Rat [Greyhawk]

Camprats are gopher-like rodents with appetites far bigger than their bodies. Their fur is sandy brown with a dark brown or black stripe down the back, the tail is a stub, the eyes are tiny and beady, and the long incisors are wickedly sharp. They are seldom dangerous, but their knack for getting into food makes them a misery for travelers.

A camprat would sooner climb over, leap past or chew through an obstacle than fight. Its speed makes it hard to hit (hence its good Armor Class), and if cornered its teeth punch through leather as though it were thin cloth. Unlike common rats, these are tidy animals that spread no notable disease.

They can jump eight feet across or three feet up and scale any surface their claws can catch. Their teeth grow without end, so they gnaw constantly. A sack lasts five seconds, thin leather 15 and thick leather 30, and an inch of wood takes 60 seconds if soft or 90 if hard.

Camprats eat anything not on fire. They scavenge ceaselessly but never hunt, and sealed leather bags or food hung from branches will not stop them, so they plague hill and barrens travel. Packs are loose, with even numbers of each sex and no leader. Dead, bark-stripped trees warn that camprats are near. They teem in many highland ranges, and a legendary gnome king once spent ten years failing to clear one range of them.

Big predators prize them as treats: ogres eat them alive, and young red dragons breathe fire down their burrows and dig out the roasted morsels.

A vapor rat looks like a big gray giant rat but lives on the solid cloud islands that cloud giants and cloud dragons often inhabit. When angry, hungry or cornered, it darts in to bite.

Killing one is the hazard. Its dying breath is a puff of gas equal to stinking cloud, but it strikes just one creature within eight feet, aimed always at its foe, and is harmless beyond that range. Slay them from afar and they are safe; fight them close and they are not.

Vapor rats can turn themselves to gas, drifting as wisps of cloud and steering like a ship before the wind from one cloud to the next. Wounded or seriously threatened, they always take this form, and then only attacks that destroy vapor harm them: intense or magical fire, lightning, or very strong winds, as with a potion of gaseous form.