Rat King [Lycanthrope]

In a rat-haunted domain of the misty dread realm, wererat packs prowl the sewers with uncanny coordination, and few above suspect who is directing them. In lightless, filth-choked chambers far below, the rat kings scheme to rule the surface.

As a human or a giant rat, a rat king looks frustratingly ordinary, just another wererat. Its hybrid shape gives it away: a swollen rat almost as big as a bear, with faint human traits and limbs that look too small to carry it, yet it moves with startling speed and agility. In human form it can speak human languages, though some have been cut off from people so long that they have lost the knack. In beast or hybrid form it talks with rats. A retinue of 4d6 normal rats plus 1d10 giant rats always surrounds it, following its every order.

It is almost always met in hybrid form. Each round it claws twice for 1d4 apiece and bites for 1d6+2. Any wound it causes carries a 20% chance of inflicting a deadly illness (treat as the cause disease priest spell) that nothing short of heal can cure. A bite also carries a 10% chance of lycanthropy, always producing a common wererat. Only weapons of +2 or better harm it, and it is immune to all poisons and diseases, magical or not.

Three times a day, in hybrid form, it can use a breath weapon, choosing which of several effects to produce each time. Whatever its shape, it may also cast spider climb or putrefy food and drink whenever it likes, at 6th level of ability.

Wererats in this domain are dangerous mainly as packs, bound by a fierce loyalty that lets them dominate the underground. Now and then one is born too selfish and spiteful for pack life. The pack usually torments such a misfit and often kills it, so some flee into the deepest sewers. Most die alone. Rarely, one returns transformed, with a monstrous new hybrid body and strange powers. Wererats say the rat god favors loners cunning and willful enough to survive, and marks them by sending one rat to bite them with a magical plague. A wererat that endures the fever, visions and agony emerges a rat king.

It soon takes over the local packs, which seldom object, since its brains usually mean more food and loot, and dissenters get eaten as an example. Nearly every pack in the domain now answers to one, except those serving the domain's own wererat ruler. A rat king plans but never joins its minions' work above; it lolls in a hidden den amid rats and refuse, guarded by 2d6 wererats. It craves personal power and pleasure, means to master the underground and then the surface, and prefers rats, even over wererats, to any other company. Under its rule a pack's methods change little, but its morale rises to 14.

Rat kings cannot breed, and since the rat god is said to set their number, there are never many. When two meet, it is war: each sees the other as a threat, rat and wererat armies die in droves, and the townsfolk above suffer most as wererat raids surge.

The people a rat king preys on rarely see it. They feel it instead, in the killings its wererat servants carry out across the domain's cities.