First Impression: Ten Dead Rats
Image: Thomas Rowlandson, The Cock - A Coaching Inn in Sutton on the Main Highway to Brighton, 1789.
I'm not exaggerating when I say that for years now I've been in search of a good way to play Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. I love the exuberant profusion of character careers, the organic character growth as players try to bend their rat catchers into witch hunters and warlocks, and the way the game seamlessly jackknifes between picaresque and occult horror. Unfortunately, all of these features are buried in endless trinkety talents, random tables, and a combat system that veers towards stalemate or total steamrolling by one side depending the edition. My hard drive is littered with heartbreakers attempting to bottle the best of these impulses and graft them to stout OSR systems like Into the Odd or GLoG.
In light of this, my interest in Ten Dead Rats should come as no surprise. The game's author describes it as "a custom kit-bashed system that combines Original Edition D&D (ala the OED) and 2nd Edition Warhammer Roleplay." I recently took the game for a spin with some friends and I figured I'd share my impressions.
Session Prep
Ten Dead Rats is easy enough to read cover to cover. It's only 24 pages after all, and much of that is dedicated to Talents and Monster stat lines (more on that shortly). In general, the text is conversational, walking through the rules as if we are deriving them for the first time as we read. For example, on page 2:
We map the 6 OD&D primary ability scores to Warhammer characteristics: Strength, Toughness, Agility, Intelligence, Will Power, and Fellowship. They are created by rolling 3d6 in order.
The game maintains some traditional rules (e.g. Descending AC) that I would probably hack for a prolonged campaign, but for the purposes of this session I decided to run it as close to rules as written as possible.
For the actual adventure, I decided to run the excellent "Night of Blood", first published in 1987 for WFRP 1E. I think it has a nice blend of WFRP's pillars - investigation, negotiation, combat, and horror.
One thing I wish Ten Dead Rats was some notes on converting monsters. Its not so far from D&D that you can't just convert OSE monsters, but I'd love a specific treatment of adapting a WFRP stat block.
Character Creation
We started our one shot by rolling up new characters. The players were all old hands with roleplay games, but mostly a mix of 5e and PBtA.
We really experienced the variance of rolling for Characteristics. One character had only a single stat above 10. Another had multiple 16s and 17s.
For the rest of character creation, 10DR embraces WFRP 4e strategy of incentivizing taking random options with experience but ultimately letting you choose. I think this system works nicely, though I do think that the XP awards often end up being so trivial as to not be a meaningful incentive for non-first timers.
The players expressed some skepticism about the sheer quantity of Talents in the game. At first level, each character has one Talent, selected from a menu determined by their career. Talents are really the only explicit avenue for character advancement - you get one more with each level and many of them simply add +2 to a Characteristic. At first blush though, they do present as a real wall of nouns.
As for starting gear, this is the one spot where I fudged the rules for the purposes of expediency. I just let each player take their choice of weapons and armor they were proficient in and gave them a "gear token" to cash in later for an item from the games table of miscellaneous items. I don't think this is too far from what they would have bought had we spent 30 minutes debating the details. I will note that this led to a starting party that was much better kitted out for combat than a typical WFRP party, where you might have all candlemakers and hermits.
In the end, we had a human barber-surgeon with a low int stat, a dwarven smuggler, and a golden god of a human boatman.
The Session
I won't write a whole session report here, but some spoilers for the module will follow.
I started the characters off in a boat (belonging to the party's boatman), hurrying away from Nuln. The barber-surgeon had hired the smuggler to get him out of town after a series of botched operations. Play commenced with a torrential downpour forcing the boat to dock with the eerily quiet ferry house outside the Hanged Man.
The party quickly set about looking for away inside, ultimately deciding to scale one of the coaching inns walls up to broken window on the second floor.
Immediately we encounter a rub. Climbing a rough stone wall in the rain seems like a textbook case for some kind of skill check. However, most players best stats are floating around a +2 on a d20. Even if this is a moderate check that means they are still substantially likely to fail, and I am deathly allergic to letting PCs fail checks to enter dangerous scenarios.
I ended up ruling that as long as they weren't in a hurry, they could spend as much time as they wanted climbing up to the second floor and avoid a check entirely. I imagine this would be necessary most of the time, lest the game grind entirely to a halt.
The party eventually descended to the inns first floor, catching two mutants disguised as the barkeep and a road warden by surprise. The party more or less ignored the twos act, having seen some evidence of a struggle upstairs and ended up holding the two at crossbow point while the boatman went out into the rain to check the stable.
In this scene I started to feel the lack of rules for governing social encounters. I really needed some kind of Morale score to see how likely the mutants were to simply fold when slightly outnumbered and caught off guard.
Out in the stable, the boatman encountered the modules only real combat. In the stable he found another mutant, this one spider legged and munching on the remains of a stable hand. He failed to grapple the spider, the spider failed to wound him then scarpered up through a hole in the ceiling. By the time the boatman had clambered up there, the thing had disappeared into the night.
10DR uses simple "high roll on a d6" initiative, which seemed to work well enough. Combat itself seemed to cruise along quite nicely using a relatively simple descending AC vs attack bonus system. I don't really have any complaints.
Back in the inn, the smuggler compelled the captured mutants to call their compatriots out of the kitchen where they were waiting in ambush. The barber-surgeon took the opportunity to disarm a mutant as he came through the kitchen door, stealing his blunderbuss. At this point the fake road warden tried to use the scuffle to make a break for it and got blasted for his effort. All of this played out in charitably half a round of combat.
Technically speaking, a barber-surgeon shouldn't be able to fire a blunderbuss without gaining a Talent to do so, but I figured that since the gun was already loaded and the thing doesn't even require an attack roll, he would know enough to point and pull the trigger.
Part of why I didn't want to phrase this post as a review is because the results of a quick playtest proved somewhat inconclusive here. I found myself needing to make a lot of rulings on the fly since the mechanics of the game didn't real align with a tense negotiation at gunpoint. I suspect that if the party had come in through the front door and encountered some of the sessions more investigative components, I would have been left improvising to a similar degree.
Debrief
Overall, the players seemed pretty happy with their experience. One commented that they appreciated how much I just let the fiction ride. I think there is something to the fact that by not imposing rules, 10DR can be read to tacitly encourage you to just trust the narrative. No ruling required. That does feel like it requires a certain fortitude on the part of the GM to not blink and impose dice rolls.
All of the players agreed that the disparity between player stat lines would have grown galling in a longer form play. By nature of how compressed the Talent system is, a character with low Intelligence is liable never to be able to become adequate, let alone gifted in that regard.
On the other hand, the player seemed to really like having to grapple with a little bit of input randomness in terms of what their characters strengths and weakness are, particularly as those characteristics index against their random career. Having a charismatic smuggler, an idiot barber-surgeon, and a JoJo character of a boatman really shaped the adventure and maybe led the players to roleplay characters they may not have arrived at the table with.
Concluding Thoughts
I don't think that I'll end up playing more of Ten Dead Rats. There's a lot it does right, but after character creation I found myself barely using the system at the table. I'm really not the kind of GM who finds themselves in that position often, usually trying to lean assiduously into the rules as a means of "playing to find out what happens."
Still I think the level of resolution in the character creation system here is just about right, even if the mechanics it connects to aren't. I'll likely borrow substantially from this portion of the book and discard most of the rest. Expect future posts as I really get to dig into my retrofit.