Rats, Rats, Rats as Big as Cats (GUMSHOE all)

 In the Quartermaster's store ... or in this case, a Manhattan Chipotle outlet.

Video sourced from PIX11 News

Rats have been a horror staple for I couldn't even tell you how long. Some of our most effective horror writers have used them with great success. James Herbert turned feral human-devouring rats into a trilogy which ended with them munching on a thinly disguised Maggie Thatcher. Herbert turned those rats into a career, and became one of the grand masters of horror as a consequence. 

Bram Stoker wrote one of his most effective horror shorts, The Judge, about a rat-infested house, and of course our dear friend Dracula has a close relationship with rodents - so close that Stephen King  borrowed the idea for Salem's Lot. He created a moment so hideous that his agent insisted he cut it from the narrative; I had them swarming all over him like a writhing, furry carpet, biting and chewing, and when he tries to scream a warning to his companions upstairs, one of them scurries into his open mouth and squirms as it gnaws out his tongue said King.

M.R. James once pulled a very sneaky blinder by titling a short story Rats, leading with a quote from Charles Dickens about bedclothes a-heaving with the rats under them, only to immediately forswear rats entirely and write the story about something else. Deceitful old soul that he was. 

New York is obsessed with rodents in a way I can't recall encountering anywhere else. Whenever someone posts a video about rats dragging away slices of pizza, people dressed in rat costumes wandering about in subway stations, giant inflatable rats posted at Union protests, I don't even bother asking which city. It's always New York. One of my favorite zombie movies is a rat zombie film, set in New York's Mulberry Street, made on a shoestring and remarkably well put together.

Sourced from The Palace of Horror

Why rats? Again, King has the answer.

I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud.

Rats, and vermin in general, are easy gross-outs. Just having them appear in the scene is enough to get a lot of people shaking in their khakis. One rat's bad enough - so let's have two, three, a dozen. They make us feel vulnerable, and where a kaiju or some larger creature terrifies though size and ferocity, rats do the same and worse by making us feel small.

One of James Herbert's most effective moments, which appeared in the film adaptation, comes when the rats swarm a baby. In the film you never see the body but that's definitely not the case in the novel. Herbert looks that moment square on, as if there was a camera put right over the cradle. The family dog does its best but is quickly overwhelmed, and soon after that the child's torn apart. Which is how rats make us feel - tiny, defenseless, vulnerable.

Bear in mind, that's all aroundabout page 20. Start as you mean to go on, I suppose. 

See, you can fight a wolf. You can hunt a bear, catch a shark. Rats, on the other hand, are like zombies - the weight of numbers is on their side. Kill one, there are ten more. Kill ten, there are a hundred. You can never kill them all. As for running ...

When I speak of poor Norrys they accuse me of a hideous thing, but they must know that I did not do it. They must know it was the rats; the slithering, scurrying rats whose scampering will never let me sleep; the daemon rats that race behind the padding in this room and beckon me down to greater horrors than I have ever known; the rats they can never hear; the rats, the rats in the walls. H.P. Lovecraft

It doesn't help that rats are pretty much contemptuous of us humans. They'll invade our spaces, wander though our kitchens, our bedrooms as they please, when they please. They'll attack us, bite us, where another animal might run. A cornered rat will bite a cat, it's said. To fight like a cornered rat is to fight with utmost ferocity, no holds barred. 

The Quartermaster's Store, that cheerful ditty, may pre-date the Great War but it certainly became popular then, and no surprise. The War had more than its fair share of rat stories. 

Deathwatch

Entropy (n) lack of order or predictability; gradual decline into disorder. As symbolism goes, you can't get better than rats. Look at what happened at the Chipotle: wires destroyed, stock eaten, staff injured, a decline into disorder that leads inevitably to destruction - or in this case, closure. 

So any scenario involving rats ought to be reinforcing that theme: disorder, decline, unpredictability. 

