How would Ratfolk fit in Korvosa?

[Sonicmixer]

Hi everyone, I'll be GMing CotCT pretty soon with my monthly game group and this question has come up.

One of my players will be Ratfolk, which I thought would work pretty well in Korvosa considering as a culture they are pretty heavily described as merchants and traders and what I believe to be quite comfortable in a city setting. But as I've read through the Adventure and seen that there is a pretty decent presence of warerats in the city with a nice little quest focused on this population in Book 2 this had made me second guess where Ratfolk would fit in the city and what their relationship to the warerats would be like if I didn't make any sweeping changes to the Adventure as written.

I'd like to ask if anyone might have some suggestions to how these to groups would exist and maybe some suggestions on how I can really give my Ratfolk player some great connection to those story lines.

[QuidEst]

The same way Ratfolk fit in anywhere: two to a square thanks to the swarming racial trait.

[Sonicmixer]

Lol, yes! Why didn't I think of that! :)

So the one idea I've been considering is making the warerats of the city Ratfolk and doing some lite rewriting of their backgrounds and storylines from both the Guide to Korvosa and the portions of the Adventure that features the warerats. Possibly set something up where my player has a chance to unite them into something of a new faction in the city once the party has dealt with Girrigz.

I'd probably make this mostly significant for when the party gets back to Korvosa in Book 6 as a faction that could actually oust and take the place of the Cerulean Society with my pm as the potential leader if he works at it.

Honestly I'm just looking for some alternatives that don't require quite this many changes.

[tonyz]

I like the background rewrite to put them into the picture!

If for some reason that wouldn't work, maybe he's from abroad - you can very easily have spanyone in a merchant seaport (maybe even from Vudra?). Maybe his family is a colony of merchants from abroad, living in Korvosa for some years.

[Craig Hallstrom]

The easiest solution is to keep the wererats and add a merchant/trader population of Ratfolk to the city.

Make the two populations at odds against each other. The wererats are evil and bringa bad name to the honest Ratfolk.

Perhaps adjust the lycanthropy lore. Make it so you don't turn into what bites you but into the evil/animalisitic form of your base nature. Therefore all Ratfolk infected with lycanthropy (no matter what bit them) become wererats. Humans tend to become werewolves. This changes up the lycanthropy rules a bit but in a way that keeps the basic feel of this disease about the same.

The CotCT is a great story arc. Have a great time running it.

[Sonicmixer]

Thanks for the great feedback! Craig, I think I'm going to take your suggestion and have both the Wererat and Ratfolk populations present in the city, both having separate origins and a short history of enmity, each for their own reasons.

This will be especially sweet because my player wants to take the Attached drawback with the objective of his affection being a Ratfolk girl, possibly with a bad history with Lem. They would have met when she had helped him get over an addiction to pesh or shiver after she found him dumped in an alley near Eel's End, him passed out from a recent bender that left him almost dead.

Unknown to him this girl is actually a native born Wererat who has tried to escape her life in the sewers by attempting to join with the Ratfolk community. She wants to escape the sewers and the violent culture of the wererats due to influence of the Rat's Teat Boys gang and her dangerous older brother Girrigz.

We'll see how he responds but I think this will really create a great story line for his character and depending on his decisions could have a great influence on both the Wererat and Ratfolk communities, building his connections to the city and possibly the formation of a new faction as I described above.

As for the lycanthrope, I think I'm going to rule that Beast Races are immune to types of lycanthrope that share their racial markers. So Ratfolk could become werewolves, werecats or wereboars, but not wererats and so on. This would also allow of interbreeding.

What do y'all think?

[Rhethwyn]

If anyone has further development on this idea, I'm ramping up with a massive party, one of whom is patterned after "Splinter". You could say I'm interested in developing the ratfolk in Korvosa as well...

[DM_aka_Dudemeister]

I'd put them underneath Korvosa, at odds with the Derro that seem to pop up in the city.

[Ian Bell]

I imagine things would get pretty tough for the ratfolk around the time that the plague hits and everyone starts blaming them. Seems like a good hook.