Rethinking Wererats

In D&D, wererats don’t get a lot of respect. Perhaps this is appropriate—after all, neither do normal rats.

Still, it seems like they fall far too easily into clichéd tropes. When most werecreatures show up in adventures (at least published ones), it’s either as the main antagonist for low- to mid-level parties, or as the interesting secret identity of some NPC (often a minor noble the characters may or may not interact with).

But not wererats. They’re consigned to the sewer.

It’s such a typical setup that an editorial in Dungeon, talking about what made a successful submission, once went out of its way to discourage adventures with wererats in sewers. And yet even they (in the form of their offspring Pathfinder) can’t seem to get away from the habit: Greg A. Vaughan’s otherwise excellent “Shadow in the Sky” has a group of Riddleport beggars…who are also a criminal gang…who are also wererats…who live in a dump. It’s a lycanthropic cliché quadfecta!

I shouldn’t pick on Vaughan—he's a good author, and one man’s cliché is another’s useful shorthand. Sewers and dumps make sense as wererat habitats, and Ziphras and his gang are just side treks, so there's no reason to push them beyond price-of-entry.

But as we’re busy thinking of ways to reapproach iconic D&D races and subraces, wererats deserve our attention. Because a) it’s fun, and b) certainly no one else will give it to them.

The late, lamented “basic” D&D had one interesting twist. All kinds of oddities crept into the Known World/Mystara—after all, this was a setting that had Arabian-inspired countries bordering Scandinavian-inspired ones, and a monster (the thoul) that was inspired by a typo. Wererats are yet another example. For some odd reason, in the Known World most wererats weren’t people who turned into rats, but rather rats who turned into people(!).

I’ve always wondered at what point that decision was made, and by which designer, as well as what it might suggest about the exceptional nature of wererats versus other lycanthropes. And pity the poor rat who, having been bitten by his werecousin and infected, finds himself in an alleyway for the first time as a shivering, naked human man….