Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2e: Children of the Horned Rat by Night10194

It was...Rat Nazis! posted by Night10194 Original SA post Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2e: Children of the Horned Rat



It was...Rat Nazis!



Children of the Horned Rat is one of the most interesting books for the WHFRP2e line. It is probably overall the weakest of the 'enemy splat' books; we'll get to the mechanics after the requisite huge pile of Hams fluff but they're not very well thought out and most of them are kind of a mess. Despite this, it's very good at one thing: Telling you how to think like a shrieking, furry little nazi rat. Which is actually extremely helpful for writing them as villains! It also includes the tremendous novelty of playable Skaven, who are intended for all your Rat Nazi Paranoia with Friend Horned Rat needs, which can be really fun, though it takes a certain mindset to embrace the level of failure and blame passing necessary to play a Rat Nazi game.



Now, why do I keep calling them Rat Nazis? Because they are. The Skaven are a parody of fascism (well, less a parody and more an accurate representation): A bunch of murderous little assholes with an economy based on slavery and exploitation, living in misery and distracted by squeaking about racial superiority. They love expensive, impractical wunderwaffen. They're led by a bunch of preening, strutting jackasses who are very happy to make thousands (millions) of others die for their ideas about heroic struggle. The most important part of Skaven governance is climbing over one another to build (and piss on) little fiefs within their labyrinthine struggles of petty jackassery and rivalry. So yes. They're Rat Nazis. Just want to get that out of the way at the beginning before we go further into the book. Who doesn't want to punch Rat Nazis?



They also have a really unhelpful little bit of fluff, which we start the book with: The Empire (and ONLY the Empire, this is one of the problems) doesn't believe they're real. It's a running joke that sounds funny until you actually try to write missions and adventures with Skaven in them and then doing the 'oh no the Skaven are real' dance for the third time gets really fucking old. Especially when, again, every other nation and every other race in the setting absolutely knows, admits, and acknowledges the Rat Nazi issue. If I was going to change up one thing in Skaven fluff, I'd change it from 'They're REAL!?' to 'They have GUNS!?' and make it so that the Empire knows Skaven are real, it just thinks they're like other Beastmen, because they so rarely manage to stop knifing one another long enough to pose a real threat. Having everyone think of the crazy little rat-fascists as a joke and ignore them and leave them to the Ratcatchers still leaves you room to have wild-eyed agitators trying to warn people of the 'truth' of how the little fuckers have rifles and mustard gas.



To start us off, we get a pamphlet by a Priestess of Verena trying to warn the Empire of the impending Skaven threat, imploring you to believe her despite the way every force in the Empire tries to cover up their existence. Again, this would probably work better if it wasn't for the fact that Tileans know they're real. Estalians know they're real. Kislevites know they're real. Bretonnians know they're real. Dwarfs know they're real. Elfs know they're real. EVERYONE KNOWS except the Empire. Even in the section on how the Empire doesn't know, we'll have a bunch of people saying 'Oh, those? They can't be Skaven but yeah those are real.' It's just an annoying little song and dance after awhile, and not the good kind of Bretonnian dance.



Anyway, our first Legend of the Skaven is the Legend of Emperor Mandred Skavenslayer (skaven aren't real!) and the Incredible Cheese, wherein the future Emperor and then Graf of Middenheim is besieged by hoards of rats and makes the decision to gather every bit of cheese in his city and cook it, driving the rats into an insane frenzy of hunger. He then orders the dwarfs to cause a massive flood of the undercity when all the rats are within, charging for the delicious cheese. This kills the rat. This is a legend to explain why on the 14th of Ulricstide, Middenheim always has a grand cheese festival where they cook pots of cheese and sausage to celebrate Mandred Skavenslayer (who was later assassinated by ninjas). This is a popular legend in Middenheim that mentions Skaven by name, in honor of Emperor Mandred Skavenslayer. Again, the Skaven Aren't Real thing wears kinda thin.



Our next Rat Legend is an anti-wizard and anti-mutant polemic about a boy born with six toes who is stolen by wizards after his parents refuse to kill him for being a mutant. The wizards, naturally being in league with the devil as all wizards are, give the boy to the Skaven as a present and they hook up warpstone to his foot to start turning him into a Skaven. Then they bolt a box of rats to his back and make him run around putting rats in things to kill them with plague. He comes to kill all the boys who made fun of his six toes and hides from his parents and becomes an evil devil rat, with the moral being that wizards are evil and all mutants have to be killed as soon as they're born. Normal sort of Imperial polemic, but again, it mentions the Skaven by name.



Our selection of 'Common Views' of Skaven are mostly 'they aren't real' and 'I saw a rat walking like a man once, can't be Skaven, but, uh, kinda seemed like 'em'. Though we have one awful little bit about a scholar complaining that the Ar-Ulric has asked him to 'teach the controversy' on rat nazi existence, making a joke comparing 'Skaven are Real' to the batshit insanity that is the controversy over evolution in public schooling in the US, specifically as it has the scholar whining that it's insane that he's asked to 'teach the controversy' because 'now we'll never move beyond our benighted age' and the tone of that for that specific joke pisses me off a bit. We also get the view of a soldier who has had to regularly fight armies of Skaven, talking about how those can't be that 'Skaven' thing but how he prefers fighting them to Beastmen because they're smaller, weaker, and run like hell once you chop a couple.



We get into the scholarly view, that 'everyone knows' Skaven exist even though no-one will admit it. I get what they're going for, but when you have the Empire actively sending Hunters out to tell people the rats aren't real/punish people for talking about them, you're going a little past the normal Bretonnian dance of 'we all pretend this is the case' and get into something really annoying instead. I've always thought the Skaven Aren't Real thing was meant to be a bit of a take on UFO paranoia, with the government trying to conceal the existence of a technologically advanced race that kidnaps people for cruel experiments and uses lots of glowing green rocks and ray cannons, but again: It's really annoying in play and in practice. The Sigmarites get up to enough counter-productive stuff without suddenly having them be employed en-masse to scream that a major threat to the Empire isn't real. In fact, it's even completely counter to how Sigmarism normally does things. They're not really big on covering up the existence of threats to the Empire; they might not want you to know too many details about them, but they do want you to know Chaos, Vampires, etc are all problems. The more I think about it, the less sense it makes that Sigmarism would pass up another existential threat to talk about, given their tendency towards a siege mentality.



Now, the bit on people who deal with the ratmen, this makes more sense. Imperials who learn a lot about them often start to think of them as a joke, and as something they can employ against rivals. After all, these are silly, squeaking little coward-rat people, right? They can't possibly be that dangerous. You can point the exploding little assholes at someone you don't like and watch the carnage, secure that you're getting the better of the bargain until the symptoms from the pox kick in or the ninjas burst through the door to shut you up. The Imperial spy dismissing them as any kind of threat in the Scholar's View section as he talks about how excellent they are as allies in matters clandestine? That's a good tack to take. I'd much prefer 'we don't understand the Rat Nazis are dangerous' to 'we try to pretend they're not real', as you still get the same plot arcs but it's less awkward and stupid to deal with. Plus, well, everything he's saying about them is still sort of true, even if they are a threat. He says those he's spoken to will all probably be dead from backstabbing soon enough, and that the rats are extremely prone to betrayal and backbiting, as the main thing that makes them not a threat. He's wrong that they have 'no culture or learning', and he's obviously getting played (who could possibly observe 'man, they're really good at assassinations' and then also go 'man, this is never going to come back and cause me trouble' in the same paragraph) but he ain't wrong that the Skaven are very prone to, uh, friendly fire.



The section on 'lands beyond the Empire' is a cavalcade of 'every other nation acknowledges the Skaven are real'.



You can tell the difference between Skaven and Beastmen primarily by the fact that Beastmen break everything when they attack. A town taken by Beastmen is going to be leveled to the ground; they are forces of Chaos and destruction and they hate the way things are A: Alive and B: Intact. Skaven attack towns primarily for the population, and they like to plan their assault such that they'll be able to capture as many people as slaves, experiments, and self-preserving food supplies (living meat doesn't rot, after all) rather than just burning the place to the ground. Skaven and Beastmen both prefer to avoid fighting hardened targets that fight back, but Beastmen are much more up for it if they get caught while Skaven will usually run away if things are more difficult than they expected. Skaven are also much more prone to using poison, sabotage, and large scale distractions. A town attacked by Skaven will usually be intact, but missing any signs of bodies or the population.



Part of the reason Skaven don't leave bodies is that they eat anyone they kill. Skaven are constantly, insanely hungry. The need for food is one of the biggest drivers of why Rat Nazi culture goes how it does. They'll eat their own, too, of course, which explains why they don't leave their own dead behind unless they were driven off the field entire.



The biggest sign an assassination was carried out by Skaven is if it seems to have been done by ninjas. I'm not kidding at all. There are actually literal rat ninjas, sure, but there's also the way Skaven love to climb and scamper, know a lot about hidden passages and tunnels, and use little shurikens with poison on them. The more an assassination seems to have been done by ninjas, the more likely it was rats. Also, the worse things smell, the more likely it was rats; skaven have a very, ah, olfactory culture and so have a lot of different and horrible musks that they unconsciously release.



Our pamphlet urges people who discover signs of the Skaven not to hunt them alone; they want to outnumber you. Also don't go to the Watch, they won't believe you and no-one will help you. This bit is fine, this is standard operating procedure for PCs as it is. There's a bit on duping Adventurers into fighting Skaven (never pay them in advance, by the time they realize how much danger they're in they'll need the money enough to finish the job), insisting Adventurers are generally the best way to deal with the rats. They tend to be the right mix of expendable, competent, and weird to somehow come out on top, and since they move around a lot, they'll evade the official crackdown on information about rat-people by wandering off to get into trouble elsewhere when they're done.



