How do we make the old 'Rats in the Basement' story more interesting?

the basement actually leads to the tomb of an ancient lich way too powerfull for the party.

The Lich then asks the party to kill the rats, they are disturbing his slumber.

The rats are actually dire rats

Introduce Squatter's Rights

The players are the rats, seeking to drive the innkeeper out of business for killing their father.

The ratfolk have legitimate claim to that basement, and the innkeeper is technically squatting on their land. However the local authorities are prejudiced against rats and have sided with the innkeeper. Now the party has to investigate and represent the rats' case in court.

The rats are of a species that is either not native, it was previously considered extinct

>I break down the door

>Small furry hands cling to your legs, pulling you down into the abyss

>The innkeeper shouts in protest.
YOU'RE PAYING FOR THAT!

The lonely Necromancer spent his days in the crypt beneath the cities sewers. His necromantic powers fading, he found solace in the companionship of the rats and used what little magic he had left to uplift them.

He asked them for nothing but their companionship and after he passed the rats were determined to keep his abode (where his body is but a skeleton on the simple bed he had) safe.

The Inn-keeper heard rumors of a mage who took hermitage in the sewers and built his establishment over an old secret enterance used by nobles in the old days and has been plying the sewers since.

The Inn-keeper has secretly called upon the party to help deal with the sentient rats so he can finally have the necromancer's supposed treasure.

The rats offer to pay you more to kill the innkeeper.

>The rats fill the basement
>And the first floor
>And the whole village
>The whole village flees as the area is literally covered in rats
>The tide of rats isn't stopping any time soon
>Adventurers sent to figure out where the hell all these rats are coming from

I thought the entire point of "rats in the tavern basement" quests were to have them basically be milk runs for new groups; making them complicated sort of defeats the purpose of teaching basic mechanics to new players in a low-risk adventure, no?

Aren't rats able to completely floor your average commoner?

why do you think they send in adventurers?

The Rats are a byproduct of a Mage College student's experiment in creating multiple familiars.

Their consciousness is a shared hive-mind that has developed sentience and expands to other pests it encounters.

>I shout back up at him
YOU HAVE ENOUGH MONEY TO PAY FOR A POTION OF SHRINKING BUT NOT A LOCKSMITH?

>The players stand on the city walls, looking out over what once was a prosperous city, now a roiling sea of tiny brown rats. Only the Lord's house remains visible above the seething tide. The players can see flashes of spellery from the Lord's sorcerous retinue attempting to quell the tide, but it obviously is a temporary solution. If it's not stopped soon, the rats will soon overrun the walls, then the valley, the entire country.

Using this

Ratfolk in the basement.

Alt.: there's a druid in the basement with the rats, he was hired by the competition.

Considering they do 1d3-4 and have 1/4 of a hit point, no.

Even the world of darkness cat meme does not stand up when you see that cat would roll a die on attack and would deal at most 1 bashing damage and have 1 health box.

The Locksmith's Guild has a federally backed charter and monopoly, as well as federal sanctions on labor production. Of course it's bloody mire expensive than the potion that I occasionally ask Cletus the alchemist to moonshine-up once every full moon or so.

And that, my boy, is how our civilization began.

You are the rats.

Your life is a basement from which death under the boot of those above you is the only escape

This ship pulled in without a sound
The faithful captain long since cold
He kept his log till the bloody end
Last entry read "rats in the hold.
My crew is dead - I fear the plague"

You cant monopolize something that me and my dick head friends mastered in 1st grade.

Bah, fine. I'll pay for the door but I'm keeping the potion. I can probably make a profit selling it down the line.

>the earth is just crushed up rat corpses
The Warhammer World is now the only planet to be made out of 95% spooky scary skeletons.

