One moment Jim is a damp knot of fur buried in the nest. The next, he’s back in a different kind of nest: his basement.
Dry air, dusty paper, lingering pizza grease. Fluorescent lights hum overhead. Shelves sag under RPG books—hardcovers, softcovers, spines in every color from classic fantasy to obscure sci-fi. Above them, swords and bows hang on brackets: a blunt ren-faire longsword, an authentic longbow bought off eBay, foam LARP weapons that had seen better days. Dice clatter faintly in the background, the eternal soundtrack of Thursdays.
In the center: the table.
Solid wood, scarred from a previous life as a dining surface, now an adventuring altar—scratches, faint marker stains, one corner chipped where someone celebrated a natural 20 too hard.
Jim sits at the head, behind a dragon-screen stacked with Post-its. His hands are human again: ink-smudged knuckles, a thin hobby-knife scar on one index finger. A notebook lies open before him, pages crammed with maps and bullet points.
On the current spread: a sketch of tunnels, chambers, and a tiny doodled rat wearing a crown.
The Wererats of Dockside campaign.
“Okay,” he’s saying, “so as you push deeper into the old sewer line, the smell gets—”
“Worse?” someone offers.
“Worse,” he confirms. “And you hear something moving in the dark. Little claws. Lots of them.”
Around the table, his players are exactly as he left them.
Frank—late fifties, overweight, faded con T-shirt straining at the gut—sits to Jim’s left. Beard more gray than not, glasses sliding down his nose. d20 ready in one hand, paladin character sheet in front of him. He plays the holy warrior like a spreadsheet with a longsword.
Right now he’s blinking slow, posture sagging. The group’s unofficial timer: when Frank starts nodding off, it’s break time.
“You said the wererats had a union, right?” Frank rumbles, fighting a yawn. “Local 137? ‘Sewer and Sanitation Workers of the Under-City’?”
“I said they claim to be a union,” Jim corrects. “Whether their contract’s worth the blood it’s written in is up to you.”
“Eh.” Frank waves a hand. “Better than the city council upstairs. Maybe they’ve got dental.”
His eyes droop another millimeter. Jim hides a smile.
Across the table, Roxy leans forward like she’s about to punch the adventure. Pink hair shaved on one side, the rest swept into a messy fringe, eyeliner sharp enough to draw blood. Black tank top, worn jeans, combat boots on the chair rung. Her sheet is chaos: KARA BLOODFANG, level 7 barbarian, motto “If it moves, I’m mad at it.”
“So,” she says, tapping her pencil, “these sewer rats—are they tragic, or assholes?”
Jim shrugs. “Yes.”
She grins, pleased. “Good. Kara kicks open the door and yells, ‘Which one of you furry bastards is in charge?’”
Frank snorts. “You can’t yell that at a marginalized monster type. It’s rude.”
Roxy flips him off without looking away from Jim. “I yell it respectfully.”
To Jim’s right, tucked near the shelves like she might vanish into them, sits Emma—slim, shy, blonde ponytail, soft green sweater. One foot tucked under herself. Her sheet is neat, handwriting small: Lirael, elven cleric of Knowledge tonight—she always plays an elf.
She chews her lip, studying the map. “Do the wererats worship anyone? Like… a patron, or is it more—”
“Crime cult,” Roxy supplies.
“Sewer Union,” Frank counters.
Jim grins. “A little of both. There’s a ‘Mother Below’ they mention in hushed tones. Some think it’s a god. Some think it’s just the idea of the swarm.”
Emma’s eyes light up—lore accepted, overthinking queued.
Beside her, Matt slouches in a dark hoodie, headphones around his neck, permanent half-frown. He’s staring at his phone, which he’s definitely not supposed to have out mid-session.
“If they’ve got a patron,” he mutters without looking up, “we can maybe flip them. Or crash their network.”
“The network is sewers,” Jim says. “And they will absolutely bite you.”
Emma elbows him gently. “You’re coming to this, so talk to people, not your phone.”
Matt huffs, but the corner of his mouth twitches. He glances at Jim. “Do the wererats have computers?”
“No,” Jim answers. “They have rusty blades, damp rot, and very sharp opinions about trespassers.”
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
The campaign is crisp in the dream, laid out perfectly.
Jim leans over the map, pencil tapping an X where the party stands.
“You’ve followed the tracks down the old Dockside line. Air’s heavier. Water rushes ahead. And there’s a smell—chemicals, like a wizard’s lab with no ventilation.”
Roxy grins. “Kara hates it here. Which means she loves it.”
Emma’s cleric squints at the tunnels. “If the Guild is dumping waste down there… wouldn’t that eventually come back up?”
Frank chuckles sleepily. “Welcome to infrastructure, kid.”
Matt finally sets his phone down. “Can we back up their… not-network, pipes? Flood the bad guys, not the rats.”
Warmth blooms in Jim’s chest—at all of them, the way they poke at his setups, the way they try to fix broken worlds with stubborn, dumb, beautiful plans.
He smiles. “Depends how quickly you spot the problem.”
He rolls dice behind the screen, more for the sound than the outcome.
Somewhere, water moves.
The scene blurs at the edges. Shelves sag in and out. Roxy’s pink hair smears. Emma’s elf doodle grows a real pointed ear for half a second. Frank’s eyes close too long.
Break time.
Jim opens his mouth to call it—
—and dice clatter become distant, real water roaring. Pizza fades to the cold, wet breath of the sewers.
Sometime in the dark middle of the night-cycle, the nest is warmth and breathing.
Rats piled together, slow heartbeats, stone chill held at bay by fur and habit. The usual lullaby: trickle, drip, distant gurgle.
