Whiskers and Wire Cages- How to Catch a Rat

Obviously, the simplest method to catch a rat is with a rat trap. Most amateurs make the same mistake of planting the same trap in the same place with the same bait. A rat’s feral cunning learns from the deaths of its fellows. After one or two night’s good work the trap lays untouched, however, rat-catchers know how to make the most effective use of their resources.

At first, any traps set across a rat’s tunnels or tracks do not need bait. Once the rats grow wary of the traps, a small pile of sawdust mixed with oats camouflages the trap’s workings and lures the rats to their capture. Soot, tissue paper mixed with hayseeds, or aniseed works once the rats grow fearful of piles of sawdust. Never use a solid chunk of food, or the rat will simply pick up the food to eat later in its den. To prevent the traps smelling of man they should be handled as little as possible.

Tinkers, toy-makers, and rat-catchers manufacture a stunning variety of traps such as the simple wire basket with an opening at the top and no way to climb out, the wire cage with a mechanism to close door immediately after the rat’s entry, or the more gruesome steel-jawed traps designed to close as a paw rests a rat's weight on the pressure plate. Most professionals avoid setting lethal traps unless the infesting rats are sewer rats or worse.

A professional rat-catcher could plant 10-50 traps depending on the size of the building and the number of traps he owns. They quietly wait and watch, patrolling their traps in case of a catch. Once a rat is caught or killed they reset their trap and continue their vigil until a little after midnight when the rats become less active, however a rat-catcher should always put in an appearance bright and early the next morning both to collect his traps and to grab any rats captured later that night before they can escape by gnawing off a limb. Any rat that escapes from a trap in this way won’t be fooled by traps again. Rat-catchers try to eliminate infestations during January or February before the rats begin breeding with greater rapidity in the spring. This serves both to eliminate future generations and to avoid the hassle trying to catch young rats small enough to squeeze into any nook or cranny.

Despite selling their own lethal concoctions to rat-beleaguered families, very few rat-catchers professionally use rat poison in the city. You can’t be certain of an immediately lethal dose, leaving most rats enough longevity  to crawl back under the floor to die, leaving a multitude of hard-to-remove decomposing rat carcasses. The owners of the premises invariably blame the rat-catcher for the horrific smell, demand he removes the bodies, and never ask for his services again.

Adventure Ideas

The thieves carefully planned their heist and tonight’s the night! After breaking in they find small mounds of sawdust and oats in the hall and waist-high nets strung through doorways. They hear muffled yips and scuffles in the walls. Can they complete their robbery with the extra complication of a rat-catcher working on the premises?

All rat-catchers know the stories of Boksby the uncatchable three-legged sewer rat. Whenever traps activate by themselves, the rats avoid the bait, or a nasty old rat gets away on three paws, rat-catchers claim Boksby has returned for revenge. One tavern popular with rat-catchers even has a bounty for Boksby’s carcass.

Now that we all know how to catch rats, we can look at the essential animal allies of the rat-catcher. Next week, we’ll examine the many morally troublesome uses of ferrets and rat dogs.

Whiskers and Wire Cages- The Work of a Rat-Catcher

In Victorian England, hordes of rats invade every building to eat, proliferate, and destroy. As architecture and engineering advanced, rats found new ways to invade and new delicacies to eat and destroy. Skilled rat-catchers devised their own tricks to outwit nature’s perfect scavenger.

Some businesses prone to rat invasion (such as tobacco shops, woodworkers, or granaries) contract a rat-catcher by the month or year to handle infestations as necessary. The cost per year to retain a rat-catcher’s services ranges from 1 guinea (one pound and one shilling) to 5 pounds per year depending on the size of the building. For short-term jobs, rat-catchers charge by the night, 2-8 shillings.  All rat-catchers are self-employed, and these high-sounding prices cover the costs of traps, trap repairs, dogs, dog licenses, nets, net repairs, cages, and ferrets. While a simple bag is fine for collecting rats while checking traps, rats should be transferred into strong wire cages for transport and to avoid escape or harm.

Enterprising rat-catchers know a live healthy rat is worth more than a dead rat. Rats can be bred for distinct colorations as pets and curiosities, but most of the rats caught by rat-catchers are bought by purveyors of sport, such as Rat-Baiting or Rat-Coursing, for 3 pence a rat. At harvest time, rat-catchers leave the city behind to catch rats scavenging threshed corn and grain. Even a mediocre rat-catcher could collect 50 or more healthy rats a day with little trouble just by laying traps around fields and barns.

