Session 18: Ninety-Nine Bodies of Rats in the Hall

The party discovers a rare monster lair in the vicinity of Fort Fenrir. Zero prep.

Session report for May 9, 2024. Seven players adventured for two days.

Characters

Bastion, human fighter level 4
Bard the Stout, human fighter level 3
Deadleaf, elf assassin level 3
Mustacha, human ranger level 3
Arrek, human fighter level 1
Jude, half-orc cleric/assassin level 1/1
Stacks, human assassin level 1

The players found more than orcs last session and wanted to capitalize. They found ancient ruins in a badlands hex southeast of Fort Fenrir and wanted to investigate. The players geared up their mercenaries and made straight for the ruins.

My notes only indicated wandering pack of wolves. But a city left to rot for who knows how long could be full of valuable artifacts and deadly monsters. Could we make an adventure of it? AD&D appendices to the rescue!

First, I decided the ruins would contain a monster lair. I rolled on the random encounter table and got wererat. Wererats seem like more of an urban encounter to me, but I can work with it. And they have a good treasure table.

a wererat?

When the party reached the edge of the ruins, we switched to hex crawl mode. The ruins were within a 6-mile badlands hex. I randomly determined about how large the footprint of the ruins were - about 6 square miles. So I placed them at the edge of the ruins and they explored individual 1-mile hexes, generated in real time using Appendix B.

Deadleaf used his new pets to sped up the search. In downtime, he purchased a hunting hawk and a couple of guard dogs, and spent his spare time training them. The hawk zeroed in on activity a few miles away from where they started - hawks love to eat large rodents, naturally. The party discovered an opening around an old road that led into the ground.

The entrance was large enough for two people to climb in at a time. A bit of a squeeze, unless perhaps you were a lycanthrope in dire rat form! The players decided to leave their mercs and mounts outside and climb in.

They stood in the remains of an ancient sewer tunnel. Most of the tunnel had collapsed and rubble was everywhere. Deadleaf discovered a secret door at the end of the tunnel thanks to his keen senses. They also discovered that some of the rubble was moved recently to conceal two other exits!

At this point I swapped to Appendix A because I did not have a lair map prepared. I decided to limit myself to a handful of rooms and about half a sheet of paper. The first "special" room or "monster + treasure" room would be the lair of the rat men.

First, the party examined the secret door to see if they could open it. A pit opened up under them - it was a trap! I did not note who fell in because no one died.

They moved to the other side of the tunnel and cleared one of the rubble piles to reveal a narrow side tunnel. They followed it to a T-shaped intersection, and took the right path to a small rectangular room whose only exit was a dead end. They took their mandatory rest (every hour!) and searched around for secrets.

Little did they know, the other path led to the wererat lair. The wandering monster die indicated an encounter, and the party was surprised by the whole pack of ratmen.

I reasoned the wererats would take advantage of their surprise and attack, because they were so close to their lair. But they wanted to mitigate the risk of magic attacks from such a formidable party so they used their ability to summon giant rats to wear down the party's resources. Each round two ratmen would summon more rats until all their abilities had been used up.

By the time the party was aware they were under attack, 20 rats were on top of them. They formed up a line as quick as they could to protect the back line. We usually allow 3 characters to fight per ten foot square, so long as the collective space required by weapons don't overlap. By the same token, the swarm of wererats could easily fit 4 or more into the same area. All told, the party would make about 12 attacks per round versus the rats' 16.

how often can this ability be used?

It would be a grind. Each round the rats would make a hit or two for 1-2 points of damage, and the fighters would clear a few rats. At the end of the round, 4-24 more rats would pile into the hallway behind them. The players still had no idea where the rats were coming from, so much that they believed the rats were an illusion.

Bastion's men-at-arms fell one by one. Arrek succumbed to repeated nibbles. Jude picked up his shield and stood on the line. Stacks got bit and retreated into the dead end. Deadleaf (whose player was away dealing with a work call) couldn't get a clean shot past his brave front line.

Over 90 rats had come down the hall and the players were running low on resources.

Stacks spent the next couple of rounds searching frantically for a way out. Finally, he discovered a secret door at the dead end! [Remember this was generated by Appendix A - story gamers BTFO, you can't make this up!]

The assassins slinked into the next room, eager to find a way out. Lucky for them, the room was empty, but there were no visible exits. They had to search again, and each wall would take an entire round to examine.

Deadleaf and Stacks kept their cool and remembered the layout of the dungeon well enough to prioritize the walls that might lead to the way they came in. On the third round, Deadleaf discovered a secret door. When he opened it he saw a familiar pit trap on the other side. Stacks returned to the party to tell them they had an escape!

By this time, all but 4 giant rats had been killed and the ratmen were ready to pounce on the weakened party. The fighters won initiative and retreated beyond the secret door just as the ratmen advanced for the kill!

It cannot be stressed enough that this sequence of events was not staged in any way. Stacks and Deadleaf found the secret doors and got the rest of the players out of the fight on the very round the ratmen were going to attack - an additional failure to find a secret door, or a search of the wrong wall, would have resulted in the fighters pinned down by ten wererats. You cannot make this up!

Deadleaf was in trouble. Three ratmen came out of the tunnel towards the secret door. Surely they would cut off everyone's retreat.

Deadleaf leaned on his speed to make a daring play. He fired silver arrows at the ratmen and sprinted for the exit. One struck home and the wererat screamed in agony. It looked like Deadleaf would be able to escape, at least.

Thanks to his high dexterity, Deadleaf acted first on the following round and fired again. As luck would have it, he struck same target and killed it! The remaining wererats failed their morale check and ran back to fetch reinforcements.

The party had time to get over the pit trap and escape!

The ratmen were nipping at the party's heels as they exited the tunnel. There was some debate as to whether they'd attempt to fight the rats or flee. Frankly, the debate took too much real time to be reasonable and we were at the end of the session time. So I told them the ratmen were climbing out of the tunnel while they debated. Mustacha threw a firebomb at the tunnel entrance - man that guy is obsessed with flaming oil - which stalled the wererats for a minute (incidentally killing the one that made it out of the hole first) and allowed them to make an escape.

They vowed to finish off the warren another day.

THE VANQUISHED
86 giant rats
2 wererats
Arrek, level 1 human fighter

THE SPOILS
xxx

THE SCORE
193 xp to the survivors