Rat Divinity

In the play of my urban megacity game, I think my players may have accidentally played God. They took a tribe of feral, zombie-esque rat people and have been nurturing them.

It's a city game. There are rat people - naturally - but I made them weirder. I like non-standard, weird alien means of reproduction for non-humans. (My dwarves are made/born as stone statues, for example). 

The ratlings are not born, but rather spontaneously emerge from concentrations of trash deep in the megacity's sewers. The more trash left unsorted, the greater chance of Ratlings. Their life cycle is more akin to medieval alchemical conceptions of flies: there's no eggs or wombs involved, just leave a pile of food scraps long enough and a humanoid rat will shamble out of the mass. 

Abiogenesis - spontaneous creation of organic compounds from nonliving matter.

They have two legs, two arms, a rat face and a coat of fur, but get too close and you'll see it's a facsimile. The hair are thin strands of filament, the eyes burning points of light, their blood like the mysterious liquid at the bottom of an industrial trash can in a busy restaurant. They appear spontaneously, and only 1 in 100 have enough willpower to form a personality to speak languages from the surface world and name themselves.

They're zombies, essentially. I wanted to supply a horde of rat folks that PCs could mow down without the moral quandary of their hopes, dreams and their families back home. They're made of trash.

And despite the narrative insistence that they are closer to zombies than "people", the players have grown attached and helped support them. They were the first to ever ask "what's  your name?" and when stupefied by the concept, Named Them down in the dark.

Confronted with not just the castoff scum of society, but literal trash, they reached a hand down to beings with nothing else.

 

Rat Sculpture by Michel Keck

What does it mean to treat vermin as equals, to go from zombie to a person with hopes and dreams?

What does it mean when I create a legion of generic minions, and players still insist they have a right to live once the adventure is over?

The players have given them money, support, they've given them reading books in Common to help them try and learn to read. When they acquire extra loot they don't know what to do with, they always mention they could just "give it to the rats". This has included things from unregistered firearms to 3000-year-old wheels of cheese from dusty tombs. And picture books.

A RAT'S PATH TO DIVINITY

They eat the picture books. And they learn and absorb The Word. For mortals to reach a hand down to the abject, castoff of society is itself a blessed act. To treat a wretched thing as an equal is a form of creation, one that can ignite the Divine Spark in what was once hollow shells. To absorb the word - even through gnashing rodent teeth rather than eyes - proves them worthy of the inner light that can lead the willing back to The Divine that emanates down, from the High Hosts of Angels all the way down to the vermin of our world.

In treating the Ratlings as equals, they've been given their first chance at The Divinity all mortals are privy too. The intrepid heroes haven't played G-d so much as carried the torch of the divine spark, carried it through darkness and sewage to cold receptacles. Yet under all the grime, the receptacles are still there.

How do the flames of divinity manifest themselves?

 

Lighting the divine spark? That happened to my buddy Eric...

MANIFESTATIONS / MIRACLES OF THE DIVINE SPARK

1. Ratlings now have immortal souls. They are equally eligible for the Gardens of Paradise and the fires of Jahannam, capable of alignment towards Law or Chaos. 
2. Literacy is slow-going, but all the Ratlings dream of a Big Rat who will lead them to a land of cheese and crackers. They use tar, sewage and moss to paint his picture all over the sewer wall. They see mundane rats down in the dark, and they wonder if they have been blessed or cursed in The Big Rat's image.
3. They are still spawned from trash. Though they aren't capable of sexual reproduction, that doesn't stop them from exploring each other's bodies (mortals gonna mortal). The first ratling to discover this is remembered forever as a Hero.
   
4. They begin collecting the trash that spawns them, laying their lives down to make safe nests and nurseries. They consider future generations for the first time.
5. A ratling names herself Gulbahar Gouda, and writes the first epic poem about the quest for cheese before they became self-aware. She doesn't know it, but she's set a literary trend that will last for 1,000 years.
   
6. Self-aware and learning, they become anti-faeries: milk un-spoils, pies re-emerge hot on windowsills. In their wake shelves become neat and orderly and people find the keys they swore they lost last week.
7. The ratling Scrig is given a mundane spear by a hunter who is in covenant with The Wild Huntsman. Using it to defend himself for the first time, he rolls a Natural 20. The weapon is imbued with desire, the revelation that violence can protect as well as harm: Scrig's Spear is now an artifact that will be passed down through the ages.
   
8. Witches and oracles of the city give them cheese to appease them. This confuses the ratlings, but in their confusion they assume the bearers of the offerings are scatterbrained and need protection.
9. A pack of were-crocodiles cross paths with the nest, decimating half the tribe.
   A ratling calls upon the divine, channeling the trash-fire burning in its heart, casting the predators out. He would be revered as a spiritual leader, if he was not weighed down in mourning.
   
10. To be self-aware is to know grief. The rats grieve their lost young, holding their first funeral.
    They will never forget what heartache feels like. They learn to cope: grief, The Big Rat, the spark in the hearts all coalesce into Art.
11. They recycle discarded egg-shells, moss and brick grout into pigments chewed up in their little rat mouths. They spit it back out and paint with their short rodentia fingers. They paint themselves, they paint the monstrous wildlife of the sewers, they paint their hopes and dreams high up where the drainage won't wick it away.
    

 Ratlings can know joy and sorrow, sin and hope. Talzur is never the same again.

Rat statue by Bordalo II in the U.K.