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TRAIL OF CTHULHU
Hideous Creatures
Rat-Things
Publisher:
Author:
Artwork:
Layout:
Cathriona Tobin
Kenneth Hite
Gennifer Bone
Cathriona Tobin
Hideous Creatures: Rat-Things is part of the Ken Writes about Stuff
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© 2015 Pelgrane Press Ltd. All rights reserved.Trail of Cthulhu is published by arrangement with
Chaosium, Inc. Trail of Cthulhu is a trademark of Pelgrane Press Ltd.
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TRAIL OF CTHULHU
Hideous Creatures: Introduction
Lovecraft created his various “shadowy congeners” because the stories of vampires, werewolves, and even ghosts had become
too familiar and too formulaic to evoke true horror. Almost a century after he wrote, his own monstrous races have likewise
begun to seem like comfortable story furniture rather than unnerving signals that the world is horrible and wrong.
Our goal with this series is to present a comprehensive look at Lovecraft’s hideous creatures, from as many angles as we can.
Our goal is contradiction, surprise, and most especially the uncanny: the recognition of something familiar as something weird. As
in the “Gods and Titans” section of the
Trail of Cthulhu
core book, this series deliberately contradicts itself, blurring boundaries
and erasing certainties in the name of the uncanny. In your campaign, these variant truths might be misunderstandings, legends,
heresies, or deliberate lies spread by the creatures to lull their foes into a false sense of familiarity.
Change anything and everything in these pages, most especially the ability scores. If you need a terrifying assassin, a brief but
survivable fright, or a sanity-shattering horror, just add or subtract points at will.
Contents
Rat-Thing
Canonical Rat-Thing Abilities
Possible Rat-Thing Abilities
Variations
Mythic Echoes
Omajinaakoos (Ontario)
Pairaka (Ancient Persia)
Umot Perusong (Borneo)
Viesczy (Kashubia)
Yamo (Uganda)
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4
5
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7
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7
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Investigations
Clues
Scenario Seeds
The Rats in the Trenches
The Dream House in the Witch
Bibliography
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7
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TRAIL OF CTHULHU
Rat-Things
“WITNESSES SAID IT HAD LONG HAIR AND THE SHAPE OF A RAT, BUT THAT ITS SHARP-TOOTHED, BEARDED FACE WAS
EVILLY HUMAN WHILE ITS PAWS WERE LIKE TINY HUMAN HANDS.”
– “THE DREAMS IN THE WITCH-HOUSE”
Rat-things resemble ordinary rats,
and are easily mistaken for them at a
distance. Their heads are nonetheless
evil caricatures of human heads, and
their paws are like tiny human hands.
They have extremely strong, sharp
teeth, canines grown forward to
resemble incisors. They nuzzle and
nurse on human blood from their
witch companions or from convenient
sleepers. Though they do not die
naturally, they are now very rare.
Attacking rat-things climb the legs
or clothes of human opponents, or
drop down from ceilings, or climb
plumbing into their delicate areas at
delicate moments, or tunnel up from
the insides of their chests.
Frankly, the regular description
of the rat-thing is horrid enough, or
more than horrid enough. Combining
the oily menace of the city rat with the
malign features of a serial killer or sex
criminal should provide nightmares
for any players who glimpse the thing,
much less see it grinning over their
waking form, teeth and beard matted
with their blood.
But you can change the rat-thing
up with features from other “familiar
spirits” from English and Scottish
witch-lore:
• Toad-thing (bloated gluttonous
warty face)
• Pullet-thing (staring mad idiot
human face, razor-sharp talons)
• Cat-thing (horribly seductive or
sadistic expression, fangs)
• Dog-thing (only looks human from
head-on; from the side looks like a
deformed or cancerous dog muzzle)
• Hare-thing (one massive chipping
tooth, epileptic twitches)
• Mole-thing (eyeless human face,
hands crusted with bloody dirt)
• Blackbird-thing (human eyes in an
otherwise birdlike body, human
hands folded up under the wings
extrude slowly)
• Weasel-thing (savagery plain and
simple, much wider mouth than
normal)
Many rat-things know spells, either
from their human existence or from
centuries of association with witches
and sorcerers. But the Keeper can fade
such concerns into the background,
compared with the ubiquity and
fluidity of rat-horror. They say you
are only seven feet from a rat at any
time in a city. Rats outnumber people,
often by five or eight to one. They use
our streets, our sewers, our subways,
our graveyards, our entire cities as
their nests. Rats can chew through
concrete, climb sheer metal, cross
between houses on telephone lines,
learn to avoid traps, slip into rooms
while you sleep, poison food or water
with diseased urine, destroy pets and
children, drive the weak mad and carry
rabies to destroy the strong.
And that’s all before they get
300-year-old sorcerers attached to
them.
Rat-Thing
Abilities:
Athletics 9, Health 3,
Scuffling 7
Magic:
A rat-thing might have a Magic
rating as low as 3 or 4, or more likely
one in the double digits like the human
wizard he once was. All rat-things know
at least two other spells in addition to
Contact Nyarlathotep and Contact Rat-
Thing. The canonical rat-thing spell is
Create Hyperspace Gate.
Hit Threshold:
6 (small and incredibly
nimble)
Alertness Modifier:
+1
Stealth Modifier:
+2
Weapon:
-2 (bite); drained Health
lost to rat-thing bite refreshes its own
Health (up to 6).
