look on your players faces when you tell them how much damage they’re taking on a critical hit from a giant bird’s casque.

Ends, Themes, Scenes, and Cuts

Last week: SOMETHING Happens on Every Watch

 Tie Up Loose Ends

RPGs produce a lot of loose ends. Some of them will never be tied up, and that’s fine. Real life is the same way. 

But sometimes a rest watch can provide an easy opportunity grab those loose ends. An example I always remember is from the first season of Critical Role. A party member on watch sees a roc flying by at a great distance, and from context, they infer that it is a roc they previously encountered, and decided to spare. That’s a nice little way of calling back to previous events, without making it a capital-E encounter, or really anything that the party has to “do” anything with.

This can take other forms beyond just seeing something. PCs might have a prophetic dream, or receive a Sending or similar communication from an NPC, or simply stumble upon something static (like a crumpled up newspaper or broadsheet) that alludes to the conclusion of offscreen events.

Restate Fundamental Themes

This will sound weird, but… how often is the fundamental premise of your campaign restated? How often do the central conceits of the fictional world assert themselves in a form that isn’t a distinctive monster, special location, or important NPC?

It can help to have them appear a few times a session. Three is a good number. These don’t have to be important. It actually helps if they aren’t important, because it makes them feel less like hooks that the players are intended to act upon, and more like passive aspects of the world that would be present whether or not the adventurers noticed.

Dungeon dressing. Minor NPC behavior. Weather. And of course, random encounter results.

Say the campaign premise is that magic is returning to the world after a thousand-year absence. Yes, you will have upstart wizards upending society, and magical monsters overrunning the countryside. But there should also be lots of quiet, small, non-adventure-adjacent instances of resurgent magic affecting the game world. Are ordinary plants growing differently along the path? Has the weather or climate been altered in some small but noticeable way? How has life changed for a normal person in a small town? Big themes can’t be limited only to big representation. They need small representation too.

Do a One-on-One Scene 

“Stonks is on watch. Melvin wakes up to go to the bathroom, or maybe just can’t sleep. They have a brief conversation around the fire. What do they talk about?”

One-on-one scenes give characters a chance to bounce off each other. This could be two characters with tangled relationship or a beef; or it could be two characters who have little to do with each other, but find they share some perspective 

Yes, this is very much a story game idea. And I would use it pretty lightly in most games that aren't explicitly about interpersonal roleplay. But this can really flesh out a lot of detail that isn't going to come up in the ordinary course of exploration and adventure.

Cut Away to a Counterpoint Scene

This is another one I don’t do very often because it is very “filmic,” and that is not really my style of running games. But I think excluding it entirely would be a mistake, as it can be very powerful when used effectively. Players are steeped in books, TV shows, and other media that do this all the time. Cutting away from the main characters serves multiple purposes, including:

• Conveying the passage of in-game time without using a lot of real-life time
• Giving the PCs a break from being “on screen”
• Providing some urgency and highlighting “fronts” and other antagonist action

A friendly NPC or a character controlled by a player not present for that session can be a good viewpoint perspective to “explain” why the players can “see” the cutaway, even if their characters cannot; but it’s not strictly necessary to explain at all.

This is definitely to taste. Going into “director” mode can be too much for games that intentionally eschew those techniques. I don’t do this often, as it can put the players in audience mode, and I don’t like to run many scenes that are, effectively, me talking to myself.

But cutting away can be very compelling, and it can telegraph danger or urgency or change without dropping a tense situation or a long-ass combat encounter into every campfire rest.