What They Don't Tell You About Wererats - D&D

sometimes known as ratman these sly and evil creatures inhabit subterranean tunnel complexes beneath cities always smelling of putrid sewage where rats sneak around towns and cities in order to find things to steal people to ransom and fresh meat to consume before we go in though this video is brought to you once again by grim hollow the player's guide look guys the grim hollow player's guide is a book shock full of things that you desperately need for your campaign from new schools of magic like synchromancy blood magic to new subclasses for all of your favorite characters see their previous kickstarter was a great success a book that changed many of the ways that i run my games with the addition of bleeding as a condition to transformations like how to turn your character into a lich a vampire a werewolf and much much more now they have a new kickstarter and in it you will get a way to turn your characters into elementals and fae with full descriptors as to how the transformation 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general so we will cover all of this portion here on that one that video will probably be another 30 to 40 minute video so already not looking forward to editing it but for this one we will simply focus on whereas one of the many types of were beasts that exist in dungeons and dragons for that particular race of creatures we really only have this here which is sad a tiny portion of a page the reason it is sad is because whererats are a full race of creatures with culture mannerisms ecology and people forget that two werebeasts can procreate with each other to form more of the same type of werebeast so colonies of these type of creatures spot in the world all the time and they all have interesting societies they are not just a thing that you can get turned into if you get bitten by one they're not just a curse but anyways it says here that wereats are cunning liken tropes with sly avaricious personalities they are wiry and twitchy in humanoid form with thin hair and darting eyes in their humanoid and hybrid forms wereats prefer light weapons and use ambush tactics rather than fighting as a pack although a wereat can deliver a nasty bite in its rat form it favors that form for stealthy infiltration and escape rather than combat a wereat clan operates more like a thieves guild with wereats transmitting their curse only to creatures that they want to induct into the clan wereats that are accidentally cursed or break loose from the clan's control are quickly hunted down and killed then lastly it says that wheread clans are found throughout urban civilization often dwelling in cellars and catacombs these creatures are common in the sewers beneath major cities viewing those subterranean areas as their hunting grounds rats and giant rats are commonly found living among wereats now all the way over here in the corner we are told that if a human is turned into a wereat they gain a dexterity of 15 if they had less than that so they basically become way more nimble than the average person and then over here two pages later we get the actual stat sheet for the average we're at they are good at perception though i should point out that there should be a big asterisk on that where rats actually have terrible eyesight the reason they would have proficiency in perception would be because of their hearing and smelling which is actually really good anyways lycanthropes in general of course are only weak to magic or silvered weapons and so where rats in this stat sheet here share the same power though i also need to point out there should be another big asterisk in here where rat vulnerabilities and invulnerabilities are extremely hard to predict because they tend to always be different all werewolves for example are weak to silver everyone knows that but not all were rats are there are wara colonies that are actually immune to silver but maybe weak to cold iron some that could be immune to cold iron but then vulnerable to fire where rats are described as being the weakest of all of the lycan tropes in terms of raw power but they are also described as being the hardest to kill because finding their vulnerabilities is a task in out of itself typically if you find the vulnerability of a single wear ad you will find that the warren that that wearat comes from will all share that same vulnerability it's basically all based on the strain of the virus that created them anyways dark vision of 60 ft though this only applies in the rat form this is very important if you were transformed into a rare rat and you already had dark vision because maybe you were an elf then you get to keep that dark vision and that's important to know too generally speaking you do tend to keep some of your racial benefits when you transform into a lack and drop though some exceptions of course apply this here is meant to be used for a true lycanthrope that being a a wereat that was born a wereat because it had two where at parents now i should also point out because the monster manual didn't put in there but generally speaking the hybrid version of a wereat that is naturally born would also have dark vision however that dark vision is only 30 feet and then in the sun a wheread can only see up to 15 feet where rats are supposed to be myopic and basically almost blind especially when out into the sun now as far as abilities go a wereat can basically polymorph into many different forms one is the normal human form then a hybrid rad human form which is the one you see here in the picture and then to a full-blown giant rat his attacks are mostly based on the weapons it has in hand with an interesting exception of its bite which can transmit lycanthropy but that's it now let's continue on and talk about what the 5th edition monster manual did not tell you about whereas i think the first thing that we need to talk about which i believe is by far the most interesting part about the rat men are why we don't see more of them and this is the recurring question that i hit a lot if flack and tropes can reproduce with each other and they can infect others with their bites and claws and they are so resistant to damage why are they so rare well we're not going to speak about other lichen troops but whereas are very peculiar in this particular regard you have to wonder why don't we see a situation like in warhammer where you can find a whole civilization of ratmen i mean why don't wear it reproduce like rats can normal rats even carry the lycentropic disease so basically there's two reasons why they are so rare for one whereas have an aversion to reproduction which you probably didn't see coming and it is very ironic considering what they are see whereas are psychologically driven to avoid reproduction because whereas are parasites a where at colony cannot function on their own they cannot farm resources they cannot craft tools and they cannot hurt animals whereas take from people who do those things they find a group