2006: Revenge of the Rat King

1974 is an important year for the gaming hobby. It is the year that Dungeons & Dragons was introduced, the original RPG from which all other RPGs would ultimately be derived and the original RPG from which so many computer games would draw for their inspiration. It is fitting that the current owner of the game, Wizards of the Coast, released the new version, Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, in the year of the game’s fortieth anniversary. To celebrate this, Reviews from R’lyeh will be running a series of reviews from the hobby’s anniversary years, thus there will be reviews from 1974, from 1984, from 1994, and from 2004—the thirtieth, twentieth, and tenth anniversaries of the titles. These will be retrospectives, in each case an opportunity to re-appraise interesting titles and true classics decades on from the year of their original release.

—oOo—

This is an evil dungeon. For example, the first room consists of a set of stairs which lead down to a door. Murky water is pooled in front of the door. That is simple enough. However, the door cannot be opened because the passage on the other side has been filled with rubble, which will take several hours to clear and that after the strenuous effort to smash the door down. Whilst the Player Characters are doing that, they are standing in the pool of water which hides several caltrops whose points have been laced with poison called Vein Rot, which does Strength damage and halves movement. Ah, I hear you say, “What about secret doors?” Well, yes, of course. There is a secret door, but you know what? That has been trapped too. Opening the secret door releases clouds of finely powdered glass, which if a Player Character breathes in, causes Constitution damage. Which is evil and just the first room. Then the dungeon proceeds to batter the players and their characters over their heads with another fourteen encounters with different mechanics and different traps and monsters, but in a very similar vein… If it sounds like someone has it in for the players and their characters, that is because someone has—and it is not Harley Stroh.

Obviously, the clue to fact that this is the start of a revenge scenario is in the title, Dungeon Crawl Classics #27: Revenge of the Rat King. Designed for a party of between four and six Player Characters of Fourth to Sixth Level, this is the twenty-seventh entry in the original line-up of Dungeon Crawl Classics from Goodman Games. Being published in 2006, it is not written for use with the publisher’s own Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game, but for Dungeons & Dragons, Third Edition published by Wizards of the Coast. It is also a sequel to the very first entry in the series, Dungeon Crawl Classics #1: Idylls of the Rat King. In that scenario, the Player Characters’ investigations into raids by Goblin bandits on caravans carrying silver ore lead to the nearby Gannu Silver Mine which turned out to be infested by not just Goblins, but rats and Wererats. The final confrontation in the mine is with Lawrence Gannu, cursed by the villagers of Silverton to be a Wererat after they blamed his father for a dangerous discovery in the mines, returned to take his revenge upon the villagers. Now Aaron Gannu, father of Lawrence, has discovered that it was the Player Characters who killed his son and has engineered a plot to snare them in his clutches and their certain deaths. He will have his revenge!

Dungeon Crawl Classics #27: Revenge of the Rat King is really a dungeon in three acts. The first part opens with the Player Characters in the city of Soulgrave tracking down a ring of slavers and having found an entrance to one of its staging areas under its streets. Very quickly, the Player Characters will find themselves facing challenging situations, both in terms of traps and foes. Monsters harry the Player Characters, scampering away when they get too close and barely giving them time to recover before the next encounter, whilst a rattish figure taunts them all the way. It is linear, including some nasty traps and an unguided and consequently perilous ride on a skiff down a raging storm sewer, and gruelling. The latter intentionally so. Intentionally because Aaron Gannu wants to capture the Player Characters rather than kill them—at this stage. Ultimately, he will. In the second act, the Player Characters wake up dressed in rags, chained up, and bereft of their equipment. After escaping, they must find their way down another rushing waterway and eventually, their equipment, arming them ready to face their captor at the end of the scenario. The third and final act of the scenario is shorter and just as bruising, but the Player Characters have the benefit of their equipment and so the encounters leading up the finale are almost a relief for the players if not their characters.