With all that in mind:

The Nest

The characters are asked to go to X and recover Y. For purposes of this outline it doesn't matter what X or Y actually are. Y is valuable enough to send some poor shmucks to go get it, and X is a place that once was quite nice and now is not. It could be a subway station. an airport, a fine mansion on the hill. Or none of these things. 

The previous occupant(s) were less than cleanly. Maybe it was an aged packrat (eh? ehhh?) who piled everything up until trash overwhelmed them. Maybe it was squatters, or some eccentric billionaire who forgot how to take showers and clip their toenails. Whoever it was, they left a lot of stuff behind, some of which is valuable. That's apart from whatever Y is worth; extra loot, which the characters might carry away for themselves.

Then they find the bones. At first it's animals; cats, dogs, relatively ordinary creatures whose corpses were dragged inside and flung into a midden. It's unusual behavior for unintelligent animals; people create middens all the time, octopi also, but it's rarer for other creatures. 

Then they start finding human remains, picked clean. Some were transients, people who probably came here for shelter. Others may have been ambushed and brought here; kids, city workers, people who got too close. Somehow they were dragged here after death, their bodies carefully hidden away.

Then they find the holes, the tunnels that lead downward, ever downward.

Options: 

• The rats are being channeled or powered by a minor supernatural or Outer Dark entity; a ghost, say, or some kind of dybbuk. This spirit has inhabited the decaying flesh of one of the corpses and so long as that corpse isn't buried or otherwise dealt with, the rats will keep coming back.
• The rats are being controlled by a different kind of rat, perhaps one with multiple heads (credit to James Herbert for that one.) This super-rat has psychic control over their lesser brethren, a kind of Queen status. It can't move very quickly so if the characters find this rat they should be able to kill it - provided they can get past all the other rats.
• The problem is X. Wherever or whatever X is, it's not a place as we understand the term. It's entropy manifest. It started small, perhaps one room in a much larger structure, but over time entropy infested everything, took over the complete building, with unfortunate consequences for the people who lived/worked there. There may not be a way to defeat it, but there ought to be a way to contain it for now. Later, someone with more smarts or resources can actually destroy it. You hope ...

Enjoy!

Forgotten London: Rat Queen (GUMSHOE, Bookhounds of London, Night's Black Agents)

From Westwood & Simpsons' The Lore of the Land: A Guide to England's Legends:

The tradition concerns a mysterious, luck-bringing Queen Rat. This was a supernatural creature whose true appearance was that of a rat; she would follow the toshers [sewer workers] about invisibly, as they worked, and when she saw one that she fancied she would turn into a sexy-looking woman and accost him. If he gave her a night to remember she would give him good luck in his work; he would be sure to find plenty of money and valuables [among the garbage that ends up in the sewer] He would not necessarily guess who she was, for though the Queen Rat did have certain peculiarities in her human form (her eyes reflected light like an animal's, and she had claws on her toes), he probably would not notice them while making love in some dark corner. But if he did suspect, and talked about her, his luck would change at once; he might well drown, or meet with some horrible accident.

In Bookhounds, the Flusher (Contacts in the East End) is the theme-specific descendant of the tosher. Flushers know what's been found in the sewers, and who's been lost there, and they know the tangled labyrinth of tunnels beneath all London. The flushers will not talk to those they know despise them … although their sergeant, the Ganger, might unbend for a good reason. Especially if they've seen something Down There that you can show you know something about.

As with most things to do with the Victorian poor, Henry Mayhew is the most useful source.

