Bats, rats, and other nuisances reconsidered again for the n'th time.

[phiwum]

The Bestiary has an entry on rats that explicitly limits rats to two to a hex (as ITL does), but explicitly states that rats may attack from adjacent hexes. I could've sworn that ITL requires rats to attack from the same hex, not adjacent hexes, but I can't seem to find evidence for that. (Oneiros says that the Red Crypt solo adventure explicitly has this restriction, but perhaps this is a hangover from earlier rules.)

In the worst case, then, a person could be attacked by fourteen rats. In practice, at least in my settings, rats will usually be in tight spaces -- but the same cannot be said for wasps, say.

That starts to make the nuisance something to pay attention to. A question remains, however: do rats engage? If so, then a swarm of rats will seriously slow a party. If not, then rats are not so hard to handle. If you win initiative, you can force them to move first. One may expect them to rush to their prey, at which point the party can run right through them, minimizing the number who can attack -- likely to two per person. This depends, of course, on the size of the swarm. It also depends on whether one can step through hexes with one or two nuisance critters (perhaps flying) without being slowed or worrying about tripping.

Up until now, I've chosen to play rats as stacking up to six per hex, able to climb on a person so that while they do not engage, they cannot be outrun -- once they're latched on, so to speak. Moreover, rats in my previous play were never engaged. These were a lot of special rules.

I'm going to try out this new (to me) interpretation with the official stacking rules, attacks from adjacent hexes. I think that I'll try rats not engaging larger figures, though they may be engaged by larger figures. Larger figures may move into or through a hex containing two rats at no penalty.

But I thought that the new material in the Bestiary may lead to new discussions of how to handle these nuisances. That they explicitly can attack from adjacent hexes makes the stacking limit of 2 more reasonable -- and I'm surprised that I don't see anything to the contrary in ITL. But it's also a little odd that rats may attack adjacent hexes while dragonets (or Blood Hawks from OSM) cannot.

I don't know when I'll next have a party hassled by rats or other nuisance critters, but I'll let you know how it goes.