Sure you can, as long as you can limit entry into the market.
Speaking of which, have you seen the new enforcers the guild just got? I heard they broke Jason's fingers just for looking at a bobby pin funny.

an innkeeper begs for aid with removing the rats from his basement, recruiting a local crew of nobodies to do it for him
he explains to them that the door has been bewitched by his angry ex-wife who was a sorceress, making trespassing for any man impossible, by the way his brother who is a wizard cursed it to be immune to any tampering, not even the brother himself could tamper with it at this point.
his father-in-law, a mighty bishop, shrunk the doorway to ten centimetres tall before this, erecting a wall around where the door used to stay, he then blessed all walls and the roof and the floor of the cellar with impenetrability to physical or magical force of any kind
he refers you to a local alchemist who peddles in such matters, he has available a potion that can turn a man into a rat, but nothing else of any kind. the town does not receive such exotic goods in trade and travelling merchants also do not carry around better solutions.
the doorway can only be swung open during twilight of august the 23rd, it is the 22nd

Ah, another one of those episodes.

I quit. You can have it, novelty wore off 6 years ago.

Oh, you're no fun anymore

It happens in every thread and you just give up.

The campaign starts with w wizard apprehending the travelling party for wicked experimentation, due to unknown reasons the party isn't suitable after insert event here, being a cruel arse hole the wizard shrinks the party and chucks him in his basement, cue fun quest.

The rats are intelligent and have tiny little steam-powered machines a la rat-scale Dragonmech.

The insects of the sewers have made a pact with the outer gods and are culling all insects that do not pledge themselves to their new found gods. The roaches intreat the rats to help them and bother the innkeeper with mischeif to have him call on low level adventurers so they can ask them for help

There are no rats
There are no basement
Just a trap door and behind it there is the drawing of a rat

It's all a practical joke for novice adventurers
>If you are looking for a job, you should talk with old Jerkins, he have a rat problem in his basement, tell them that his friend Bob send you, he will let you pass right away

Make the rats Scaven

>one of the rats is actually a polymorphed princess, whom the party is on a quest to save
>the princess had been cursed to this form by the villain, who believed this to be the most suitable method of stashing her away until her would-be rescuers could be dealt with
>the party is completely oblivious to this fact, unless maybe a magic-user happens to use some sort of detection spell on the rats for some inexplicable reason
>at the start of their quest, the party unwittingly slaughters the polymorphed princess in rat form
>the party proceeds dauntlessly to the BBEG's lair, unaware that their actions are entirely wasted at this point
>after the BBEG is slain, the polymorph curse is dispelled, and the princess' remains revert to their human form
>the local barmaid screeches in terror when she steps into the root cellar only to find the princess' squashed and torn remains spattered across the floor
>the king conducts an investigation to determine just who committed this terrible atrocity
>the king commissions a knowledgeable magic-user to deploy a discovery spell that reveals exactly by whose weapon the princess was murdered
>the king immediately rounds up the party and has them tortured and executed in an excruciatingly ghastly manner
>the GM scolds the party for not having the foresight to use a detection spell on the rats

>the rats are playing GURPS successfully

Surprised no one has posted this yet.
tfw you will never play a lvl 0 campaign and live out the lives of npcs

Any of these.

My personal take: the Innkeeper hired you under false pretenses, and is plotting to kill you once the party is good and lost in his labrynthian basement. Some of the rats are intelligent (and oddly moral), and offer to help you in exchange for freedom from being a clean-up crew.

Side quest upon side quest!
>wild encounter with weaken skaven on big dire rat with a bloody corpse near town outskirt with weird screeching sound in the back ground
>went to town after encounter to find out what happening.
>bartender say he got rat problem
>do quest
You will learn the following
>there is a vampire problem
>the shaven has protected their home for generation and used and kept the village sewer "clean" as a nest because it the last place you would go to gold if there no need to work there.
>the skaven are fighting the bats

Actually played a character who was this but with leopards.

