Dead I Am the Rat
At the beginning of the year, I made a goal of publishing and selling an adventure. I have a handful I'm writing, but like so many other projects I have, I work on them when time and inspiration permit. Since I have the comparative luxury not to need income from them, there's no real time pressure for me, except whatever I invent for myself. But deadlines are good for my creativity, so I thought I'd try my hand at actually publishing and selling something. Enter “Dead I Am the Rat”.
You can buy it at the link below, but if you want to know more about what went into it, read on.
The concept for this was essentially a shower thought from November 2023 right after my local Spookyfest event (one of three RPG Fests we run in and around western Queens each year since 2021). I was listening to the Rob Zombie song “Dragula” when it occurred to me (via lyrics you can easily find) that I could build a Mausritter adventure structured like “Bakto's Terrifying Cuisine”, but with the goal of having rat zombies as the PCs, and their goal to assassinate (or at least drive away!) the cat lord.
Over the course of 2024, I set about writing locations. Slowly. I had a map of the region pretty early on, as well as location names and some familiar Mausritter tropes (cat lord! bat cultists!) and some that are now semi-canonical in my Mausritter adventures (vampire rabbits!). But an adventure is more than just some locations. I had to tie things together in ways that could be gamed or at least inspire creative solutions, and I needed to develop the cat lord in a way that he would be overwhelming if taken head on, but approachable if player rats could remove his supports. I hope I've captured that! In any case, I spent a lot of 2024 preparing for and running a Dolmenwood game that started in the Fall and ran through Spring of this year, which left me with less bandwidth for writing overall.
Let's talk about the structure of the game. I mentioned that it owes its basic structure to Bakto's Terrifying Cuisine, which I've run two or three times now for different groups, learning something each time. I always ran that with Troika! on the premise that Bakto's fit neatly into a surreal science fantasy concern. It's invariably fun and gross and deeply unnerving (in a good way). But it's the particular timing mechanic that makes Bakto's a great one-shot for RPG Fests.
Bakto's runs on a countdown timer, with some loose guidelines on how and when to decrement the timer. Players have 20 turns to gather their ingredients and cook a meal for the eponymous demon. If all you do with the timer is decrement it every 10 real world minutes, you can keep the adventure to between 3 and 4 hours: 3 hours, 20 minutes for the turns; and then a bit more time to cook, present the dish, and resolve the outcome. Since one of my major concerns with picking adventures for one-shot use is uncertainty in timing, being able to predict timing in some sense is incredibly helpful.
So “Dead I Am the Rat” runs primarily on a turn timer. Whereas Bakto's offered loose guidance on turn tracking, I have much stricter rules for it.
Travel between locations on the map joined by solid lines takes one turn by car, two on foot. Travel between locations joined by a dashed line can only be accomplished on foot, and takes two turns. Interacting with a location (asking for information, searching and scouting, etc.) takes one turn. Combat takes one turn (but fleeing can save time.)
You can, of course, still use a physical timer, but the idea is that most interactive actions consume a turn. And keeping it to 20 turns (give or take...) still ensures that there's a cap on the total time. Moreover, the player rats have to finish their task before time runs out, putting some additional pressure on the players.
In the process of developing this adventure, I also was fortunate in that Bakto's was reviewed on Between Two Cairns, which gave me a chance to take stock and adjust my adventure to address some of the criticisms. Only one adjustment was substantive. The non-substantive adjustment was to put the map on its own page with all the player-known locations and pathways marked out, so it could be given to the players. There's no reason that the player rats, who I assert in the opening materials are from here, wouldn't know the lay of the land.
The substantive change was to connect many of the items directly to some strength of the cat lord, primarily as a way of mitigating that strength. There are plenty of “extraneous” items, of course, and the possibility of picking things up that aren't explicitly mentioned (say, via the night market in Stilton Warren), and those can be the source of additional creativity. Additionally, I mapped out the Dramatis Animalia as a series of factions with their own likes and dislikes, and placed them at different locations across the region, with the idea that players will spend some of their precious turns backtracking to get something important, to gain an ally, or to eliminate one of the cat lord's allies. Only playtesting will reveal how effective this is, but it looks good on paper!
And finally, let's talk about the car. Yes, it is literally Dragula from the Munsters. It is also the Dragula from the Rob Zombie song, with a creative interpretation for how it's powered. You see, I like fungi. A lot. So I decided that this Dragula was powered by a fungi colloquially known as “witches” as a tongue-in-cheek nod to the song's lyrics. To find witches (which costs a turn!) player rats have to “dig through the ditches”, and then to power theur car they “burn through the witches”. Enough said, right? Well, I figure since the witches are a form of currency, they should be useful in at least two ways, so in addition to being a fuel source for the car, they are also like healing potions for rat zombies, which explains why the graveyard ghosts really want them as well.
On the whole, I am hoping that the combination of limited turns, scattered resources, and a limited multi-purpose currency offers enough unpredictability that even the GM can play to find out what happens. That is one of the OSR attitudes I have come to value.
With luck, I've created something enjoyable and memorable for your table!
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