Also the section on Skaven Hunting has A: A grimdark super-strong hobbit who loves to snap Rat Nazi necks after he escaped their mines and B: A dwarf explaining that you have to talk to humans a lot about how you're just 'ratcatchers' so that they don't get out of sorts and actually pay you properly for hunting Skaven for them. 'Always get paid in advance, otherwise the humans will pretend what they hired you to kill doesn't exist and then stiff ya', says the dwarf. It doesn't really take anything special to murder a Skaven once you hunt them down. Of course, the greatest threat to the Skaven Hunter is that Skaven Don't Exist and the Empire will, of course, have you executed if your profession comes to light and blah blah let's make this material harder to interact with.



A Ratfighter's equipment sounds like equipment any high level combat PC wants: Handkerchief soaked in herbs to ward off the smell, plate armor to keep the little rat-knives out of you, halberd, brace of pistols, symbol of Sigmar (rats don't fear holy symbols, it's for you, not them), lantern, long coat, nice hat or helmet. The only odd thing is the clay, to hide your own scent. Remember what I said about olfactory culture? The rats have keen noses and they work as much by scent as they do by sight. In a dark tunnel where they can already see you better than you can see them, letting your smell stand out is only going to make things worse.



Next Time: The form and function of the common Rat Nazi Children of the Horned Rat is one of the most interesting books for the WHFRP2e line. It is probably overall the weakest of the 'enemy splat' books; we'll get to the mechanics after the requisite huge pile of Hams fluff but they're not very well thought out and most of them are kind of a mess. Despite this, it's very good at one thing: Telling you how to think like a shrieking, furry little nazi rat. Which is actually extremely helpful for writing them as villains! It also includes the tremendous novelty of playable Skaven, who are intended for all your Rat Nazi Paranoia with Friend Horned Rat needs, which can be really fun, though it takes a certain mindset to embrace the level of failure and blame passing necessary to play a Rat Nazi game.Now, why do I keep calling them Rat Nazis? Because they are. The Skaven are a parody of fascism (well, less a parody and more an accurate representation): A bunch of murderous little assholes with an economy based on slavery and exploitation, living in misery and distracted by squeaking about racial superiority. They love expensive, impractical wunderwaffen. They're led by a bunch of preening, strutting jackasses who are very happy to make thousands (millions) of others die for their ideas about heroic struggle. The most important part of Skaven governance is climbing over one another to build (and piss on) little fiefs within their labyrinthine struggles of petty jackassery and rivalry. So yes. They're Rat Nazis. Just want to get that out of the way at the beginning before we go further into the book. Who doesn't want to punch Rat Nazis?They also have a really unhelpful little bit of fluff, which we start the book with: The Empire (and ONLY the Empire, this is one of the problems) doesn't believe they're real. It's a running joke that sounds funny until you actually try to write missions and adventures with Skaven in them and then doing the 'oh no the Skaven are real' dance for the third time gets really fucking old. Especially when, again, every other nation and every other race in the setting absolutely knows, admits, and acknowledges the Rat Nazi issue. If I was going to change up one thing in Skaven fluff, I'd change it from 'They're REAL!?' to 'They have GUNS!?' and make it so that the Empire knows Skaven are real, it just thinks they're like other Beastmen, because they so rarely manage to stop knifing one another long enough to pose a real threat. Having everyone think of the crazy little rat-fascists as a joke and ignore them and leave them to the Ratcatchers still leaves you room to have wild-eyed agitators trying to warn people of the 'truth' of how the little fuckers have rifles and mustard gas.To start us off, we get a pamphlet by a Priestess of Verena trying to warn the Empire of the impending Skaven threat, imploring you to believe her despite the way every force in the Empire tries to cover up their existence. Again, this would probably work better if it wasn't for the fact that Tileans know they're real. Estalians know they're real. Kislevites know they're real. Bretonnians know they're real. Dwarfs know they're real. Elfs know they're real. EVERYONE KNOWS except the Empire. Even in the section on how the Empire doesn't know, we'll have a bunch of people saying 'Oh, those? They can't be Skaven but yeah those are real.' It's just an annoying little song and dance after awhile, and not the good kind of Bretonnian dance.Anyway, our first Legend of the Skaven is the Legend of Emperor Mandred Skavenslayer (skaven aren't real!) and the Incredible Cheese, wherein the future Emperor and then Graf of Middenheim is besieged by hoards of rats and makes the decision to gather every bit of cheese in his city and cook it, driving the rats into an insane frenzy of hunger. He then orders the dwarfs to cause a massive flood of the undercity when all the rats are within, charging for the delicious cheese. This kills the rat. This is a legend to explain why on the 14th of Ulricstide, Middenheim always has a grand cheese festival where they cook pots of cheese and sausage to celebrate Mandred Skavenslayer (who was later assassinated by ninjas). This is a popular legend in Middenheim that mentions Skaven by name, in honor of Emperor Mandred Skavenslayer. Again, the Skaven Aren't Real thing wears kinda thin.Our next Rat Legend is an anti-wizard and anti-mutant polemic about a boy born with six toes who is stolen by wizards after his parents refuse to kill him for being a mutant. The wizards, naturally being in league with the devil as all wizards are, give the boy to the Skaven as a present and they hook up warpstone to his foot to start turning him into a Skaven. Then they bolt a box of rats to his back and make him run around putting rats in things to kill them with plague. He comes to kill all the boys who made fun of his six toes and hides from his parents and becomes an evil devil rat, with the moral being that wizards are evil and all mutants have to be killed as soon as they're born. Normal sort of Imperial polemic, but again, it mentions the Skaven by name.Our selection of 'Common Views' of Skaven are mostly 'they aren't real' and 'I saw a rat walking like a man once, can't be Skaven, but, uh, kinda seemed like 'em'. Though we have one awful little bit about a scholar complaining that the Ar-Ulric has asked him to 'teach the controversy' on rat nazi existence, making a joke comparing 'Skaven are Real' to the batshit insanity that is the controversy over evolution in public schooling in the US, specifically as it has the scholar whining that it's insane that he's asked to 'teach the controversy' because 'now we'll never move beyond our benighted age' and the tone of that for that specific joke pisses me off a bit. We also get the view of a soldier who has had to regularly fight armies of Skaven, talking about how those can't be that 'Skaven' thing but how he prefers fighting them to Beastmen because they're smaller, weaker, and run like hell once you chop a couple.We get into the scholarly view, that 'everyone knows' Skaven exist even though no-one will admit it. I get what they're going for, but when you have the Empire actively sending Hunters out to tell people the rats aren't real/punish people for talking about them, you're going a little past the normal Bretonnian dance of 'we all pretend this is the case' and get into something really annoying instead. I've always thought the Skaven Aren't Real thing was meant to be a bit of a take on UFO paranoia, with the government trying to conceal the existence of a technologically advanced race that kidnaps people for cruel experiments and uses lots of glowing green rocks and ray cannons, but again: It's really annoying in play and in practice. The Sigmarites get up to enough counter-productive stuff without suddenly having them be employed en-masse to scream that a major threat to the Empire isn't real. In fact, it's even completely counter to how Sigmarism normally does things. They're not really big on covering up the existence of threats to the Empire; they might not want you to know too many details about them, but they do want you to know Chaos, Vampires, etc are all. The more I think about it, the less sense it makes that Sigmarism would pass up another existential threat to talk about, given their tendency towards a siege mentality.Now, the bit on people who deal with the ratmen, this makes more sense. Imperials who learn a lot about them often start to think of them as a joke, and as something they can employ against rivals. After all, these are silly, squeaking little coward-rat people, right? They can't possibly be that dangerous. You can point the exploding little assholes at someone you don't like and watch the carnage, secure that you're getting the better of the bargain until the symptoms from the pox kick in or the ninjas burst through the door to shut you up. The Imperial spy dismissing them as any kind of threat in the Scholar's View section as he talks about how excellent they are as allies in matters clandestine? That's a good tack to take. I'd much prefer 'we don't understand the Rat Nazis are dangerous' to 'we try to pretend they're not real', as you still get the same plot arcs but it's less awkward and stupid to deal with. Plus, well, everything he's saying about them is still sort of true, even if they are a threat. He says those he's spoken to will all probably be dead from backstabbing soon enough, and that the rats are extremely prone to betrayal and backbiting, as the main thing that makes them not a threat. He's wrong that they have 'no culture or learning', and he's obviously getting played (who could possibly observe 'man, they're really good at assassinations' and then also go 'man, this is never going to come back and cause me trouble' in the same paragraph) but he ain't wrong that the Skaven are very prone to, uh, friendly fire.The section on 'lands beyond the Empire' is a cavalcade of 'every other nation acknowledges the Skaven are real'.You can tell the difference between Skaven and Beastmen primarily by the fact that Beastmen break everything when they attack. A town taken by Beastmen is going to be leveled to the ground; they are forces of Chaos and destruction and they hate the way things are A: Alive and B: Intact. Skaven attack towns primarily for the population, and they like to plan their assault such that they'll be able to capture as many people as slaves, experiments, and self-preserving food supplies (living meat doesn't rot, after all) rather than just burning the place to the ground. Skaven and Beastmen both prefer to avoid fighting hardened targets that fight back, but Beastmen are much more up for it if they get caught while Skaven will usually run away if things are more difficult than they expected. Skaven are also much more prone to using poison, sabotage, and large scale distractions. A town attacked by Skaven will usually be intact, but missing any signs of bodies or the population.Part of the reason Skaven don't leave bodies is that they eat anyone they kill. Skaven are constantly, insanely hungry. The need for food is one of the biggest drivers of why Rat Nazi culture goes how it does. They'll eat their own, too, of course, which explains why they don't leave their own dead behind unless they were driven off the field entire.The biggest sign an assassination was carried out by Skaven is if it seems to have been done by ninjas. I'm not kidding at all. There are actually literal rat ninjas, sure, but there's also the way Skaven love to climb and scamper, know a lot about hidden passages and tunnels, and use little shurikens with poison on them. The more an assassination seems to have been done by ninjas, the more likely it was rats. Also, the worse things smell, the more likely it was rats; skaven have a very, ah, olfactory culture and so have a lot of different and horrible musks that they unconsciously release.Our pamphlet urges people who discover signs of the Skaven not to hunt them alone; they want to outnumber you. Also don't go to the Watch, they won't believe you and no-one will help you. This bit is fine, this is standard operating procedure for PCs as it is. There's a bit on duping Adventurers into fighting Skaven (never pay them in advance, by the time they realize how much danger they're in they'll need the money enough to finish the job), insisting Adventurers are generally the best way to deal with the rats. They tend to be the right mix of expendable, competent, and weird to somehow come out on top, and since they move around a lot, they'll evade the official crackdown on information about rat-people by wandering off to get into trouble elsewhere when they're done.Also the section on Skaven Hunting has A: A grimdark super-strong hobbit who loves to snap Rat Nazi necks after he escaped their mines and B: A dwarf explaining that you have to talk to humans a lot about how you're just 'ratcatchers' so that they don't get out of sorts and actually pay you properly for hunting Skaven for them. 'Always get paid in advance, otherwise the humans will pretend what they hired you to kill doesn't exist and then stiff ya', says the dwarf. It doesn't really take anything special to murder a Skaven once you hunt them down. Of course, the greatest threat to the Skaven Hunter is that Skaven Don't Exist and the Empire will, of course, have you executed if your profession comes to light and blah blah let's make this material harder to interact with.A Ratfighter's equipment sounds like equipment any high level combat PC wants: Handkerchief soaked in herbs to ward off the smell, plate armor to keep the little rat-knives out of you, halberd, brace of pistols, symbol of Sigmar (rats don't fear holy symbols, it's for you, not them), lantern, long coat, nice hat or helmet. The only odd thing is the clay, to hide your own scent. Remember what I said about olfactory culture? The rats have keen noses and they work as much by scent as they do by sight. In a dark tunnel where they can already see you better than you can see them, letting your smell stand out is only going to make things worse.