 Although lucrative, rat-catching is not pleasant work. Much of the rat-catchers work happens at night when rats are most active. A strange man prowling around a closed business at night with a directional lantern looks very suspicious, so most rat-catchers inform local constabularies before undertaking a night’s work. Rat-catchers spend long nights in cold, damp, and often unsanitary places, plunging arms into walls to pull out struggling rats, closing broken sewer drains, watching traps, and disturbing rat nests in high rafters. Most dreadful of all, are the inevitable rat bites which rat-catchers must accept as an inevitable hazard of their profession. In fact, you can recognize a rat-catcher by the multitude of scars covering his hands and face. Rats have strong jaws and long teeth which often bite down to the bone. Heavy leather breeches protect rat-catchers legs and ropes tied around their ankles prevent rats climbing up their pant legs, but most rat-catchers avoid wearing thick gloves so they can feel their work in the dark. Infected rat bites lead to swelling, throbbing, and putrefaction. Rat-catchers pragmatically treat their wounds by lancing open the infected area, cleaning it of pus, and applying a homemade ointment. Horrible fevers bringing rat-catchers to death’s door for a few weeks is all part of the job.

Adventure Ideas

All rat-catchers agree the worst job in London is the Guildhouse. As the home of the Worshipful Company of Hermeticists, the Guildhouse is full of thaumaturgical equipment, dangerous enchantments, and grumpy careless magicians. The building’s halls and rooms don’t follow the laws of nature very well, and nobody thinks to warn rat-catchers about the magical spells protecting certain corridors from prying eyes. Worst of all, the rats don’t behave the way rats should. Sometimes they breathe fire, sometimes they fly, and sometimes they talk.

Now that we have the basics covered, we can move onto the clever, cruel, and creative methods rat-catchers used to catch rats.

Whiskers and Wire Cages: The Rats of England

In the Victorian world divided by class, race, and nationality, the horror of rats unites all. Their fanged, disease-carrying bodies cause less fear than the damage and ruination brought by their ravenous appetites. Armed with experience, courage, the proper tools of the job, and strong stomachs, Victorian rat-Catchers labored to protect their clients, homes, business and property from infestations. We’re examining the work of rat-catchers and how they could be brought to the gaming table, but first we must first familiarize ourselves with their prey.

Broadly, there are two species of rats in the British Isles: black rats and brown rats. Black rats arrived in England with the Romans and are now found all through the countryside, scavenging in barns, fields, and along river banks. Brown rats, or wharf rats are a foreign species introduced to the British Isles sometime in the early 1700s. Brown rats are larger than black rats and will eat practically anything, two traits which help them thrive in cities, pushing the smaller species out to the country.

Professional rat-catchers further divide rats by habitat, health, and disposition:

-Barn Rats or Burrow Rats are always black rats caught in the countryside, and are cleaner and healthier than rats caught in the city. Their bites tend to heal cleanly with little danger of disease because of their diet of corn and feed. 

-Sewer Rats and Drain Rats are universally brown rats. Their horrific diet of scavenging in the sewer gives their bites a high chance of infection and blood poisoning. Even their fur carries disease, leading some rat-catchers to believe they are poisonous.

-Red Rats feed daily on flesh, such as discarded fat outside a tannery or scraps stolen from the dead horses fed to dogs kept in kennels. Their diet gives them a boldness and ferocity greater than other rats. If a variety of rats inhabit a cage for a night, only the red rats will remain alive in the morning,

- Some rat-catchers tell stories about “Blood Rats”, large vicious rats with hairless heads and long fangs, giving them a “snake-like head”.  These strange creatures supposedly steal into children’s rooms at night and gnaw at their extremities.

As sewers grow more efficient, fetid food sources flow out before they can be eaten, bringing sewer rats up to the surface. They crawl up drains and chew through lead pipes to scavenge in homes and warehouses. Rats nibble fine fabric and soft woods to wear down their teeth, ruining fine furniture, clothes, and furnishings. In farms, feeds stores, warehouses, grocers, and kitchens rats eat harvested goods, steal extra to take back to their nest, and spoil a great quantity more. Rats even kill poultry and steal eggs by rolling them to their nest, making the vermin a true bane to any chicken farm.

They thrive in the city, thanks to their terrific cunning and adaptability. Wherever one rat is spotted, dozens more lie in hiding. Rats breed quickly with litters of up to 20 pups and can become pregnant immediately after birth.  Some naturalists decry their extermination, believing a healthy population of rats in the sewers helps mankind by reducing the amount of decaying waste from which waft “sickening vapors” carrying plagues up from the drains, but when small piles of scat sprout up in the pantry, everyone calls the rat-catcher.