Were it not a notorious fact, it might perhaps be thought impossible, that men could be found who, for the chance of obtaining a living of some sort or other, would, day after day, and year after year, continue to travel through these underground tunnels for the offscouring of the city; but such is the case even at the present moment … Many wonderous tales are still told among the people of men having lost their way in the sewers, and of having wandered among the filthy passages - their lights extinguished by the noisome vapours - till, faint and overpowered, they dropped down and died on the spot. Other stories are told of sewer-hunters beset by myriads of enormous rats, and slaying thousands of them in their struggle for life, till at length the swarms of the savage things overpowered them, and in a few days afterwards their skeletons were discovered picked clean to the bones …

They carry a bag on their back, and in their hand a pole seven or eight feet long, on one end of which there is a large iron hoe. The uses of this instrument are various; with it they try the ground wherever it appears unsafe … Should they, as often happens, even to the most experienced, sink in some quagmire, they immediately throw out their long pole armed with the hoe, which is always held uppermost for this purpose, and with it seizing hold of any object within their reach … without the pole, however, their danger would be greater, for the more they struggled to extricate themselves from such places, the deeper they would sink … in addition to the long hoe already described [they equip themselves] with a canvas apron, which they tie around them, and a dark lantern similar to a policeman's [with a lens that could be restricted] this they strap round them on their right breast, in such a manner that on removing the shade, the bull's-eye throws the light straight forward when they are in an erect position, and enables them to see everything in advance of them for some distance; but when they stoop, it throws the light directly under them, so that they can then see any object at their feet.

Rat Queen

Athletics 9, Health 5, Scuffling 10

Hit Threshold: 6 (small and nimble) or 4 (human form)

Alertness Modifier: +1

Stealth Modifier +3 (rat form) or 1 (human)

Weapon: -2 (bite, rat form), -1 (bite, human form), claws +0 (human form)

Special: a bite from a Rat Queen does not heal. In game terms, the Health damage heals but the wound still seems recent and will not scar or scab over. This is because the Queen uses these bites to mark her prey, either so she can give her victim good luck, or so she can track the ones she hates. Any bitten victim can be tracked unerringly by the Queen, and her Alertness and Stealth modifiers increase by 2 against those victims.

Armor: none. However a Rat Queen killed, or buried, in London's sewers or the river Thames will re-form one month to the day after being killed. To ensure she doesn't come back, it's best to bury a Rat Queen far from London, or at least to burn the remains and scatter them to the winds.

Stability: +1 in rat form, none in human form unless the person seeing her knows what she really is, in which case loss is +1.

Magic: 8, refreshed each day at sunset.

Spells: Rat Queens are often friendly with ghouls, and many know how to Call/Dismiss Mordiggian. Rat Queens of this type can also summon ghouls, on a 4-point spend per ghoul summoned.

Create Hypertime Gate is also a common Queen trick. All of them know Dominate, and are very familiar with Idiosyncratic Magic. This last is why so many would-be sorcerers seek them out, often at their peril.

A 2 point Magic spend summons one Rat Thing, or a 20-strong rat swarm. Up to 6 points can be spent this way in one scene.

While in the sewers, a Rat Queen can summon dead toshers from the muck where their forgotten bones sank. Treat as zombies for combat purposes, and for each 1 Magic point spent the Queen gets a tosher. They all have weapons, their hoes, which strike for +1.

Rat Queens know where all kinds of peculiar things are hidden, lost, or abandoned. Seekers after treasure, or just a back way in to some well-guarded sanctum, can bargain with the Queen, but her price is usually very high indeed.

Some Bookhounds claim a Rat Queen can, if she wishes, give their store good luck. A Windfall can be had, if the Bookhounds meet her terms. Of course, her enmity works the other way, and any Bookhound store on the Queen's bad side suffers a Reverse. This is why some nervous Bookhounds frequent East End and riverside pubs; they hope to catch the Queen's roving eye.

Killing and properly disposing of the body of a Rat Queen dispels all of her magical effects, for good or ill. So Windfalls vanish, as well as Reverses. However if it ever becomes known who did it, other Rat Queens, Rat Things and ghoulish allies will take vengeance against the killers.

While Rat Queens don't lead cults, they have many friends in the East End and sewer Flushers, and can call on these friends for any aid short of actual combat. Many of these friends have been the Queen's lover in the past, and bear her bite mark; a useful identification aid for Bookhounds trying to work out who to trust.