RAT PEOPLE posted by Night10194 Original SA post Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2e: Children of the Horned Rat



RAT PEOPLE



Our next bit is an extensive in-universe dissection of rat people. Our scholar narrator had several bodies found by a tunnel crew trying to expand the cellar of a town hall, and had them delivered to a medical doctor for dissection and analysis. Yep, Skaven Autopsy! Complete with some pretty interesting art of Skaven on the dissection tray. The average rat is about 5 feet tall, but seems shorter since they usually stand hunched over. One rat in the bunch had very large, curving horns and white fur, and seemed to be more important and better fed than the others. The final body was an immense, muscular creature that the scholar took for a dead Rat Ogre; we'll be getting to our dear friend Roger (I will be calling all Rat Ogres Rogers, I've played a lot of Vermintide) in time, but suffice to say Roger is a wonderful example of evil corporate work at its finest. Two of the other rats was a bit bigger than the others, had black fur, and was carrying more weaponry, denoting a warrior class. Fur color is hypothesized as an important social signifier among the rat people, which is completely correct. White Rat on top, Black Rat below, Brown Rat at the bottom. No sure how the author determined the brown rat was the 'common' Skaven if the 5 rat party was a Grey Seer (wizard rat lords), two Stormvermin (Black Skaven warriors), a Roger, and a single brown rat, but hey.



Rats have fine, thick fur that protects from the cold, and that exudes a slight oil like an otter. From this, the author postulates (again, correctly) that the rats are good swimmers and frequently encounter water. The rats also possess extensive and complex scent glands, which seem to serve some kind of social function. From the presence of urine in the rats' fur, the author also posits that the rats piss on one another as a social marker, which is also correct. Skaven piss on everything, it's what they do. The rats are surprisingly scarred, suggesting very violent lives and a lot of old injuries. All the rats were slightly diseased, and the author suggests that infectious disease and pox must be a persistent problem for the ratmen. She also notes ritual scarring in a three-pointed triangle, suggesting a holy symbol and the presence of rat religion, which terrifies her! Rats shouldn't have religions.



Skaven are built to jump, climb, and scamper, with very powerful back legs (they run faster than humans) and the hunched posture suggesting adaptation to tunnels and a tendency to pounce on things. The rats are physically weaker than humans in anything but short bursts of activity, which the author posits is why most of them don't wear armor. They're very good climbers and jumpers, run quickly, and are very mobile, with sharp teeth and natural claws designed to rend and kill with the whole body. Everything about their physique is designed for short, hyperactive bursts of raw energy, probably accompanied by a lot of frantic squeaking and squealing. Everything about them is also just plain filthy, because these are not pet rats, these are wild rats who also got into fascism. An interesting extra is that Skaven have prehensile rat-tails, which are actually muscular enough that if one of them has the proper training, they can wield a weapon with 'em. The most horrifying revelation for the author is that the rats had guns with them. Guns they were dexterous enough to use. Guns she suspects they built. Guns that fire depleted (not depleted) wizard uranium (warpstone). Even worse, the white rat had warpstone in his belly, suggesting the little bastards can eat the stuff without catching fire or exploding. She also discovered undigested gold jewelry in the belly, suggesting the rats' stomachs could digest bone but not the gold jewelry worn on it. Another curious note: The rats have very small stomachs, and this might be part of the reason they need to eat constantly. The nose and ears are very developed, indicating the rats have good hearing and an excellent sense of smell, on par with a dog.



The most unnatural part of the Roger dissection was the realization that it was not a random mutation. Stitching and evidence of surgery suggested that the huge Rat Ogre was a designed organism, intended to be this huge and distended muscle-rat. Armored plates and metal stamping keep portions of the biology from ripping themselves apart from overpressure and strain, and natural weapons surpassing the normal strength of a Skaven have been implanted into the body. Evidence of spellcraft and flesh-moulding are everywhere on Roger. This is because, unknown to the author, Roger is a mass produced monster made by an evil megacorporation. I am excited to get to Clan Moulder in time. The author is frightened by the 'hostility of the world' evidenced by the existence of ratmen adapted to fight, kill, squeak, and chew their way across the world. Considering Goatman Prime is probably watching from the bushes as she writes this, I'm not sure how much of a revelation this really is. It's not like the world isn't already full of things that hate it. Her difference between Beastmen and Ratmen is the uniformity of the latter, with the Ratmen being relatively intelligent and able to build their own weaponry and armor rather than just being the eternal auxiliaries/jobbers of Chaos like Beastmen. All Imperials tend to assign the Ratmen to one of the Chaos Gods, and she assumes these guys are Tzeentch in his aspect as the Mutator, despite having just said they're best defined by the way their biology is in no way randomized.



Our main author now tells us, of course, that the authors of this, and indeed the authors of almost every scholarly work on Skaven, have been killed to death by ninjas. Usually after being condemned by the church. Our author then enters a short rant about 'I am very sane! Remember, reader, copy this pamphlet and pass it on, in case I, too, am KILLED TO DEATH BY NINJAS!' That said, I actually quite like the Skaven Autopsy section. It's a neat in-universe way to get at one of the most important parts of the rats: Their biology. They could probably be a lot more chill if they weren't constantly on the verge of starving and driven to hyperactivity and aggression at all times by that simple fact.



Our normal author takes over again, writing up how the Skaven sense of smell actually allows for the coordination of large units of squeaking little jerks much faster than simply talking. This makes moods spread fast among rats, though, which is where their tremendous reputation for panicking and running away comes from; once a couple start to squirt the musk of fear in the face of an angry Slayer, there's no stopping the rout. The rats cannot fully stop themselves exuding musk, which means a rat (or a Hunter) with an exceptionally good nose is going to be very good at reading their moods. We get a sidenote from a dwarf soldier saying you'd best wash your gear immediately after killing rats, because their blood mixes with and sticks with the musk and goddamn you're never getting that stuff off your axe if you don't clean it after every dozen you chop.



The rats are just big enough to 'hide under hood and cowl' and pretend to be human, the author assures us, which means EVERY BEGGAR COULD BE A RAT I'M SANE I TELL YOU NINJAS! but I digress. The thing they can't hide when trying to pretend to be human is how they walk. They scamper. They cannot but scamper. Their legs are crazy powerful and designed wholly for scampering. There's a lot about how they're so dangerous and stealthy but it all disguises the fact that they're about 5 feet tall and fairly easily smashed, which our dwarf buddy is happy to cut in with.



Rats will eat anything. Absolutely anything. They are always starving, and very bitey. Even an unarmed Skaven will try to drag a person down and get on their back so they can claw and bite. Our dwarf friend notes this is hard to do with dwarfs, and that it's better to have a lower center of gravity when you fight Rat Nazis. Wounds inflicted by Skaven need quick treatment because they're filthy little bastards with curved and jagged swords that are constantly covered in rust. If you don't see to rat wounds, you'll get rat infections, which are really the worst kind.



The best defense against the rats is armor. They love to use poison, especially the ones with the cool little throwing stars and face masks, and combined with the filth it's best to just not let them touch your precious blood. As an added bonus, the rats have a sense of technology but no concept of quality or craftsmanship, so their jagged little swords are usually prone to falling apart when they hit solid plate. Rats are actually very good at guns, so never fight them at long range if you can. If you let the rats control the field, you'll get picked apart by rifles, because Skaven Jezzails are about on par with Hochlander rifles and they tend to have a lot more of them. Get close to rats, spook them, and chop 'em, the dwarf agrees. If that wasn't bad enough, the little bastards have flamethrowers. The rats have weapons technology that exceeds human wisdom, with an emphasis on 'exceeds' and 'wisdom', given the likelihood of all these crazy wunderwaffen blowing up and killing the rats, or misfiring and killing the rats, or the rats deciding to shoot into melee and mostly killing the rats. Our author claims their weapons are superior to the dwarves, which obviously pisses off our dwarf commentator, who notes that dwarf crafted weapons don't blow up and kill their own user. Rats also like to use disease as a weapon, or to throw globes full of a sort of 'poison-wind'. If you see rats covered in robes and thick masks, this means you've got globadiers. Shoot that little bastard first.