Adventure Idea

Each morning a certain anatomist finds that the books, tools, and chemicals in his dissection room have been moved during the night. He has taken more precautions to secure the room each day, such as locking the door, baring the windows and requesting constables to check his home’s exterior during their rounds. The only openings left are a few pipes the rats chewed open, but they couldn’t be possibly the culprits.

According to legend, basilisks and cockatrices are born when a toad or snake sits on a yokeless egg. What happens when a rat accidentally sits on a stolen chicken egg just before it hatches? A Ratalisk? A Cockatrat?

Next week we get down to business, by looking at the work of the Rat-Catcher.

Nourish and Extinguish- Salamanders in Victoriana

Victoriana is as much fantasy as it is rooted in 1850s history, so as I wrote about chimney sweeps my mind wandered into more fantastic waters. Fire elementals and medieval bestiaries kept popping up, but I didn’t have room for them in my previous posts. So now, here are some ideas and rules for Salamanders in Victoriana.

While many cold-blooded creatures thrive in heat, the salamander is truly Pyrophillious.  Unlike the amphibian of the same name, salamanders rest in blazing flames without burning or bother. Fire warms their blood, cleans their skin, and serves as a sanctuary for eggs about to hatch. Should a fire grow too hot for the salamander’s tastes, glands in its skin sweat a milky flame-quenching liquid, a teaspoon of which dripped into a fireplace quickly extinguishes all flames leaving only lukewarm ash and smoke. Salamanders wander into camps and homes in search of unattended hearths or open flames. Modern industry attracted salamanders out of marshes and forests into the cities of Europe and Asia in search of a nice warm fire.

A fully grown salamander spans 2-4 feet from their blunt nose to their thick tail and weighs between 30 to 70 pounds. Their four legs terminate with curiously human-like hands. Moist pitch-black skin mottled with bright yellow stripes or spots covers their long chubby bodies. Strangely, the temperature of the fire surrounding their egg when they hatch drastically affects their coloration and demeanor. If their fire grows too warm, orange or even red hues creep into the yellow patches and their ferocity grows to the point of attacking with little provocation. If the fire dies before they hatch, their pigmentation dulls to a dark brown and they have a more docile temperament.

A deadly poison covers a salamander’s skin, causing irritation, hair loss, and convulsions upon contact.  Prolonged exposure or ingestion brings death in minutes. Some medieval legends describe predatory salamanders killing a full grown man by leaping on his head, and rubbing their belly on his face. Paradoxically, the salamander’s excretions and skin save countless lives every year. Tanned salamander hide loses little of its inherent flame-retardant qualities. Salamander skin gloves protect engineers and craftsman attached to prestigious firms and the most successful chimney sweeps wear full suits of salamander skin when battling chimney fires, although many only claim to own a salamander suit in order to raise their credibility.  Salamander farms collect their excretions for fighting fires and a host of industrial applications.

Salamanders are not native to the British Isles. The nearest native population of Salamanders slither in the French countryside across the channel, despite the efforts of local hunters to rid their home of such a dangerous creature.

Salamander

Initiative: 8

Physical: 8

Mental: 3

Health Pips: 4

Special Traits:

Pyrophillious- Salamander’s bodies are adapted to heat and possess Armor Value 8 against any fire damage. A salamander may spend an action to extinguish flames touching its body.

Regeneration x3- (See page 294 in Victoriana 3rd Edition Rulebook) In addition to quickly regaining hit points, Salamanders can regrow lost legs or a lost tail a few days after their loss. A Salamander’s body loses its regenerative abilities at death.

Poisonous Skin- Any character touching a salamander with their bare skin must pass a Fortitude test against the poison’s potency of 8. Whether they pass or fail, the character’s skin exposed to the poison turns bright red and stings causing -1 to the character’s Dexterity.

On a failure, the character suffers -2 health per round and an additional -1 to their Dexterity. These effects continue until the character passes a Fortitude test (5 black dice), another character passes a Medicine test with 5 black dice, or the character’s death.  

Damage: Bite (2)

It was pretty nice to just come up with a monster this week after wallowing in horrid squalor, however we will return to the worst jobs of Victorian England next week with a look at Rat-Catchers. I hope you enjoy.