>The group descends to find the source of the strange scratching and gnawing noises in the basement.
>The party finds, in some dirty corner of the basement, a massive rat king, writhing and wriggling in every direction
>As you move to kill it, the rats begin speaking in unison, detailing a prophesy of death, disease, and famine
>As you walk back up from the basement, you seek out the owner of the house/tavern/whatever for your reward, only to find a dessicated corpse laid back against the wall, covered in scratch marks, no possessions of value are around
>As you leave, the sky seems to be a noticeably more grey and foreboding, the air stale with a strange hint of a rancid smell, in the windless air
>The rest of the town shares the same fate as the owner, their bodies shriveled and dry.

Ayyyyy

>Warhammer Fantasy.jpeg

Stealing this for lamentations

My 5e GM did something like this. Rats in sewers. Swarms using wave tactics, flanking, shit that was way too smart for rats to be doing. Turns out they're being controlled by a rat king stuck in a magic circle (we still don't know what's up with that)

the rats are actually all horny anthro furry wenches, out to yiff the town into decadence and induct them into a chaos cult of hedonism and vice

you know what must be done

The protofurry?

youtube.com/watch?v=oRIyw-pJkUk

Join them?

Rats are actually fairies taking up space in someones basement.

The only time I've ever seen it done even semi-well was just overt lampshade hanging on it.

We were high level characters. We went on a bender with a minor deity, woke up somewhere apparently heavily in debt and with a geas on us to pay it back, and most of our spare loot gone.

Anyway, said inkeeper asks us to kill some rats in his basement, and grumbling, we go down to do the deed.

We fought some absurdly high-statted rats with literally thousands of HP sitting around some gnawed dragon skeletons.

>mfw I saw a living one in real life

Purge them.

The rats are the resident's pet and a spiteful beast woman has been placing rotten meat near the basement which has attracted mountain lions.

did it tell you that you'd be trapped in ajapanese pottery class within a screen where people fight over minor slights?

Giant rats are actually a serious threat, not so much because they're individually dangerous but because there are a lot of them and they'll eat everything. Famine and starvation threaten, and the town/regional government is therefore drafting pretty much everyone they can get their hands on as ratcatchers.

The rats have a hive-mind, and were in partnership with the innkeeper as part of a blackmail ring.

Unbeknownst to the adventurers, the rats are actually possessed by minor plague spirits. Once the rats are dead, they attempt to jump into the nearest living body- the adventurers. Cue quest to get the spirits exorcised while simultaneously trying to avoid becoming inadvertent mass murderers.

The rats return to haunt the adventurers in their dreams.

No it saved me from a prison escapee

Story?

They just want to be cuddled.

>Cranium Rats
>Wererats

I'm on the phone, gimme a few

>get all the way to the big bad and slay him
>no one bothered to clean up the rat corpses in the mean time

Nobody said to make the quest harder, just more interesting.

I open the door at the specified time and cast fireball through it.

GURPS

>spoiler
Our 5e campaign started at level 0. The characters are:
>a hunter
>the barkeep
>a town guard (Me)
>the blacksmith
>some random herbalist who lives in the woods
Shit we got up to included breaking up a barfight and rescuing the baker's daughter from giant spiders. 3 party members almost died to one fucking bear. The herbalist is apparently a pot farmer and is also trying to make some moonshine.
3 sessions later and we're finally level 1. None of us has any good equipment.
It's pretty fun all things said

This. They aren't there because they want to be; they're there because they absolutely needed to get away from something else. To really grasp how scary this actually is, you've got to realize that rats aren't exactly the most timid creatures once they reach a certain size. In fact they can be down right vicious, especially in numbers. Drive this point home by having the townsfolk bring that fact up and by having the rats actually be a legitimate threat in a large group. It'll make the players wonder just what could possibly be so bad as to drive the vicious vermin tide to flee. It's actually a pretty common trope in movies.

>No matter how many rats are killed more appear
>Innkeeper refuses to pay and you're forced to investigate
>Turns out theres a secret hatch that leads deep into the catacombs of the city
>Theres a smuggling ring bringing in illegal drugs or magical supplies in
>Little Freddy was helping out a band of criminals all along

The rats are half human half rat hybrids who were created by the quest giving mad scientist in an attempt to once and for all give street justice to the infestation of cats in his neighbors basement.