Next Time: But what do they eat? Our next bit is an extensive in-universe dissection of rat people. Our scholar narrator had several bodies found by a tunnel crew trying to expand the cellar of a town hall, and had them delivered to a medical doctor for dissection and analysis. Yep, Skaven Autopsy! Complete with some pretty interesting art of Skaven on the dissection tray. The average rat is about 5 feet tall, but seems shorter since they usually stand hunched over. One rat in the bunch had very large, curving horns and white fur, and seemed to be more important and better fed than the others. The final body was an immense, muscular creature that the scholar took for a dead Rat Ogre; we'll be getting to our dear friend Roger (I will be calling all Rat Ogres Rogers, I've played a lot of Vermintide) in time, but suffice to say Roger is a wonderful example of evil corporate work at its finest. Two of the other rats was a bit bigger than the others, had black fur, and was carrying more weaponry, denoting a warrior class. Fur color is hypothesized as an important social signifier among the rat people, which is completely correct. White Rat on top, Black Rat below, Brown Rat at the bottom. No sure how the author determined the brown rat was the 'common' Skaven if the 5 rat party was a Grey Seer (wizard rat lords), two Stormvermin (Black Skaven warriors), a Roger, and a single brown rat, but hey.Rats have fine, thick fur that protects from the cold, and that exudes a slight oil like an otter. From this, the author postulates (again, correctly) that the rats are good swimmers and frequently encounter water. The rats also possess extensive and complex scent glands, which seem to serve some kind of social function. From the presence of urine in the rats' fur, the author also posits that the rats piss on one another as a social marker, which is also correct. Skaven piss on everything, it's what they do. The rats are surprisingly scarred, suggesting very violent lives and a lot of old injuries. All the rats were slightly diseased, and the author suggests that infectious disease and pox must be a persistent problem for the ratmen. She also notes ritual scarring in a three-pointed triangle, suggesting a holy symbol and the presence of rat religion, which terrifies her! Rats shouldn't have religions.Skaven are built to jump, climb, and scamper, with very powerful back legs (they run faster than humans) and the hunched posture suggesting adaptation to tunnels and a tendency to pounce on things. The rats are physically weaker than humans in anything but short bursts of activity, which the author posits is why most of them don't wear armor. They're very good climbers and jumpers, run quickly, and are very mobile, with sharp teeth and natural claws designed to rend and kill with the whole body. Everything about their physique is designed for short, hyperactive bursts of raw energy, probably accompanied by a lot of frantic squeaking and squealing. Everything about them is also just plain filthy, because these are not pet rats, these are wild rats who also got into fascism. An interesting extra is that Skaven have prehensile rat-tails, which are actually muscular enough that if one of them has the proper training, they can wield a weapon with 'em. The most horrifying revelation for the author is that the rats had guns with them. Guns they were dexterous enough to use. Guns she suspects they built. Guns that fire depleted (not depleted) wizard uranium (warpstone). Even worse, the white rat had warpstone in his belly, suggesting the little bastards can eat the stuff without catching fire or exploding. She also discovered undigested gold jewelry in the belly, suggesting the rats' stomachs could digest bone but not the gold jewelry worn on it. Another curious note: The rats have very small stomachs, and this might be part of the reason they need to eat constantly. The nose and ears are very developed, indicating the rats have good hearing and an excellent sense of smell, on par with a dog.The most unnatural part of the Roger dissection was the realization that it was not a random mutation. Stitching and evidence of surgery suggested that the huge Rat Ogre was a designed organism, intended to be this huge and distended muscle-rat. Armored plates and metal stamping keep portions of the biology from ripping themselves apart from overpressure and strain, and natural weapons surpassing the normal strength of a Skaven have been implanted into the body. Evidence of spellcraft and flesh-moulding are everywhere on Roger. This is because, unknown to the author, Roger is a mass produced monster made by an evil megacorporation. I am excited to get to Clan Moulder in time. The author is frightened by the 'hostility of the world' evidenced by the existence of ratmen adapted to fight, kill, squeak, and chew their way across the world. Considering Goatman Prime is probably watching from the bushes as she writes this, I'm not sure how much of a revelation this really is. It's not like the world isn't already full of things that hate it. Her difference between Beastmen and Ratmen is the uniformity of the latter, with the Ratmen being relatively intelligent and able to build their own weaponry and armor rather than just being the eternal auxiliaries/jobbers of Chaos like Beastmen. All Imperials tend to assign the Ratmen to one of the Chaos Gods, and she assumes these guys are Tzeentch in his aspect as the Mutator, despite having just said they're best defined by the way their biology is in no way randomized.Our main author now tells us, of course, that the authors of this, and indeed the authors of almost every scholarly work on Skaven, have been killed to death by ninjas. Usually after being condemned by the church. Our author then enters a short rant about 'I am very sane! Remember, reader, copy this pamphlet and pass it on, in case I, too, am KILLED TO DEATH BY NINJAS!' That said, I actually quite like the Skaven Autopsy section. It's a neat in-universe way to get at one of the most important parts of the rats: Their biology. They could probably be a lot more chill if they weren't constantly on the verge of starving and driven to hyperactivity and aggression at all times by that simple fact.Our normal author takes over again, writing up how the Skaven sense of smell actually allows for the coordination of large units of squeaking little jerks much faster than simply talking. This makes moods spread fast among rats, though, which is where their tremendous reputation for panicking and running away comes from; once a couple start to squirt the musk of fear in the face of an angry Slayer, there's no stopping the rout. The rats cannot fully stop themselves exuding musk, which means a rat (or a Hunter) with an exceptionally good nose is going to be very good at reading their moods. We get a sidenote from a dwarf soldier saying you'd best wash your gear immediately after killing rats, because their blood mixes with and sticks with the musk and goddamn you're never getting that stuff off your axe if you don't clean it after every dozen you chop.The rats are just big enough to 'hide under hood and cowl' and pretend to be human, the author assures us, which means EVERY BEGGAR COULD BE A RAT I'M SANE I TELL YOU NINJAS! but I digress. The thing they can't hide when trying to pretend to be human is how they walk. They scamper. They cannot but scamper. Their legs are crazy powerful and designed wholly for scampering. There's a lot about how they're so dangerous and stealthy but it all disguises the fact that they're about 5 feet tall and fairly easily smashed, which our dwarf buddy is happy to cut in with.Rats will eat anything. Absolutely anything. They are always starving, and very bitey. Even an unarmed Skaven will try to drag a person down and get on their back so they can claw and bite. Our dwarf friend notes this is hard to do with dwarfs, and that it's better to have a lower center of gravity when you fight Rat Nazis. Wounds inflicted by Skaven need quick treatment because they're filthy little bastards with curved and jagged swords that are constantly covered in rust. If you don't see to rat wounds, you'll get rat infections, which are really the worst kind.The best defense against the rats is armor. They love to use poison, especially the ones with the cool little throwing stars and face masks, and combined with the filth it's best to just not let them touch your precious blood. As an added bonus, the rats have a sense of technology but no concept of quality or craftsmanship, so their jagged little swords are usually prone to falling apart when they hit solid plate. Rats are actually very good at guns, so never fight them at long range if you can. If you let the rats control the field, you'll get picked apart by rifles, because Skaven Jezzails are about on par with Hochlander rifles and they tend to have a lot more of them. Get close to rats, spook them, and chop 'em, the dwarf agrees. If that wasn't bad enough, the little bastards have flamethrowers. The rats have weapons technology that exceeds human wisdom, with an emphasis on 'exceeds' and 'wisdom', given the likelihood of all these crazy wunderwaffen blowing up and killing the rats, or misfiring and killing the rats, or the rats deciding to shoot into melee and mostly killing the rats. Our author claims their weapons are superior to the dwarves, which obviously pisses off our dwarf commentator, who notes that dwarf crafted weapons don't blow up and kill their own user. Rats also like to use disease as a weapon, or to throw globes full of a sort of 'poison-wind'. If you see rats covered in robes and thick masks, this means you've got globadiers. Shoot that little bastard first.

Industrialized Rat Babies posted by Night10194 Original SA post Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2e: Children of the Horned Rat



Industrialized Rat Babies



Alright, let's get this out of the way. Skaven, according to our author, have industrialized the breeding process and have made the females of their race into giant mutated brood-mares that exist to do nothing but reproduce. Yep. On one hand, the Nazi connection kinnnnd of plays that out, given the Lebensborn program and a lot of their weirdness. On the other, this kind of stuff is usually a realllly bad idea in RPGs. This comes from the wargaming fluff, so there's no blaming the RPG authors specifically for it, but it's also the kind of thing that probably shouldn't come up in your game often. 'Horrible bloated broodmother rat' is just something I'd prefer to leave off the table and not talk about. There are very few Skaven women, and they aren't born very often, leading to this insanity. What could have checked their population numbers instead became a drive to brutalize the shit out of the female rats and produce more soldiers and workers. Skaven only take 3-5 years to reach physical and mental maturity. Very few live past 20.



Something else to note about our author: Because of the in-universe nature of this entire extremely long section, we're getting the author's breathless terror at the thought of fighting rat people for pages and pages, and she rather, uh, overestimates the rats. They are not nearly as physically dangerous nor as impervious to calamity as our author likes to rant about; she talks about the damn things like they were the goddamn perfect being because she's afraid of them and possibly going a bit nuts. The bit about 'they breed so fast they could survive endlessly on eating their own offspring' is obviously hyperbole, as is her idea that they must be immune to all diseases (they are not) and poisons (they are definitely not, rat poison will kill them). They eat anything they can get their paws on, it's true, but if what they eat is poisoned or completely rotted they'll die all the same as anyone else. She claims every single Skaven has to eat their own body weight in raw meat every day. Given the little guys are almost the size of humans, this would mean they're eating 80-100 pounds of flesh every day, which is obviously impossible, especially with the earlier fluff about them having small stomachs and generally eating small meals many times. The drive for food is one of the main things driving Skaven culture; they never know where their next meal is coming from, and many of their invasions are actually attempts to seize livestock, food stores, and other edibles. Their rapid metabolisms and high octane crazy make them hungry hungry hungry.