of people who produces and then they take those things from those people if whereas didn't have a society to steal from they would fall down and crumble this is also compounded by the fact that whereas have an extreme taste for humanoid flesh so when you combine those two factors you get a society that needs to have humanoids close by a city of humanoids that they can feed off of if the colony of wereats living in the sewers suddenly had an explosion of growth they would be found and then eliminated or worse yet they might take over the city with those new numbers and deplete its resources and then basically crumble and die once again whereas are parasites and a parasite that kills its host will die the other reason why whereas are so rare is actually based off of his ability to infect others see and you definitely would have not seen this one coming but whereas actually do not infect people with bites which probably goes against everyone's understanding of all liking tropes but see wereats are fairly unique in this the problem that wereats have in this regard is the way the virus is transmitted and the way their mouth is shaped the lycanthrope disease is carried through parasites in the body of a wereat these parasites can be found in many of the ways that you would expect including the saliva the problem lies in that the teeth of a wear rat are actually outside of the mouth and most times that means that those teeth do not carry saliva in them when a wearat bites you they do what we call a dry bite no fluids are actually being transmitted to the one getting bit and hence no parasites are being transmitted now of course there is still obviously a chance that you might get some saliva in there but generally speaking this is a 1 in 100 chance of you getting the parasite through a bite now hilariously most times the parasite ends up being transmitted by a weread it actually tends to be through normal weapon attacks which again i bet you didn't see coming you actually have a way better chance of getting like entropy from a wereat by getting hit by its sword than by getting bit by the creature see whereas live in complete and utter filth i mean their home is literally in the sewers they are always in constant contact with feces and vomit and corpses many times it is their own vomit and their own feces that they are in constant contact with they don't care about cleaning their weapons or gear so it is likely that their weapons have been in contact with their own feces which of course would carry the parasite i mean there are a billion scenarios in which the parasite could have ended up in their weapons and it does all the time so whenever you get struck by their dirty soiled rotten sword your chances of contracting the disease goes up and up you should also know that the parasite is what we call species specific which means that it only affects humanoids the disease does not affect normal rodents and normal rodents cannot carry it either so there are no chances of a wild rat created wild epidemic now further speaking about creation of wereats a wereat can produce a child with a non-wear at humanoid a weared male and a normal female will produce a normal humanoid child albeit the child will be shorter in height than it otherwise would have been but then a normal male anywhere at female on the other hand will produce a special we're at child we call these rattlings basically the baby will look like a normal giant rat except that it will have opposable thumbs and will have humanoid-like mannerisms like for example the giant rat will enjoy standing and walking in two feet at the age of two this rattling will develop its first transformation into a humanoid a form that will share the age of the rat but three times older so by the first time the rat can transform into a humanoid being two years old the human form will look like a six-year-old child this doesn't change later in the years so if a 10 year old natural wear rat transforms into a man the man will look like a 30 year old man now you have to remember you cannot cure a naturally born wereat from lycanthropy you cannot cure a person from something that they have always been in the same way as you cannot cure a human from being a human you can only cure a person from lycanthropy if they were infected and then turned those differences are crucial not just because it matters in terms of hearing but because the disease works differently for both kinds as well a wereat that was born aware at can actually keep its intelligence through transformations so we can make smart decisions and think even while it is a rodent whereas someone that was turned into a wereat will have difficulty even remembering most of their transformations quote an infected lycanthrope will change involuntarily the full moon can trigger the transformation but so can very strong emotions or pain an infected wearat is not in control of its hunger for humanoid flesh it attacks friend and foe alike preferring victims that are known personally by the infected whereat end quote a person that is infected by this disease will personally seek people it knows from its personal life and try and eat them getting a bizarre form of satisfaction from haunting those it knows the person will most likely not remember its night as a monster at all most times only having dream-like memories of its depredations but now that we have talked about the disease let's actually talk about the society and this is of course is mostly pertinent to natural true wear rats those that were born as such how do they live their lives what did they do all day see most societies of wear rats have adopted to living in subterranean environments directly underneath humanoid settlements most of which tend to be the sewers there is something psychologically attractive about the long stretching tunnels and the lavantine designs of sewers that make them feel safe in there that coupled with living on a particularly cramped warren makes them feel safe this ecological desire is shared with normal rats and so you tend to see both living harmoniously together in fact normal rats tend to see wear rats as office of their kind and so they follow them wherever they go which is why it appears as if wereats can just summon rats whenever they wish these rats follow the wear rat through scent which they have learned to recognize in spite of the shape the werewat takes further a wereat can actually communicate with the rats using a form of chattering language a similar language that wereats used to communicate with one another the difference is that when a werewat talks with normal rats the cheatering sounds are audible to humanoids when two wereats are talking to each other they use high frequency squeaks which are actually inaudible to most humanoids two whereas stalking a prey could be having full conversations with each other and the prey would be none the wiser also fun fact a collection of rats is called a mischief that is awesome anyways wereats are also psychologically