Ok, so I guess I'll greentext

>Be me, taking a late night walk downtown around 3am
>Just what I usually do at night
>Not in a bad neighbourhood, but on a main street that's close to a few
>Sometimes I go down interesting sidestreets or alleys that I'd never have a reason to explore otherwise
>Down one such place behind a theatre, no lights
>I'm checking out a little crossroads, it's like hidden streets back here
>Suddenly hear a voice
>"Hey man, can I talk to you?"
>Turn around, can't see who it is very well
>I'm much bigger than him, but he looks like he was that wiry kinda of strength, I feel reassured anyway because he sounds scared
>I say nothing
>"I just wanna sell you some weed man, I'm in a bad spot"
>Tell him I don't want any
>"I traded cigs for them earlier and I tried to get into a club but the bouncer stopped me and I called him a nigger and some guys chased me and I just need money for a cab to get back to jail man"
>I tell him I don't have cash, start looking down the little crossroads to see where I can bolt if needed
>"Please man I'm not supposed to be out here I think they called cops I just want to get back. I'll just give this to you I don't want it on me"
>he steps closer

Comment too long, continued in a second post

>Suddenly, I hear a bunch of shit get knocked down near one of the dumpsters, probably a fucking raccoon
>Guy gets fucking spooked, jumps, walks towards me rapidly, asks if anyone else is here. I dunno if he's asking me or whoever he thinks is hiding behind a dumpster
>I start backing up, there are two other directions I can go right now, I'm considering bolting
>I see a garbage bag get tossed out from the wall, it looked light, like it was filled with paper
>And then this fucking dark shape slithering along the floor
>Sometimes inching like a caterpillar, sometimes straight up rolling
>The guy had turned around after hearing the bag, see this thing
>Throws his weed at it and runs
>The thing stupidly travels straight into a dumpster
>It gets louder, I can make out the noise now
>I recognize it, as I used to have pet rats
>I had heard of Rat Kings before
>Realize what I must be looking at right now
>I get closer, I can see tails around the fringe of the sphere
>Fucking thing lopsidedly falls at me
>I sprint out of there, never to return

I felt like this was going to be my fucking superhero origin story, as I've always loved rats.

The thing was so unnerving, the way it moved. And the other guy running made me feel extra spooked.

I can take questions I guess, I'm sure I've left a lot out

Did it make any specific noises?
How many rats exactly were in it? Like 8 or a lot more?

Those rats must be pretty hardcore if they went through all the effort to trap them. What's so valuable that he wants them dead in spite of all these countermeasures.

That sounds more like a Junji Ito story than a superhero origin.

>rolling

Those five rats must have been pretty hardcore.

The rats ask the party if they would clear out their basements of dwarves.

The dwarves in turn ask if the party would clear out their basements of duergar.

Then the duergar ask the party if they would clear out their basements of drow.

And then the drow...

Anyway, that's how the party ended up in the underdark.

That's a good one, that

It just sounded like a bunch of rats, nothing that crazy. I wish for the story it had been creepier

They werent squeaking as a call, it was more like this certain noise rats make when they're breathing

It looked to me to be at most 12. It would have come up to maybe mid-calf.

it was more of like a log shape than a true sphere, and I guess its center of balance changed a lot. I wish I could have seen it better

Not all heroes wear capes ~;~^)

>When you nut but you keep on sucking

And here I thought you were joking.

Fucking hell, dude

What even is that? A raccoon?

>"I traded cigs for them earlier and I tried to get into a club but the bouncer stopped me and I called him a nigger and some guys chased me and I just need money for a cab to get back to jail man"

user, you met a PC.

It looks to be one, yeah
have a tiny rat king youtu.be/pqLR5fYt4Yw

more of a rat prince really

/thread

well TES: Oblivion had an original idea. The rats in the basement were pets, and you have to protect them from cougars...