Skaven actually live in huge cities underground, where they live in terrible little warrens and ramshackle buildings. There's no idea of permanence among the rats, is the impression I get; you build something to live in it now, you don't really care if it's standing in a couple years because you might be dead. Skaven partly hate dwarves so much because dwarves are also tunnelers, and they fight over the best and most livable tunnels. In addition, Skaven feel much safer underground, knowing that humans and elves don't operate very well in hunched tunnels; that goes out of the window when a bunch of bearded badasses with shotguns, riot shields, and extremely heavy armor are bullying a bunch of rats around the tunnels. They build mines, transport networks, underground farms, and giant nurseries full of squalling baby rats; they actually need infrastructure way more than 'we have infinite supplies and just magic up an army' types like Chaos. You can, in fact, go in and wreck up the Skaven's shit; they actually need to keep themselves supplied and most of the infrastructure they use for it is very volatile because it's all powered by warpstone.



Skaven keep attacking the surface, our author claims, because they are the only race in the setting that can't imagine being annihilated. There are so many of them, and they breed to quickly, that they instead worry entirely about the individual rat. Every single rat is constantly pondering where their food is coming from, how they'll stay safe, and how they'll move up. This actually leads to the unique thing about the rats: They might be a squeaking horde of fur and rusty daggers, but they give a shit. They really give a shit about dying. Every individual rat tends to think they're the most awesome rat that ever squeaked, and they will do everything they can to live through fighting your PCs. The author posits that this sense of self-importance, plus their overall sense of insane security (who could ever imagine the Under Empire exploding?) is why every rat is looking at the rat to his left and the rat to his right and plotting how to make sure they're the one that gets their throat torn out by your small, but vicious dog. She reasons it's similar to how the Empire ends up in civil wars whenever Chaos isn't attacking them for a couple decades, but writ across the entire history of the Under Empire.



Rat society is structured by fur color and unbridled ambition. This section gets kinda repetitive, to be honest, and I think the in-universe stuff drags on. There's 26 pages of the agitated Verenan wailing about how rats are going to kill us all before we get to anything else. This is like a fifth of the entire pagecount. White rats are priests and wizards. Black rats are warriors. Brown rats are whatever the other rats force them to be or whatever they've managed to claw their way into being. Skaven society has dozens of levels of hierarchy beyond this, because if there's one thing the rats like more than backstabbing and eating, it's lording over every other rat they think they can get away with lording over. Skaven infighting is a little different from all the other antagonist factions of the setting in that it happens partly because the conceited little bastards think other Skaven are way more of a threat than you, in the abstract. Playing their dumb politics against one another will win you battles, probably even wars. I think the only people who can rival Skaven for self-assurance are elves, and with about as disastrous of consequences.



The rats worship a great god called the Great Horned Rat. Imperials will always immediately identify the Horned Rat as a Chaos God, and certainly GW did the same eventually because they're hacks, but it's much more interesting if it's something else. Priesthood is hereditary, with white or grey furred rats with cute little horns marking them as magically gifted, a process our author identifies as being similar to how collegiate Wizards take on aspects of their Wind. The three-scratch triangle that accompanies rat people in their wanderings is their holy symbol, and one of the few things the Skaven will actually try to protect. They can't resist putting it on everything as a show of faith to their God, because the average Skaven is very devoted to the Horned Rat. Interestingly, this makes the Skaven the only monotheists in the setting; they think the Horned Rat will eventually eat all the other Gods. The Horned Rat is basically Rat Sigmar, really; he's a manifestation of everything the rats think is cool about a person and the direct patron of their entire civilization. The problem being that while humans think things like 'cooperation' and 'protecting others' are cool (and so assign them to Sigmar) the rats think being a murderous betrayer who climbs over the piles of their former friends and allies to the top is cool, so the Great Horned Rat is all about gnawing and backstabbing and the inevitable annihilation or subjugation of all non-Skaven.



The section on Skaven tech could be summed up with 'it's powerful, but made by the lowest bidder, explodes, and Warpstone isn't safe, even for them.' The Skaven also dearly need Warpstone; if they run out their civilization will absolutely collapse. They bend as much as they can towards getting more Warpstone. They need it. It's their cocaine, their oil, and their plutonium all at once. They are also causing immense ecological damage everywhere they go. Our author is quite clear: If there can be found a way to destroy Warpstone and the supply can be cut off, the Skaven will die. Yes, that's a big ask, but at least there's an objective and a critical point rather than a dozen more books about how you can never ever fix the polar gates or otherwise stop Chaos, right?



We also get an Ulrican legend about the creation of the world as we know it, where Ulric alone tries to hold the collapse of the polar gate and Ranald runs away without warning anyone. The other Gods won't help until Verena goes to help Ulric and shames the others into making him King of the Gods and everything and he helps the humans learn to fight Chaos and they mostly contain it, etc etc. Obviously a legend in favor of the Ulricans, and told by Ulricans, but the outline is similar to many of the human myths of the Collapse. The interesting part is this legend claims the Skaven arose from the rats that ate the corpses of the first Chaos champions and infected humans. This is one of our possible origins for the ratmen.



The other, more popular (and probably true) myth is the Doom of Kavzar. See, there was a city in what becomes Tilea where man and dwarf lived in peace after the elves had been pushed off the continent. Their city was great; they lived in harmony, everything was lovely, and they wanted to thank the Gods for it. So they undertook building a great tower with a shrine to every God in the same place. They weren't able to finish their tower, and as they despaired that they'd lose the blessing of the divine, a grey-cloaked man came before them. He said he'd finish the tower immediately, if they let him place a shrine to his God on the top. Being very stupid people who forgot about how you shouldn't trust mysterious wizards talking about Gods they won't mention, they agreed. He snapped his fingers, tower was finished, and on top of it stood a great bell. They thought the bell was going to be cool at first.



The bell was not cool.



The Gods stopped listening to the people of Kavzar, and terrible storms came upon their city, as the bell kept tolling away. They locked themselves in their homes and holds, and prayed for their mistake to be undone. Instead they got positively blasted with rats. Just rats everywhere. Eating people. Turning into rat people. Sinking the entire city into a massive morass and set of tunnels built out of the destroyed dwarfhold underneath it. Given how Skavenblight (first city of the Skaven) is in Tilea, and given how the rats goddamn love bells as a major holy symbol of the Great Horned Rat...yeah, I'm gonna go with this is the one that happened. Sorry, Ulricans.



And now we finally get into the actual book proper.