Armor:
None
Stability Loss:
+0; +1 if the rat-thing
was known to (or ancestral to) the
witness when alive
Canonical Rat-Thing
Abilities
In addition to his ability to navigate
hyperspace gates, Brown Jenkin shows
both these powers in “Dreams in the
Witch-House.”
Dream Initiation:
The rat-thing can
place the target in a dream state, during
which it can bring her through a Gate,
into another world or plane, and even
carry out other magical ceremonies
together and drain blood from her. This
requires a Magic ability roll from the
rat-thing (minimum spend of 2 Magic);
the sleeper resists with a Stability roll
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TRAIL OF CTHULHU
Rat-Things
with a Difficulty equal to the total of
the rat-thing’s roll and spend. The
target can still make separate Stability
rolls while in the dream-state to resist
major actions such as signing the black
book of Azathoth or killing a baby. The
rat-thing or its witch can spend Magic
to increase the Difficulty of such tests.
Internal Attack:
If a target has ever
participated in a ceremony with a
rat-thing (even involuntarily during a
dream) the rat-thing can teleport to
the target’s insides and chew its way
out. Its internal attacks begin at Hit
Threshold 0 and increment up by 1 for
each attack; the first two attacks each
do two instances of bite damage. When
it reaches Hit Threshold 2, it emerges
from the target’s skin and can be
attacked in turn – assuming the target
has any Stability left. (Being chewed
through costs 1 Stability per Health
point lost; seeing the rat-thing burst
from one’s body is a 7-point Stability
test.) Truly horrible Keepers can allow
the rat-thing to target anyone it's bitten
... or seen near a Gate ... or smelled.
in mind, it onsets in 1-6 hours and
affects the victim as if
Hurt.
The
malady then begins draining 1 Health
point per hour until the victim
reaches -6, at which point he requires
hospitalization and medical attention.
Dream-Chase:
For 2 Magic points,
a rat-thing can enter the dreams of
its target. From there, it can discern
its target’s whereabouts, create
nightmares (5-point Stability test),
rotate the sleeper into hyperspace (as
Create Hyperspace Gate) or into the
Dreamlands (both 4 Magic points),
or even emerge into the dreamer’s
room through rat-holes, angles in the
corner, or patterns in the wallpaper.
Environmental Immunity:
Rat-
things can travel to all planes and
planets; they suffer no ill effects
from poison, vacuum, lensed gravity,
interstellar cold, or other such
hazards.
Hyperspatial Familiarity:
Rat-
things know the patterns and tangencies
of hyperspace very thoroughly, even
innately or intuitively. They spend
only half the required Magic to Create
a Hyperspace Gate. Further, they can
find (or cause to be built) spots on
Earth (such as non-Euclidean witch-
attics) where an interplanar Gate
costs them only 2 Magic to build.
They can never be lost in hyperspace.
Hypnotism:
Some
rat-things
have the Hypnosis ability (Trail
of Cthulhu,
p. 43) usually at 8+.
Rat-thing Hypnosis can work on
the unwilling, and includes simple
commands (“open the door”); those
with witch-cult ancestors take -2 to
their Stability roll to resist. Such a rat-
thing likely knows the Mind Exchange
spell.
Magic Drain:
Blood sacrificed to
Nyarlathotep (or to the rat-thing’s
patron, if different), spilled inside a
hyperspace pentacle, etc. refreshes the
rat-thing’s Magic pool by an amount
equal to half the Health lost.
Shapeshifting:
For 2 Magic points,
a rat-thing can shape-shift into a large
rat, a bloated bat, or a remarkably ugly
baby or dwarfish human.
Spider Climb:
A rat-thing can cling
to walls and ceilings made of anything
but sheer glass.
Variations
As with the “Gods and Titans”
section in the corebook, this
compendium is intentionally self-
contradictory. Its facts and theories
come from Lovecraft, from later
writers, and from the universe of
possibilities opened up between them.
• Rat-things are created by malign
sorcery from rats fed on human
brains, to serve as factotums and
servants to the witch-cult.
• Rat-things are sorcerers or
witches who chose (or gained)
transformation rather than death;
they teach their ancient lore to
their successors and thus continue
to serve Nyarlathotep, Shub-
Niggurath, or the Unnamable
One.
• Ludvig Prinn invented the spell to
create (or become, or summon) a
rat-thing, which is why they only
start appearing in witch trials
after 1540.
• Rat-things are an alien species
from
Nyarlathotep’s
world
orbiting Sharnoth; he seeds them
among his cultists across time as
spies, messengers, and instructors
in hyperspatial physics.
• Rat-things are hybrids born to
witches after congress with the
Black Man or the Great Goddess.
Possible Rat-Thing
Abilities
However they occur, rat-things are
individual beings, not a species per
se. They can therefore manifest very
individual powers and abilities over
and above their personal spell lists or
customized hyperspace gates to their
favorite planes and planets. Here are
some “generic individualisms” you can
ascribe to that special rat-thing in your
own campaign.
Darkvision:
A rat-thing can see into
hyperspatial frequencies; they never
suffer penalties for darkness, fog, cover,
etc.
Diseased Bite:
Bitten victims must
make a Difficulty 4 Health test or be
infected with some loathsome disease.
Unless the Keeper has a specific disease
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