The scenario requires some preparation in terms of hooking the Player Characters in. It does suggest several ways to do that, all of them tied into the slave ring hook. Yet the Dungeon Master may still want to develop some background in her campaign involving a slave ring before the Player Characters get to this scenario, whether that is in the city of Soulgrave or one of her own choosing. Ideally though, the Dungeon Master should run Dungeon Crawl Classics #27: Revenge of the Rat King as a sequel to Dungeon Crawl Classics #1: Idylls of the Rat King, otherwise the revenge plot at its heart will not just be as significant to either the players or their characters.

If those issues can all be dealt with, the scenario’s primary problem is insurmountable. This is the fact that it is linear. In fact, each of its three acts is linear. Act one to get the Player Characters captured, act two to get the Player Characters free and to their equipment, and act three to get the Player Characters to the finale and the confrontation with Aaron Gannu. Each is testing in its way, the first act grinding the Player Characters down, the second acting stripping them bare, and the third building them back up again. The designer is telling not just a story of revenge, but a revenge epic! One, of course, starring a variable cast, yet that also means that the scenario’s plot has to run for it to work. That is, the Player Characters have to be captured, they have to lose their equipment, and they have to regain it. In effect, no matter how foolish or clever the players and their characters are in the first act—and clever play, along with lucky aplenty, can curtail the effect of some of the challenges they will face, it does not actually matter. For some Dungeon Masters and some players this may be too much of an imposition upon player agency.

Most obviously, Dungeon Crawl Classics #27: Revenge of the Rat King is connected to Dungeon Crawl Classics #1: Idylls of the Rat King, but there are one or two nods to other roleplaying classics in the book too. One is the cover, a delightful homage to the cover of the Player’s Handbook for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, First Edition, but with a statue of a rat god replacing the demon, larcenous adventurers swarming all over it of course and attempting to prise out the gemstones it has eyes! The Player Characters will discover this very statue towards the end of the dungeon. Inside, the scenario develops the slavers theme by taking inspiration in one or two locations to A1-4, Scourge of the Slave Lords, such as having to run along the tops of walls of cages holding captured slaves as in A2 Secret of the Slavers Stockade and the whole sequence to the second part of the scenario in which the Player Characters wake and find themselves clothed, but completely lacking equipment and must rely upon wits and abilities is inspired by A4 In the Dungeons of the Slave Lords.

The scenario includes some new magical items and a new monster too. The latter is the Redtooth Troll, a troll afflicted with wererat lycanthropy. His encounter in the scenario starts with him under a bridge and reaching up and over to knock the Player Characters off.

Penultimately—and notably, Dungeon Crawl Classics #1: Idylls of the Rat King and Dungeon Crawl Classics #27: Revenge of the Rat King have something else in common beyond one being the sequel to the other. This is that both have subsequently been adapted for use with Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition. These are Fifth Edition Fantasy #31: Idylls of the Rat King and Fifth Edition Fantasy #36: Revenge of the Rat King.

Physically, Dungeon Crawl Classics #27: Revenge of the Rat King is generally well presented. There is a lot to work through and prepare as many of the NPCs and monsters are highly detailed. The artwork is excellent throughout and there are many images here that the Dungeon Master can show to her players in addition to the handouts at the end of the scenario. One big improvement in Dungeon Crawl Classics #27: Revenge of the Rat King is the cartography which more detailed and interesting than in Dungeon Crawl Classics #1: Idylls of the Rat King.

Dungeon Crawl Classics #27: Revenge of the Rat King is not quite a death trap dungeon because it is not designed to kill the Player Characters. It is, however, designed to hurt them, scour at their resources, and put them through the wringer and make them as well as their players work really hard. Every encounter in the dungeon is challenging, but the first act is really testing and full of nastily inventive scenes. The Dungeon Master is going to really enjoy running Dungeon Crawl Classics #27: Revenge of the Rat King; the players not quite so much—unless they like a challenge.