Next Time: A history of rat violence. Alright, let's get this out of the way. Skaven, according to our author, have industrialized the breeding process and have made the females of their race into giant mutated brood-mares that exist to do nothing but reproduce. Yep. On one hand, the Nazi connection kinnnnd of plays that out, given the Lebensborn program and a lot of their weirdness. On the other, this kind of stuff is usually a realllly bad idea in RPGs. This comes from the wargaming fluff, so there's no blaming the RPG authors specifically for it, but it's also the kind of thing that probably shouldn't come up in your game often. 'Horrible bloated broodmother rat' is just something I'd prefer to leave off the table and not talk about. There are very few Skaven women, and they aren't born very often, leading to this insanity. What could have checked their population numbers instead became a drive to brutalize the shit out of the female rats and produce more soldiers and workers. Skaven only take 3-5 years to reach physical and mental maturity. Very few live past 20.Something else to note about our author: Because of the in-universe nature of this entire extremely long section, we're getting the author's breathless terror at the thought of fighting rat people for pages and pages, and she rather, uh, overestimates the rats. They are not nearly as physically dangerous nor as impervious to calamity as our author likes to rant about; she talks about the damn things like they were the goddamn perfect being because she's afraid of them and possibly going a bit nuts. The bit about 'they breed so fast they could survive endlessly on eating their own offspring' is obviously hyperbole, as is her idea that they must be immune to all diseases (they are not) and poisons (they are definitely not, rat poison will kill them). They eat anything they can get their paws on, it's true, but if what they eat is poisoned or completely rotted they'll die all the same as anyone else. She claims every single Skaven has to eat their own body weight in raw meat every day. Given the little guys are almost the size of humans, this would mean they're eating 80-100 pounds of flesh every day, which is obviously impossible, especially with the earlier fluff about them having small stomachs and generally eating small meals many times. The drive for food is one of the main things driving Skaven culture; they never know where their next meal is coming from, and many of their invasions are actually attempts to seize livestock, food stores, and other edibles. Their rapid metabolisms and high octane crazy make them hungry hungry hungry.Skaven actually live in huge cities underground, where they live in terrible little warrens and ramshackle buildings. There's no idea of permanence among the rats, is the impression I get; you build something to live in it now, you don't really care if it's standing in a couple years because you might be dead. Skaven partly hate dwarves so much because dwarves are also tunnelers, and they fight over the best and most livable tunnels. In addition, Skaven feel much safer underground, knowing that humans and elves don't operate very well in hunched tunnels; that goes out of the window when a bunch of bearded badasses with shotguns, riot shields, and extremely heavy armor are bullying a bunch of rats around the tunnels. They build mines, transport networks, underground farms, and giant nurseries full of squalling baby rats; they actually need infrastructure way more than 'we have infinite supplies and just magic up an army' types like Chaos. You can, in fact, go in and wreck up the Skaven's shit; they actually need to keep themselves supplied and most of the infrastructure they use for it is very volatile because it's all powered by warpstone.Skaven keep attacking the surface, our author claims, because they are the only race in the setting that can't imagine being annihilated. There are so many of them, and they breed to quickly, that they instead worry entirely about the individual rat. Every single rat is constantly pondering where their food is coming from, how they'll stay safe, and how they'll move up. This actually leads to the unique thing about the rats: They might be a squeaking horde of fur and rusty daggers, but they give a shit. Theygive a shit about dying. Every individual rat tends to think they're the most awesome rat that ever squeaked, and they will do everything they can to live through fighting your PCs. The author posits that this sense of self-importance, plus their overall sense of insane security (who could ever imagine the Under Empire exploding?) is why every rat is looking at the rat to his left and the rat to his right and plotting how to make surethe one that gets their throat torn out by your small, but vicious dog. She reasons it's similar to how the Empire ends up in civil wars whenever Chaos isn't attacking them for a couple decades, but writ across the entire history of the Under Empire.Rat society is structured by fur color and unbridled ambition. This section gets kinda repetitive, to be honest, and I think the in-universe stuff drags on. There's 26 pages of the agitated Verenan wailing about how rats are going to kill us all before we get to anything else. This is like a fifth of the entire pagecount. White rats are priests and wizards. Black rats are warriors. Brown rats are whatever the other rats force them to be or whatever they've managed to claw their way into being. Skaven society has dozens of levels of hierarchy beyond this, because if there's one thing the rats like more than backstabbing and eating, it's lording over every other rat they think they can get away with lording over. Skaven infighting is a little different from all the other antagonist factions of the setting in that it happens partly because the conceited little bastards think other Skaven are way more of a threat than you, in the abstract. Playing their dumb politics against one another will win you battles, probably even wars. I think the only people who can rival Skaven for self-assurance are elves, and with about as disastrous of consequences.The rats worship a great god called the Great Horned Rat. Imperials will always immediately identify the Horned Rat as a Chaos God, and certainly GW did the same eventually because they're hacks, but it's much more interesting if it's something else. Priesthood is hereditary, with white or grey furred rats with cute little horns marking them as magically gifted, a process our author identifies as being similar to how collegiate Wizards take on aspects of their Wind. The three-scratch triangle that accompanies rat people in their wanderings is their holy symbol, and one of the few things the Skaven will actually try to protect. They can't resist putting it on everything as a show of faith to their God, because the average Skaven is very devoted to the Horned Rat. Interestingly, this makes the Skaven the only monotheists in the setting; they think the Horned Rat will eventually eat all the other Gods. The Horned Rat is basically Rat Sigmar, really; he's a manifestation of everything the rats think is cool about a person and the direct patron of their entire civilization. The problem being that while humans think things like 'cooperation' and 'protecting others' are cool (and so assign them to Sigmar) the rats think being a murderous betrayer who climbs over the piles of their former friends and allies to the top is cool, so the Great Horned Rat is all about gnawing and backstabbing and the inevitable annihilation or subjugation of all non-Skaven.The section on Skaven tech could be summed up with 'it's powerful, but made by the lowest bidder, explodes, and Warpstone isn't safe, even for them.' The Skaven also dearly need Warpstone; if they run out their civilization will absolutely collapse. They bend as much as they can towards getting more Warpstone. They need it. It's their cocaine, their oil, and their plutonium all at once. They are also causing immense ecological damage everywhere they go. Our author is quite clear: If there can be found a way to destroy Warpstone and the supply can be cut off, the Skaven will die. Yes, that's a big ask, but at least there's an objective and a critical point rather than a dozen more books about how you can never ever fix the polar gates or otherwise stop Chaos, right?We also get an Ulrican legend about the creation of the world as we know it, where Ulric alone tries to hold the collapse of the polar gate and Ranald runs away without warning anyone. The other Gods won't help until Verena goes to help Ulric and shames the others into making him King of the Gods and everything and he helps the humans learn to fight Chaos and they mostly contain it, etc etc. Obviously a legend in favor of the Ulricans, and told by Ulricans, but the outline is similar to many of the human myths of the Collapse. The interesting part is this legend claims the Skaven arose from the rats that ate the corpses of the first Chaos champions and infected humans. This is one of our possible origins for the ratmen.The other, more popular (and probably true) myth is the Doom of Kavzar. See, there was a city in what becomes Tilea where man and dwarf lived in peace after the elves had been pushed off the continent. Their city was great; they lived in harmony, everything was lovely, and they wanted to thank the Gods for it. So they undertook building a great tower with a shrine to every God in the same place. They weren't able to finish their tower, and as they despaired that they'd lose the blessing of the divine, a grey-cloaked man came before them. He said he'd finish the tower immediately, if they let him place a shrine to his God on the top. Being very stupid people who forgot about how you shouldn't trust mysterious wizards talking about Gods they won't mention, they agreed. He snapped his fingers, tower was finished, and on top of it stood a great bell. They thought the bell was going to be cool at first.The bell was not cool.The Gods stopped listening to the people of Kavzar, and terrible storms came upon their city, as the bell kept tolling away. They locked themselves in their homes and holds, and prayed for their mistake to be undone. Instead they got positively blasted with rats. Just rats everywhere. Eating people. Turning into rat people. Sinking the entire city into a massive morass and set of tunnels built out of the destroyed dwarfhold underneath it. Given how Skavenblight (first city of the Skaven) is in Tilea, and given how the rats goddamn love bells as a major holy symbol of the Great Horned Rat...yeah, I'm gonna go with this is the one that happened. Sorry, Ulricans.And now we finally get into the actual book proper.

Rat people run, run like the wind posted by Night10194 Original SA post Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2e: Children of the Horned Rat



Rat people run, run like the wind



Remember how last chapter left it ambiguous where the ratmen came from? Yeah, we immediately start of with 'Lol the Doom of Kavzar is real, fuck the Ulricans' in a firm authorial voice, 8 'o clock, day 1. We also get a little bit on how Skaven history is a bit sketchy because the little buggers don't actually keep many records. They're so focused on the now and the near future, why would they care what happened to some loser who obviously didn't manage to take over the world 2000 years ago? When they do record history, it's almost always personal/great rat history, either as an attempt to flatter a superior by bigging him up or an attempt to leave behind a record of how cool they were. From these scraps of boasting we get the history of the vile ratmen.



However, we get a really interesting implication here. The Skaven don't speak of Kavzar much, but their records show they call the strange grey hooded man 'The Shaper' and claim he came from 'an Older Race'. Now, Skaven are obviously not part of the Great Plan, but the direct implication in book is that the Shaper was some kind of renegade Old One. The device he installed at the top of the great tower of Kavzar was the first Screaming Bell, but it was also specifically a device to call down meteorites from the orbital junk cloud around the planet. Meteorites made of Warpstone. The terrible storms and cold seem to have been caused by a meteor strike. As does the mutation of the city's rats. Given what Old Ones did to the rest of the world's races, the idea of a renegade making the rat people post-Collapse when they were all supposed to be gone already is interesting. The Warpstone rain was so intense it even transformed the architecture of the city, turning it into a stark and hellish cyclopean mess. The Skaven were born out of the deaths and suffering of everyone in the great city of Kavzar, their birth pangs the death of a prosperous and happy civilization.



What else is interesting is the little guys were chill for a long time after eating Kavzar. They had Warpstone, they had food, and they had enough space. They spent a long time just living in the ruins, now called Skavenblight, building stuff and twitching their little noses, boggling and bruxing. Look, I had pet rats as a kid, I'm always going to think rats are a little adorable. Then they started to run out of Warpstone and started to plan what to do next. Without it, none of what they built would work! It was a divine gift from the Great Horned Rat and/or Shaper, right!? Literal manna from heaven. So they got an idea: Build a giant drill! This will solve everything! We will build a giant drill and force endless magical energy through it and then we'll build a hollow world where we can all live and get-get the Warpstone and everything will be great! Absolutely nothing could go wrong with building a massive terraforming project on an undreamt of scale and then shoving endless chaotic power through it.



Miraculously, everything worked great and the rats live a peaceful existence side by side with the world in their holl Hahaha everything fucking exploded!



With the drill machine exploding, millions of rats died as they accidentally sank all of Skavenblight into the swamp. The idiots who had caused all this were up higher, and survived, as is the Skaven way, became the new lords of the Skaven, the Council of Thirteen, and the surviving wizards who'd fucked everything up became the Grey Seers. You're going to see a lot of this with rat nazis, where the fuckups are at the back, manage to survive, and climb over the corpses to become the leaders. RAT PEOPLE! Anyway, the rats begin a new process and a new plan, which they call the Great Sniff: We're all starving to death and the paradise made for us by someone (possibly an asshole Old One) is now in the sea/swamp. Step 1: Start the pumps. Step 2: Send rat colonists everywhere and start building wide, building tall was screwing us. This is how we get rat ninjas, but I'll come to that later. The rats then come into conflict with the dwarves, who at this time have A: Kicked the hell out of the elves and B: have a giant underground world-city. The rats do not mention how much help they got in fucking up that world-city from a certain fat idiot frog half the world away; you remember how people have gone on about how one of the Lizardmen Slaan went to war with continental drift? Yeah, that's, uh, kind of one of the big reasons we've got rat problems. Because it blew up the dwarf world-city and cut all the holds off from one another when they'd been used to being able to plan around a world-spanning tunnel network for mutual defense.



The rats, as I said, don't mention any of that and nor does their book. They just say they got to work fighting the dorfs alongside the greenskins as allies of convenience. Turns out sneaky rats and angry orcs go together like peanut butter and chocolate if deliciousness was dead dwarves, and so the war was going pretty well for our strong rat sons. They helped let the orcs into dwarfholds, let the orcs burn them down, then stole everything and ate the bodies. They had a rhythm going. Then they invaded Karaz-a-Karak, the greatest hold of all dwarfkind, and the dwarves were desperate enough to use something as yet untested: Gunpowder, originally designed to blast open new tunnels. Explosions rocked the mountains such that even the orcs were afraid, and both sides withdrew to try to figure out what the hell had hit them. Meanwhile, the dwarves would sequester this stuff to study it and try to figure out how and why that worked and test it for ages. The rats prepped for another strike to finish off the bearded ones, reasoning they couldn't possibly do that twice and that they'd run out of explosions before the rats ran out of bodies.



It went perfectly! They exterminated the dwarves and moved on to INHERIT-INHE And then a bunch of assholes who'd gone to Lustria came home. This caused a civil war that took the rats out of the fighting, then a couple centuries later the dwarfs allied with some backwater king named Sigmar and smashed the orcs at Blackfire Pass, ending the crisis.



See, Clan Pestilens, one of the branches of the Great Sniff, had gone to Lustria. They'd discovered they really liked disease while in Lustria. And then they's gotten their asses beaten by Sotek the serpent god decided entirely on their own and of their own free will to come home and share how much disease was the only will of Nurgle THE GREAT HORNED RAT under their great leader Nurglitch (GEE I WONDER WHAT HE REALLY WORSHIPS). But that comes later. First the Skaven have to save the world.