Bristles and Brushes- Luck and Divination

After plunging ourselves into all the disease, danger, and despair in the life of a chimney sweep, let’s consider some of the charming and strange lore connected to their profession.

The Luck of the Sweep

European superstition clings to a belief seemingly ridiculous to anyone familiar with the hard cruelty of the chimney’s sweeps life: Chimney Sweeps are Lucky!  Back in the 1700s, King George II rode in a royal procession until his horse began savagely bucking.  The king held on for dear life until a lowly chimney sweep ran forward and calmed the horse. The sweep left before the king could bestow a royal reward on his savior. Recognizing the sweeps profession by his soot-covered clothes, the king declared all sweeps to be lucky. Or in a strikingly similar story, a chimney sweep rescued King William the Conqueror from an out of control horse and cart, and that grateful king made the proclamation of luck. Of course, it could just be that the sight of a chimney sweep reminds everyone how lucky they are to not be members of that profession.

Practically any encounter with a chimney sweep (save for their visits to clean a chimney) imparts luck to those around them. If a sweep kisses a bride on her wedding day or if a sweep attends the wedding, the marriage will be happy. Passing a sweep on the street or shaking hands with a sweep transfers luck. Finally and most lucky of all is meeting a sweep on the street on New Year’s Day. Some sweeps make extra money attending weddings and selling handshakes to superstitious or desperate people. This belief opens doors that would remain shut to an ordinary member of the working-class covered from head to toe in filth.

Tephromancy and Capnomancy

In addition to cleaning and clearing a stopped up flue, chimney sweeps with a foot in the spirit world might perform oracular services. All over the world, civilizations current and ancient searched cinders, soot, ash, and smoke for clues about their future. Even Victorian Englishmen performed the rite of “Riddling the Ashes”. They spread ash over the hearth on certain holy days such as St. Mark’s Eve or Halloween and checked it the next morning for the footprints of any person in the household to die in the coming year (or the footprint of a future husband, or the footprint of a future child).

Reading the remains of a fire is called Tephramancy. Most traditions hold only the ashes of a sacrificial fire hold any meaning, but family life revolves around the hearth. A fireplace might have some very personal prognostications if someone took the time to look for them. Similarly to Tephromancy, Capnomancy divines the future through the movement of smoke. Chimney sweeps know how smoke should behave as a part of their profession. They would be the first to notice when it flows in a way it shouldn’t, gathers strangely, or turns the wrong color.

Adventure Ideas

A certain gambling den has been plagued by a string of incredible lucky streaks. Every night the house loses far too much money from bets on rat-baiting. The only connection between the lucky winners is the small dirty kid that pets the rat-terriers before they start.

No matter what precautions they take, the chimney sweeps make a mess whenever they clean out the chimney in Mrs. Swale’s boarding house. It’s odd how the soot only clings to items belonging to that mysterious tenant.

Next week, we’ll finish up by looking at a semi-mythological creature with interesting connections to the work of the chimney sweep: the Salamander.

Bristles and Brushes- The Health of the Chimney Sweep

As we look into the unpleasant facts of a chimney sweep’s life, it’s as dark and dirty as the flues they cleaned. Sweeps, some as young as four, lived short unloved lives performing dangerous work in deplorable conditions. The older a sweep ages, the more his profession takes.

In exchange for meager room and board, climbing boys risked their lives and lost their health. Horrific sores opened on their elbows and legs, rubbed raw from climbing and bracing up countless flues. Some master sweeps toughened their apprentice's young sensitive skin by brushing in brine (water mixed with salt) as they stood close to a warm fire. Working in a confined space with no air flow while purposefully stirring up contaminants in the air does no good for the bodies of growing children. A nasty fall from high up a flue crippled many sweeps for life, and some grew up deformed from the rigors of their work before their bones stopped growing. Disturbed soot particulates spread through the air, causing tears in inflamed eyes, and range of respiratory problems if frequently breathed in. If a sweep stuck and suffocated to death halfway up a flue, the bricks of the chimney had to be torn out to remove the body.

Outside of work, frequent beatings from the master sweep, malnutrition, and filthy living conditions destroyed an apprentice’s health further. By law, master sweeps must provide their apprentices with a bath once a week, but many went dirty for longer than a month. Particularly nasty sweeps never provided their charges with bedding, so many climbing boys slept in the bags they used to collect soot.