Night's Black Agents Variation: though Rat Queens can still be found in the East End, and particularly Docklands, the area has transformed since Mayhew's day, and so have the Queens. Now they can often be found in gastropubs, or the latest two-or-three star restaurant, or some banker's multimillion pound den overlooking the shining City and the Thames. They move among the elite, and have become power players in their own right. Their ability to confer Luck makes them very popular creatures, and they trade on this, changing lovers every other week or so. Rats ride high, in this new London. In a Dracula Dossier game, Dracula long ago learned about the Rat Queens, but whether they became his Minions or remain a neutral supernatural power is an open question. If they did not become minions, they surely resent this foreign parvenu and can be persuaded to become temporary, fickle allies, with the right inducement. If they did, a Queen will be in charge of a London-based Node, perhaps a Satanic temple; they accept nothing less than dominance inside their territory, but aren't interested in anything outside London. In a NBA game without Cthulhu or related magic, assign two free and one other Renfield power to a Queen, and Aberrance 10.

Enjoy!

Vampire Rats (Night's Black Agents)

I'm a big fan of Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London series and its hero, PC Peter Grant. However, living where I do means I can't always pick the latest up on release. I recently devoured Lies Sleeping, in which Peter and his two nemeses, former colleague Leslie and the Faceless Man, have their Good, the Bad and the Ugly showdown. I'm not going to talk about that, except to say go read the damn thing already what the hell are you waiting for? What I'd like to talk about is a very brief non-spoilery throwaway gag.

Nightingale and Frank Caffrey dealt with a vampire nest in Neasden. Curiously these turned out to be infected rats …

That's such a good idea it deserves to be stolen. There's even a small precedent:

"I heard a commotion one day in the yard,” he said, “and there was a young turkey thrashing about the yard with two rats hanging to its neck. I ran into the yard and drove them away and found that they had sunk their teeth into the back of the turkey’s neck and had been sucking the blood. The turkey was strong, but the wounds poisoned it, and swelled its head and I had to kill it. The worst of it is, these rats won’t be poisoned, for they refuse to eat raw meat or cheese that has been fixed for them."

Also, a very fun movie, Mulberry Street. I had a DVD copy but it rotted. I shall have to get another one somehow.

In Night's Black Agents rats get group stats, which increase in stacks of 10. For every 10 rats added to the horde, its Health, Athletics and Damage all go up. Otherwise its ability pools and damage are fairly unremarkable. It works best in large numbers, which is why Steven King wanted to use them in Salem's Lot, but was persuaded against it because it was felt the scene was too gruesome. "I had them swarming all over him like a writhing, furry carpet," says King, "Biting and chewing, and when he tries to scream a warning to his companions upstairs, one of them scurries into his open mouth and squirms as it gnaws out his tongue." King was drawing on a similar moment in Stoker's Dracula, where a horde of flesh-chewing rats are neatly disposed of by Godalming's dogs.

To make this work in-game, the Director needs to answer an important question. Did this happen by accident or design?

If accident, then there must be something that caused this. Perhaps the strange pathogen that created vampires first came from rats, and some of the breed still carry the strain. Or the chemicals got out of the vat, the rats ate a vampire in its coffin and gained some of its powers, what have you. The key thing here is that to understand, and beat, the pack, the agents will need to discover what the accident was, which itself is at least one or two scenes' worth of investigative work. If they don't do this, then the likelihood is they won't exterminate the threat. No matter how much damage they do, one or two of the infected will escape, to carry the infection to another pack.

Once the agents understand the accident, they can devise some kind of cure, perhaps by introducing an antigen of some kind to the wider population. Then the rats solve the problem themselves, by passing the McGuffin on to the rest of the pack. Or perhaps they just spray holy water on anything that moves and most things that don't.