The sentries are awake and listening.
It starts as a shift in the background noise. The trickle downstream deepens to a throatier growl. Air pushes colder, damper, insistent. The sentry’s ears flick. Whiskers flare. A long sniff pulls in fresher silt and churned muck.
He stares into the dark tunnel.
Something’s coming.
A sharp, staccato squeak—rat alarm: Up. Wake. Water.
His eyes snap open.
The gurgle is wrong—louder, deeper, like distant cart wheels smoothed into a continuous roar. His nose confirms: more water, more cold, more churn.
He shoves through the pile, earning sleepy squeaks of protest. From the edge he sees the channel fattening, wavelets slapping higher.
Blockage let go somewhere upstream. The whole line is flushing.
Camping in the dungeon. Of course.
The ledge sentry dashes along the edge, full alarm squeak now. The wall sentry scrambles down, fur bristling.
Jim doesn’t speak rat, but urgency does. He sprints to the boss, bumps his shoulder and squeaks sharp and repeated: UP. WATER. BAD.
The boss wakes instantly. One look at the rising channel and they shift to command mode.
What follows is efficient, rat-style:
Adults grab pups by the scruff, haul them higher.
Food stashes get pushed or carried onto the rubble pile.
Jim helps—carrying food uphill, nudging a groggy juvenile, staying clear of the serious work: moving the living.
The water hits the ledge with a soft whoomp, splashing cold filth across sleeping spots. It laps at old stains, dissolves them, creeps further in.
“The nest goes from bed to debris field, chunks of bedding bobbing in the rubble like miserable little rafts. The rats pile onto the highest ledge, a living island above the new waterline.”
A small side stash—kernels, fish pieces, a prized cheese rind—vanishes under the rush. Some rat will mourn that later.
As the surge peaks and eases, Jim does a quick count:
Pups: squeaking, safe.
Injured: moved, shaken but breathing.
Boss and elders: wet paws, dry bodies.
Casualties: 0.
For a random dungeon event, that’s a good roll.
The roar settles to a higher, louder gurgle. The channel won’t drop as low for a while. The near ledge is under water now.
The room has changed.
So has Jim’s threat assessment.
Right. Environmental hazards. Random encounters. Long rests are suggestions, not promises.
The boss flicks an ear in acknowledgment: You woke. You warned.
Jim settles back into the tilted warmth, fur damp on one side, adrenaline buzzing.
Sleep doesn’t return easily after nearly getting flash-flooded out of a sewer bedroom.
The rats have calmed—more or less. Water level stabilized. Pups snoring again. Sentries redeployed. New normal: mound flooded, damp wall line, everyone smelling faintly of stress.
Jim lies there, eyes open, staring at a knot in the overhead stone.
What the hell am I doing?
His tail flicks involuntarily. A nearby juvenile grumbles and uses his side as a pillow. He doesn’t move away.
What am I doing?
Reacting. Fixing whatever’s in front of him.
That keeps you alive moment to moment. It’s not a plan.
He treats his existence like a campaign pitch.
Premise: You Are Now a Rat
Old life: basement DM, running games about people who fix broken worlds from a safe distance.
New life:
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CR: 1/4 on a good day
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HP: single digits
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Status: sewage-adjacent
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Win condition: ???
Do I want to get back?
Yes.
He misses thumbs. Speech. Frank dozing off. Roxy’s grin when she raged. Emma’s soft lore questions. Matt pretending not to care while min-maxing.
But wanting to go back isn’t a path back. No “press here to reincarnate” button. No gods offering deals. No tutorial message.
He could chase a door that might not exist.
Or play the hand he’s got, for real.
Assume “human again” is a long-term miracle, not a plan.
What does Rat Life: Campaign 1 actually want?
The question sits there in the dark, heavier than the damp stone overhead.
He starts with the obvious, the thing every level-1 character needs before they can even think about plot hooks: don’t die stupidly. Baseline survival. No stepping under a careless boot because he was distracted. No cat turning him into a red smear because he forgot to check shadows. No low-level rogue getting easy XP off a confused rat who used to run campaigns. If he goes out, it has to matter—something worth the dice roll, not “tripped into his own slime like an idiot.”
Then there’s the nest.
They took him in. No questions, no language barrier big enough to stop “you helped” and a chunk of stale bread. They’re the first things in this world that treated him like he belonged instead of like a hazard to stomp.
So protect them. Map every hazard in reach. He can’t save every rat in Waterdeep’s underbelly. But he can keep this swarm one step ahead of whatever’s trying to wipe them out. That’s a win condition he can actually reach.
Growth comes next, because staying level 1 forever isn’t an option. Scrap Savant is a start—one slot, one nest, one ridiculous way to turn physics into a weapon. The system gave him a class; it’s probably not done handing out upgrades. More levels. More features.
And the last piece, the quietest and hardest: don’t lose himself.
There’s a real danger here. The longer he lives like this, the louder instinct gets—scent, fear, hunger, the simple animal satisfaction of a full belly and warm fur. He doesn’t want “rat” to overwrite “Jim” until there’s nothing left of the guy who used to smile when Emma asked about wererat religion instead of loot, or who noticed Matt relax—just a little—when the game pulled him out of whatever quiet storm was in his head.
If the system ever gives him a way to be visible again, he wants to still be someone worth listening to. Not just another monster on the random encounter table.
By the time the thoughts settle, the nest has eased back into low, nervous calm. The louder gurgle is the new lullaby. Sentries watch. Pups snore softly.
Jim exhales—a tiny breath lost among dozens—and tucks his nose under his paw.
This life gets played out, not just survived.
That’s enough for tonight.