The constant accumulation of carcinogenic soot had little chance of being washed away. Years of exposure cursed most sweeps with large dark scrotal warts, known as “soot warts”. Soot warts often developed into cancer which spread fatally into the abdomen. More chimney sweeps contracted cancer than any other profession in London due to their daily exposure to soot. Percival Potts famously connected the sweep’s cancer to their occupational exposure in 1775, making public the easily avoided danger. The sweeps of continental Europe adopted tight-fitting, hooded body suits and daily baths, but English sweeps clung to their methodologies.

Adventure Ideas

Recently a number of child sweeps died in the chimneys of houses in the same community as a crusader against child labor. Boys looking remarkably similar to the dead sweeps have recently enrolled in a boys school.

Thaumaturgists, sigil scribes and petty mages often use fire as a key component to their spellcasting preparation. The sweeps hired to clean a magician’s chimney would contract more otherworldly ailments from soot sprinkled with magical particulates.

The nasty brine mixture rubbed into the apprentice’s skin could have a more supernatural quality. Civilizations all across the world use salt circles and salt water to keep fairies, evil spirits, ghosts, and other horrors at bay.  Is there something in the chimneys of London that would harm sweeps if not for the presence of salt water in the skin?

Enough of that. Next week, we move back into the fantastical side as we look at odd folklore and superstitions connected with sweeps.

Bristles and Brushes- The Horrible Story of Apprentice Chimney Sweeps

Numerous unpleasant truths lie behind the façade of Victorian gentility. Few are more disgusting than that of the child apprentices to the chimney sweeps, better known as “climbing boys”.  Children, as young as 4, served as laborers in dangerous and brutal conditions. Some never reached their teens.

Master sweeps procured most of their apprentices from working-class families. Parents paid the sweep to raise their child and teach them a trade. Under the Poor Law, sweeps also made arrangements with workhouse guardians to procure apprentices. Others recruited from orphanages, and a dastardly few even kidnapped children. Whoever they were and however they were gotten, the life of a climbing boy (and some climbing girls) stole away their childhood.

A chimney flue holds little space for a full-grown sweep to work, but a young child could still fit. By bracing and scooting with their feet, knees, and elbows the apprentices climbed the chimney to reach every soot-covered nook. Protected only by rough pants, a shirt, and a cap pulled down over their face, climbing boys squeezed to the top of the chimney loosening soot deposits and clogs with a broad tough brush and a scraper. If the chimney was particularly narrow, the boys worked “in the buff” to save space. At the suggestion of the master sweep, older apprentices “encouraged” scared or stuck climbing boys by squeezing up after them and sticking their feet with pins or lighting a small straw fire in the hearth. Once he reached the top of the chimney pot, the apprentice climbed back down and collected the fallen soot to sell later. After seven years of these deplorable conditions, climbing boys became journeyman sweeps, and could serve under any master sweep they wished, but after seven years they were also growing teenagers often unable to fit up a chimney making their apprenticeship nearly worthless. Some became master sweeps and continued the tradition of tragedy, others found new professions. More still turned to crime or drunk themselves to death.

The horrific plight of apprentice chimney sweeps did not go unchallenged. Some homes refused to hire sweeps with child apprentices, though many others believed a chimney cleared by climbing boys safer and more thoroughly cleaned than with the extendable tools used by more humane sweeps. In 1788, the British Government passed an act restricting a master sweep to no more than six apprentices all older than 7, but with no enforcement, no change followed. The Chimney Sweepers Act of 1834, ensured that an apprentice must desire to work for the master sweep, and increased the legal minimum age to 14, again with no effect.

Finally, the work of crusaders and activists bore fruit in 1864. The Chimney Sweepers Regulation Act imposed fines and imprisonment for master sweeps found breaking the law and gave the police authority to arrest suspects. Although the practice of child-endangering apprenticeship continued, the act gave teeth to public outcry and hastened its end.

Adventure Ideas

While stuck in the narrow confines of a flue, one poor suffocating climbing boy heard a whisper in his pitch-black confinement. He miraculously appeared safe and sound on the street outside after striking a bargain with the voice.

A gang of apprentice sweeps, recently freed by various twists of fate from their masters, formed a gang known to the police as “the Climbing Boys”. Using their head for heights and their knack for crawling through narrow spaces, they’ve formed an ill-disciplined but efficient team of burglars.

I know this subject matter is pretty awful, but I do think this kind of historic injustice can fuel some very powerful storytelling and could help pull players into a more ethically complicated setting. By pulling these hard historical facts out of the background, we can explore deeper material and ask hard questions in a safe place. Next week, we reveal further horrors of the sweep’s vocation, specifically their work’s terrible cost to their health.