If it was by design, then there has to have been a purpose. Perhaps the vampires intended to use the rats as emergency blood packs, spies, assassins, saboteurs. A magical strain of vampires might give these rat packs to favored human servants as animal familiars; after all, the whole point behind the fabled witch's mark is that the familiar sucked blood from its master at that point. Whatever that purpose may be, the agents need to understand it so they can beat the rats, or work up some kind of defense. If you know that rat saboteurs might come after the cables and wiring in your safehouse, put down lots of rat poison laced with vampire banes. If you know that these rats are magical familiars, then you also know that blooding the witch will cause them to run away in terror.

Next question: how powerful are these meant to be? Answer being, not very. These are minor antagonists at best, not boss monsters. I'd recommend treating them like inferior Renfields, so where Renfields get 12 points to add to abilities, vampire rats get only 4, no  bonus to alertness, +1 melee damage, no free powers, one other power, aberrance starts at 3 and goes up by 1 for every 10 extra rats in the pack. Feats of Strength probably aren't an option, but otherwise pick the one you like the look of. Vulnerable to the same banes and blocks as the vampire that created them, and if that means they explode in daylight, well, now you have kamikaze exploding vampire rats to worry about.

Lucky you!

Rats In The ATM (Night's Black Agents, Mumbai)

Only time for a quick one this week as there's a lot on. Among other things I'm directing a play - first read-through today - and making a cheesecake for my birthday, cos I like cheesecake. ;)

This one borrows from Ken Hite's Looking Glass Mumbai as well as this article about an ATM whose contents were devoured by rats.

Now to the story seed:

Making Bank

This broadcast is a one-day silly season attention getter for most media outlets, but for the agents it's a different story. There's enough detail in the Indian press to indicate the involvement of a Bhuta, possibly more than one. Although the Western press have only picked up on the ATM incident it's clear from Hindi outlets that this is the third incident of its type in the last three weeks. It's the first to involve an ATM; the other two were less eye-catching. Interesting side note: all three events have taken place within walking distance of Antilia, allegedly the largest private home in the world. Moreover a 0-point Traffic Analysis or similar discovers that at least one member of the Antilia's staff were near or on the site of each incident moments before it occurred. In fact a senior staff member was the last person to use the ATM before its rodent infestation. Is this Conspiracy action, or something else?

Option One: Unwelcome Guests. It's a curious fact known to few (1 point High Society or similar) but the family that built Antilia don't live in it. They hold parties and events there, but as soon as the last guest leaves so do they. Rumor has it this is because they fear bad luck; experts say the building has bad Vastu Shastra. The experts aren't wrong; the building has become a magnet for Bhuta. In fact the building is so crammed with spirits that some of them are ranging out into the wider world in search of excitement. The staff are very well paid and know better than to tell anyone about what's going on, particularly foreigners; no amount of reassurance or bribery will work on them, though Intimidation mixed with Occult Studies or Vampirology might. It's not the Conspiracy this time - but getting too close might get someone hurt or killed.

Option Two: Shot Across the Bow. The local Conspiracy Node is leaning on Reliance Industries, which is controlled by Mukesh Ambani, owner of Antilia. Reliance is in a range of different industries from petrochem to telecom, retail, and special economic development, so the Director's free to choose which of those lines the Conspiracy is interested in. Reliance also does business with Russian interests, so depending on the nature of your Conspiracy it might be his Russian friends that got him in this fix. Regardless, the Conspiracy is making its position plain: so far we haven't hurt you - but we could. Submit. Rescuing Ambani from this threat could earn the agents a powerful friend, the kind that can grant Excessive Funds.

Option Three: Good Staff is Hard to Find. A senior member of staff (of a total of 600) has drifted too close to the vampires. She might have found a Conspiracy asset or an unaligned bloodsucker, but whichever it was snacked heartily. The staff member didn't quite die, but it was a very close thing. Now her paramour wants to seal the deal - it wants a loyal Renfield at Antilia, and thinks the staff member is ripe for the plucking. However the frightened woman is hiding in Antilia, and there is some Bane or other preventing the vampire from getting in and taking what it wants. The Bhuta are a side-effect of the vampire's presence; it can't get rid of the things, much as it would like to.

Enjoy!