I know kommy5 covered this in his partial review and it's been talked about a ton of times, but c'mon, this part has to be retold in full because it is the shining moment of ratman glory for our strong rat sons. A true supreme state of ratmind. The Skaven had a Nagash problem, you see. He objected to the existence of all these alive things in the world (because he could perfectly control the dead, so moving everything from the alive column to the dead column would mean world domination for the Great Necromancer), while the Skaven really liked being alive. He was also using massive amounts of Warpstone to build his powerful giant death pyramid and other doohickeys, and the Skaven wanted this to build their own world-ending doohickeys, because it's only fun when they do it. The Grey Seers realized they would have to beat him, but he was really hopped up on crazy magic juice and insanely powerful, and you've got to remember Necromancy was fairly new to the world at the time, so nobody quite knew how to beat it. Rather than try to attack him heroically like suckers, they instead built an insanely powerful sword, so powerful it will kill everyone (including the guy wielding it) called the Fellblade. Then they had to find someone to wield it, and the Skaven figured out a way better plan than giving it to a random rat they could sucker into it. They instead found a heroic Khemri king locked in a dungeon with a tragic backstory and gave it to him, then spun him around and pointed him in Nagash's direction. Then the entire Council and Seers backed him up, basically controlling him like a puppet, because the sword let them see through their chosen epic hero. I imagine the eventual epic battle was actually pretty hilarious, with the Skaven Council as a peanut gallery screaming 'NONO! Stab-stab!" "YES-YES! PARRY LEFT!" the entire time while the occasional Grey Seer head exploded from the magical strain of protecting their fighter from Wizard Bullshit. Nagash was hacked into so many pieces that even that bastard stayed down. The rats swarmed in to grab the Nagash bits and throw them in a fire, which is the proper way to handle this, but they missed a hand because they're dumb rat people and that's why we still have Nagash problems to this day.



Still, they almost got him. Of all the people who have fucked up Nagash, they got the closest to actually putting a stop to him. By livestreaming a random king attacking him for vengeance while they cheated like crazy to drag him over the finish line in his epic duel. It is the most beautiful moment in all of ratman history. Nagash later came back and utterly destroyed the rats who'd moved into his old digs, but they'd already mined out the Warpstone and he was sort of weak after his rebirth, so the rest of the rats didn't bother fighting him. He then wandered up north to regain his strength by crushing these primitive barbarians and their little 'Sigmar' king so that he could return to Khemri and oh dear that went really badly for him.



And that brings us to Pestilens. After all this mess, Pestilens tried to take over the Under Empire, declaring a new insane disease-based theocracy and that disease was the only will of the Great Horned Rat. They'd learned a bunch about it from stealing stuff from the Lizardmen down in Lustria, and the implication is, of course, that they'd been turned by Nurgle and were probably heretical against the Rat. When they returned home, they first demanded the Council recognize they were a legitimate priesthood of a totally legitimate branch of GHR worship. The Council ate their emissaries and said 'lol'. They challenged the Council by unleashing the first bioweapons on their fellow Skaven, killing millions of ratmen and starting the greatest civil war in the history of a species known for its amazing civil wars. For the next 400 years, rat fought rat, more than anything else, and most of the world forgot rats were a problem, because so many goddamn rats died in the fighting. Disease swept through packed rat-cities, while Warlock Engineers blew up Plague Temples with giant earthquake machines and huge armies of expendable rat nazis battled through all the dark places of the world. It was pretty metal.



Sadly, it couldn't go on forever, and the rats eventually caused the collapse of their ent AND THEN THE NINJAS ARRIVED.



Clan Eshin returned from Cathay bearing shurikens, cute little face masks, and kung fu. They immediately swore allegiance to the Council, which rewarded them with power and pride of position, and then sent their adorable little ninja rats to start killing Plague Priests. This eventually got Pestilens to the bargaining table, with the Council swearing not to kill Nurglitch on the way to peace talks. After the unusually low number of assassination attempts failed, Nurglitch came before the Council and promised to serve as one of the Great Clans. They didn't like this idea, but then he revealed he had infected himself with a disease that would destroy all of Skavenblight and the entire Council if they didn't say yes, and suddenly they liked the idea a lot. Thus came Pestilens to the service of the Council and the Great Clans.



You remember the plagues of 1111 and the poor rule of Emperor Boris Goldgather. That was rat people (the plagues, the poor rule was a result of systemic corruption in the Imperial government). Rat people invaded the Empire after the massive plague, and would have destroyed it, except that they also invaded Sylvania because it had Warpstone. That was a mistake. A strange foreign noble taught the people of Sylvania how to raise the dead (thanks Vlad!) and massive armies of zombies proved to be a bit of a shock to the ratmen. They didn't outnumber them, they couldn't scare them, and poison didn't work. The ratmen were slaughtered, and worse, slaughtered ratmen made good zombies, too! The ratmen refused to lose to a bunch of strange-accented backwater yokels and so sent a huge army to Sylvania, tying up their forces, while meanwhile Count Mandred of Middenheim used his incredible cheese flooded the lower reaches of the city, then sallied forth and began destroying the rat garrisons left behind. Mandred Skavenslayer reunited the Empire and destroyed the ratmen, and ever since they've had a great hatred of Man-Things.



The last bits of history go into how rats are everywhere. Absolutely everywhere. The extent of their tunnel systems rivals the old dwarf under-way, and they live under almost every major human settlement. Worse, they've starting to build trains. In a century or two, they might have an underground rail network to let them move quicker than any other species in the setting, even more than they already do. Train Rat Nazi or the even more dangerous Truck Rat Nazi cannot be allowed to come to be. The rats claim they almost defeated Emperor Magnus on his way home from beating Chaos in 2302, but that they just 'decided' not to finish him off for 'reasons', so I'm gonna take that with a grain of salt and assume they got sent squeaking back into their holes. They claim the same about their aid for Archaon, saying that they're just waiting for the right moment when the humans are sufficiently divided in the aftermath to actually destroy them. They DID send Rat Agent 47, Deathmaster Snikch, to go kill Valten as he recovered from failing to kill Archaon. This was a clever move that will cause serious religious disunity in the Empire. Now the rats are plotting in the shadows, thinking about maybe attacking the humans in the aftermath of the war...unless your group of 3-6 PCs and their small, but vicious dog get involved, then all bets are off and everything will end in fire and squeaking and accusations of treason.



Just another day in the Under Empire.