inclined to always be with their kind you will rarely ever see a wearat alone however the relationships they form together are very interesting they never form interpersonal bonds like love or marriage and like we described before they don't really ever reproduce with one another in spite of all these things they are extremely social with each other the lore even describing them as gregarious creatures but the way they interact with each other is different than what we're accustomed to we might even consider it strange the creatures are almost continuously in competition with each other sometimes for mates sometimes for standing within their community or sometimes for wealth or other kinds of tangible benefits what's interesting is that the competitions that they get into are not really friendly at least they don't look like they are friendly you will see whereas trying to take others down with sly and conniving tactics or being generally aggressive to one another in these competitions to us it would look really like they're all enemies who hated each other trying to make each other feel bad or trying to hurt each other but to the whereas themselves the behavior is not ill at all but in fact quite the opposite they find joy and community in these challenges and in these hard forms of banter to them it's all a good time now when it comes to fighting warrants actually don't do much of it they spend most of their time being as sneaky as possible robbing kidnapping and eating people up in the city and if the humanoids ever form a resistance the wereats typically just retreat to safety this applies individually but also collectively if a true resistance is ever built to deal with the werewots in the sewers they are not at all hesitant to just literally abandon their lair and retreat since everything they own is stolen as it is they have no qualms of just finding a new lair and stealing new stuff again this makes them very hard to exterminate and i mean very hard they will always retreat against any kind of true force and their retreats are very difficult to stop since they can turn into giant rats to run away plus remember that their vulnerabilities are difficult to predict so you never know what can actually hurt them plus the monster manual didn't tell you this but whereas can actually regenerate lost limbs and those wereats who you might think you killed might not actually be truly dead see whereas have the special ability to pretend to be dead basically they can use the spell faint death but as a natural ability of theirs where they can slow down their metabolism so hard that they can make you believe that you have actually killed them only for them to stand up minutes later and make a daring escape quote where rats are parasites they recognize that they are physically weaker than most species that dominate the surface they have found and exploited the one niche where they have a chance to dominate the world beneath the cities they feed on humans and steal their riches humans unknowingly protect the wereats from both surface-dwelling creatures and those who might burrow up from far below besides the humans pay for the upkeep of the wearer at sewer realm and the quote they don't want to kill the humans at least not fully so they won't fight them it's basically the gist of it but that being said even though where rats have no qualms of living their belongings in the case of a raid they do typically have tons and tons of loot whereas are considered hoarders when it comes to loot whatever they can find that might be valuable they gather and collect most of their treasure will be considered worthless by adventurers though but there's always a good chance of finding extremely rare valuable things in there most will be junk though hey guys thank you so much for watching i would like to personally thank my patreon supporters zack bowell perry maskant 5e magic shop morgan johnson rusty rayne biotechnofrag daniel luna dog feeder brad salazar terry kolp the great codini walker motley omega scales karates the bulwark zirin king ozol alex cookson griffin pierce 4k951 benjamin bosters mr salty thomas hunt drayden the role-playing junkies podcast prince daylight morning crown sabine kurshab solarensis or dorick williams latin nathan mccomb silent choppa bushido burrito a.g dare soulless rider stalia items to astound on dm's guild samuel king lost crusader jacob ortiz tython sean duthat trev909 carrick minnick and jd green for supporting me on patreon at the 25 level if you would like to support me as well then please please please head on over to patreon.comrex to support all right guys that's it for the video i do want to tell you guys that i am planning something big for baldur's gate 3 the video game i'll basically be running through the game uh using my lore play format that for those of you who do not know i did this run of skyrim where instead of just kind of focusing a lot on the game uh at least on the gameplay side of it i was basically just focusing on the lore right if i would enter into a dungeon i would talk about the lore of that dungeon and talk about the lord of the characters of the cities anything that i would come across i would basically talk about uh what it means within the context of the world um explaining the books explaining uh the the story all that good stuff and and well you guys really like those uh those videos so i was thinking i would bring those over to baldur's gate and just talk about the lore which i i'm assuming is going to be a lot of mind flayer lore a lot of uh astral plane lore and will balder skate the actual city so if you guys are interested in that then uh just keep an eye out i'll do a patreon those who are going to be patron only thing so i'll end up doing i think it's a one dollar patreon thing that i'll be uploading over there and maybe even over here for those of you who support me on patreon so look forward to that for those of you who support me on patreon uh just a little little thing for you guys to to give back to you for supporting me so much i love you guys you guys are the best also guys of course remember to support the kickstarter for grim hall of the players guide i'm not kidding the first book they released was amazing like it actually changed the way that i run certain scenarios certain conditions transformations um they have a lot of subclasses in there i mean the first book was great this one is bound to be great as well so please just go and check it out just click the link in the description or in the comment section just look it up you know make your own mind but i would please go in there and check out the video they have like a nice little um cinematic which kind of gives you the feel of the book so i would recommend going and doing that but yeah thank you guys for watching i'll see you next time bye

Channel: MrRhexx

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Id: ZE-f8j1udiU

Length: 20min 50sec (1250 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 06 2020