Next Time: Life in a totalitarian hellhole ruled by narcissistic buffoons Remember how last chapter left it ambiguous where the ratmen came from? Yeah, we immediately start of with 'Lol the Doom of Kavzar is real, fuck the Ulricans' in a firm authorial voice, 8 'o clock, day 1. We also get a little bit on how Skaven history is a bit sketchy because the little buggers don't actually keep many records. They're so focused on the now and the near future, why would they care what happened to some loser who obviously didn't manage to take over the world 2000 years ago? When they do record history, it's almost always personal/great rat history, either as an attempt to flatter a superior by bigging him up or an attempt to leave behind a record of how cool they were. From these scraps of boasting we get the history of the vile ratmen.However, we get ainteresting implication here. The Skaven don't speak of Kavzar much, but their records show they call the strange grey hooded man 'The Shaper' and claim he came from 'an Older Race'. Now, Skaven are obviously not part of the Great Plan, but the direct implication in book is that the Shaper was some kind of renegade Old One. The device he installed at the top of the great tower of Kavzar was the first Screaming Bell, but it was also specifically a device to call down meteorites from the orbital junk cloud around the planet. Meteorites made of Warpstone. The terrible storms and cold seem to have been caused by a meteor strike. As does the mutation of the city's rats. Given what Old Ones did to the rest of the world's races, the idea of a renegade making the rat people post-Collapse when they were all supposed to be gone already is interesting. The Warpstone rain was so intense it even transformed the architecture of the city, turning it into a stark and hellish cyclopean mess. The Skaven were born out of the deaths and suffering of everyone in the great city of Kavzar, their birth pangs the death of a prosperous and happy civilization.What else is interesting is the little guys were chill for a long time after eating Kavzar. They had Warpstone, they had food, and they had enough space. They spent a long time just living in the ruins, now called Skavenblight, building stuff and twitching their little noses, boggling and bruxing. Look, I had pet rats as a kid, I'm always going to think rats are a little adorable. Then they started to run out of Warpstone and started to plan what to do next. Without it, none of what they built would work! It was a divine gift from the Great Horned Rat and/or Shaper, right!? Literal manna from heaven. So they got an idea: Build a giant drill! This will solve everything! We will build a giant drill and force endless magical energy through it and then we'll build a hollow world where we can all live and get-get the Warpstone and everything will be great! Absolutely nothing could go wrong with building a massive terraforming project on an undreamt of scale and then shoving endless chaotic power through it.Hahaha everything fucking exploded!With the drill machine exploding, millions of rats died as they accidentally sank all of Skavenblight into the swamp. The idiots who had caused all this were up higher, and survived, as is the Skaven way, became the new lords of the Skaven, the Council of Thirteen, and the surviving wizards who'd fucked everything up became the Grey Seers. You're going to see a lot of this with rat nazis, where the fuckups are at the back, manage to survive, and climb over the corpses to become the leaders. RAT PEOPLE! Anyway, the rats begin a new process and a new plan, which they call the Great Sniff: We're all starving to death and the paradise made for us by someone (possibly an asshole Old One) is now in the sea/swamp. Step 1: Start the pumps. Step 2: Send rat colonists everywhere and start building wide, building tall was screwing us. This is how we get rat ninjas, but I'll come to that later. The rats then come into conflict with the dwarves, who at this time have A: Kicked the hell out of the elves and B: have a giant underground world-city. The rats do not mention how much help they got in fucking up that world-city from a certain fat idiot frog half the world away; you remember how people have gone on about how one of the Lizardmen Slaan went to war with continental drift? Yeah, that's, uh, kind of one of the big reasons we've got rat problems. Because it blew up the dwarf world-city and cut all the holds off from one another when they'd been used to being able to plan around a world-spanning tunnel network for mutual defense.The rats, as I said, don't mention any of that and nor does their book. They just say they got to work fighting the dorfs alongside the greenskins as allies of convenience. Turns out sneaky rats and angry orcs go together like peanut butter and chocolate if deliciousness was dead dwarves, and so the war was going pretty well for our strong rat sons. They helped let the orcs into dwarfholds, let the orcs burn them down, then stole everything and ate the bodies. They had a rhythm going. Then they invaded Karaz-a-Karak, the greatest hold of all dwarfkind, and the dwarves were desperate enough to use something as yet untested: Gunpowder, originally designed to blast open new tunnels. Explosions rocked the mountains such that even the orcs were afraid, and both sides withdrew to try to figure out what the hell had hit them. Meanwhile, the dwarves would sequester this stuff to study it and try to figure out how and why that worked and test it for ages. The rats prepped for another strike to finish off the bearded ones, reasoning they couldn't possibly do that twice and that they'd run out of explosions before the rats ran out of bodies.And then a bunch of assholes who'd gone to Lustria came home. This caused a civil war that took the rats out of the fighting, then a couple centuries later the dwarfs allied with some backwater king named Sigmar and smashed the orcs at Blackfire Pass, ending the crisis.See, Clan Pestilens, one of the branches of the Great Sniff, had gone to Lustria. They'd discovered they really liked disease while in Lustria. And then they'sdecided entirely on their own and of their own free will to come home and share how much disease was the only will ofTHE GREAT HORNED RAT under their great leader Nurglitch (GEE I WONDER WHAT HE REALLY WORSHIPS). But that comes later. First the Skaven have to save the world.I know kommy5 covered this in his partial review and it's been talked about a ton of times, but c'mon, this part has to be retold in full because it is the shining moment of ratman glory for our strong rat sons. A true supreme state of ratmind. The Skaven had a Nagash problem, you see. He objected to the existence of all these alive things in the world (because he could perfectly control the dead, so moving everything from the alive column to the dead column would mean world domination for the Great Necromancer), while the Skaven really liked being alive. He was also using massive amounts of Warpstone to build his powerful giant death pyramid and other doohickeys, and the Skaven wanted this to build their own world-ending doohickeys, because it's only fun when they do it. The Grey Seers realized they would have to beat him, but he was really hopped up on crazy magic juice and insanely powerful, and you've got to remember Necromancy was fairly new to the world at the time, so nobody quite knew how to beat it. Rather than try to attack him heroically like suckers, they instead built an insanely powerful sword, so powerful it will kill everyone (including the guy wielding it) called the Fellblade. Then they had to find someone to wield it, and the Skaven figured out a way better plan than giving it to a random rat they could sucker into it. They instead found a heroic Khemri king locked in a dungeon with a tragic backstory and gave it to him, then spun him around and pointed him in Nagash's direction. Then the entire Council and Seers backed him up, basically controlling him like a puppet, because the sword let them see through their chosen epic hero. I imagine the eventual epic battle was actually pretty hilarious, with the Skaven Council as a peanut gallery screaming 'NONO! Stab-stab!" "YES-YES! PARRY LEFT!" the entire time while the occasional Grey Seer head exploded from the magical strain of protecting their fighter from Wizard Bullshit. Nagash was hacked into so many pieces that even that bastard stayed down. The rats swarmed in to grab the Nagash bits and throw them in a fire, which is the proper way to handle this, but they missed a hand because they're dumb rat people and that's why we still have Nagash problems to this day.Still, they almost got him. Of all the people who have fucked up Nagash, they got the closest to actually putting a stop to him. By livestreaming a random king attacking him for vengeance while they cheated like crazy to drag him over the finish line in his epic duel. It is the most beautiful moment in all of ratman history. Nagash later came back and utterly destroyed the rats who'd moved into his old digs, but they'd already mined out the Warpstone and he was sort of weak after his rebirth, so the rest of the rats didn't bother fighting him. He then wandered up north to regain his strength by crushing these primitive barbarians and their little 'Sigmar' king so that he could return to Khemri and oh dear that went really badly for him.And that brings us to Pestilens. After all this mess, Pestilens tried to take over the Under Empire, declaring a new insane disease-based theocracy and that disease was the only will of the Great Horned Rat. They'd learned a bunch about it from stealing stuff from the Lizardmen down in Lustria, and the implication is, of course, that they'd been turned by Nurgle and were probably heretical against the Rat. When they returned home, they first demanded the Council recognize they were a legitimate priesthood of a totally legitimate branch of GHR worship. The Council ate their emissaries and said 'lol'. They challenged the Council by unleashing the first bioweapons on their fellow Skaven, killing millions of ratmen and starting the greatest civil war in the history of a species known for its amazing civil wars. For the next 400 years, rat fought rat, more than anything else, and most of the world forgot rats were a problem, because so many goddamn rats died in the fighting. Disease swept through packed rat-cities, while Warlock Engineers blew up Plague Temples with giant earthquake machines and huge armies of expendable rat nazis battled through all the dark places of the world. It was pretty metal.AND THEN THE NINJAS ARRIVED.Clan Eshin returned from Cathay bearing shurikens, cute little face masks, and kung fu. They immediately swore allegiance to the Council, which rewarded them with power and pride of position, and then sent their adorable little ninja rats to start killing Plague Priests. This eventually got Pestilens to the bargaining table, with the Council swearing not to kill Nurglitch on the way to peace talks. After the unusually low number of assassination attempts failed, Nurglitch came before the Council and promised to serve as one of the Great Clans. They didn't like this idea, but then he revealed he had infected himself with a disease that would destroy all of Skavenblight and the entire Council if they didn't say yes, and suddenly they liked the idea a lot. Thus came Pestilens to the service of the Council and the Great Clans.You remember the plagues of 1111 and the poor rule of Emperor Boris Goldgather. That was rat people (the plagues, the poor rule was a result of systemic corruption in the Imperial government). Rat people invaded the Empire after the massive plague, and would have destroyed it, except that they also invaded Sylvania because it had Warpstone. That was a mistake. A strange foreign noble taught the people of Sylvania how to raise the dead (thanks Vlad!) and massive armies of zombies proved to be a bit of a shock to the ratmen. They didn't outnumber them, they couldn't scare them, and poison didn't work. The ratmen were slaughtered, and worse, slaughtered ratmen made good zombies, too! The ratmen refused to lose to a bunch of strange-accented backwater yokels and so sent a huge army to Sylvania, tying up their forces, while meanwhile Count Mandred of Middenheimflooded the lower reaches of the city, then sallied forth and began destroying the rat garrisons left behind. Mandred Skavenslayer reunited the Empire and destroyed the ratmen, and ever since they've had a great hatred of Man-Things.The last bits of history go into how rats are everywhere. Absolutely everywhere. The extent of their tunnel systems rivals the old dwarf under-way, and they live under almost every major human settlement. Worse, they've starting to build trains. In a century or two, they might have an underground rail network to let them move quicker than any other species in the setting, even more than they already do. Train Rat Nazi or the even more dangerous Truck Rat Nazi. The rats claim they almost defeated Emperor Magnus on his way home from beating Chaos in 2302, but that they just 'decided' not to finish him off for 'reasons', so I'm gonna take that with a grain of salt and assume they got sent squeaking back into their holes. They claim the same about their aid for Archaon, saying that they're just waiting for the right moment when the humans are sufficiently divided in the aftermath to actually destroy them. They DID send Rat Agent 47, Deathmaster Snikch, to go kill Valten as he recovered from failing to kill Archaon. This was a clever move that will cause serious religious disunity in the Empire. Now the rats are plotting in the shadows, thinking about maybe attacking the humans in the aftermath of the war...unless your group of 3-6 PCs and their small, but vicious dog get involved, then all bets are off and everything will end in fire and squeaking and accusations of treason.Just another day in the Under Empire.

Rat Races posted by Night10194 Original SA post Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2e: Children of the Horned Rat



Rat Races



You must understand: Rats are cowards because cowardice is usually the best way for them to survive. They live in an authoritarian hellhole where resources are scarce, work is dangerous, combat is moreso, and they are eminently replaceable. Every individual Skaven is approaching life based on what will keep them alive. Skaven are born without family, kept in litters that are actively encouraged to hurt or eat one another, and told at all times that they can trust no-one and that the world is a bad and terrifying place. Add to that the constant pangs of hunger, an insanely overworked adrenal system, and a predisposition to constant, spastic nervous energy and it's no wonder the little guys are so twitchy. When they see no other way, they can be astonishingly brave, especially if there are a lot of other rats around; one of the biggest things that will motivate a bunch of these guys to go to war is going hungry if they don't.



Skaven are a weird kind of contradiction where they're deeply afraid of other Skaven, yet very, very social. They react to one another with constant suspicion and fear the (often projected) covetous designs of their clanmates and fellow workers/soldiers/mad scientists, but a Skaven is also never alone. Nor do they want to be alone. After all, you need other Skaven around so that you can blame someone else whenever anything goes wrong. No Skaven ever, EVER willingly admits to failure; it's always the other Skaven's fault, or a hidden enemy messing with his plans, or outrageous bad luck thwarting his genius. This started as a means to survive in an authoritarian state, but it's become so deeply ingrained in the lower-class Skaven collective psyche that most of them believe it. Most Skaven cannot actually imagine making a mistake; everything is a hidden trap laid by someone else. Leaders do the same thing, but theirs is more a matter of making examples of subordinates or blaming the subordinates of an enemy as a means of discrediting them. Moreover, at that level of Skaven society? Yeah, a good bit of what goes wrong really is someone trying to fuck you over. The Skaven obsession with culling the weak leads to a brittle society that has, ironically, greatly weakened itself because no-one can actually trust anyone and this makes collective action of any kind really difficult. The rat race is endless, as a Skaven who manages to rise in society has other Skaven above them still, or 'peers' (who are obviously inferiors) even at the rank of the Council of Thirteen. There is no peace for Skaven. The Skaven actually don't know how long a normal Skaven lifespan is; the richest among them live for centuries, sustained by all kinds of technological marvels, while the poor rarely make it to 20. The idea of dying of natural causes, in your bed, is beyond the ratmen.



The ideal for the rats is someone who is petty, jealous, sly, and deceitful. A great leader will take all the credit for success, while finding ways to blame others for failure, not to mention makin