Before you get to start slaying dragons or thwarting the plans of evil deities, RPGs tend to test your mettle with more mundane fare. Typically this involves a filthy tavern with a rodent problem. It's such an ancient trope that RPG designers have been poking fun at it for decades, like 2004's The Bard's Tale, which sees you slay a single, solitary rat, celebrate your heroism, and cowardly run away after a much larger rat appears and sets you on fire.
So making fun of the trope has become a trope itself, and most prospective adventurers are probably just a little bit sick of these cellar antics. Often RPG designers will try to spice things up by making the rats very large, but that's always felt a bit half-arsed to me. You can't just make a tiny thing big and then call it a day.
Except, these massive rodents absolutely do exist and I really need to apologise to them and the RPG designers who've been trying to give them their time in the spotlight.
Now, I've always been aware of the existence of large rats, but I always just assumed they were merely chunkier versions of their more common cousins. It turns out, though, that the Gambian pouched rat is a whopping 88cm in length, nose to tail. That's the size of a small dog. They are hench and cute. But I'm a bit more impressed by a slightly smaller but still very large rodent: the subalpine woolly rat.
These hefty critters can be 85cm long, but they stand out even more due to their impressive fluffiness. As Live Science reports, we've only known about them since they were identified via museum specimens in 1989, but none of them had ever been documented in the wild. Until now.
František Vejmělka, a doctoral candidate at the Czech Academy of Sciences and the University of South Bohemia, has published a study in the journal Mammalia, documenting his observation of these beefy rodents in New Guinea. He used camera traps to photograph and film them in their natural habitat, with critical assistance from the area's indigenous people.
"These are the first specimen records in 30 years for this spectacular mammal poorly known to science," the author says in his study's abstract.
Via email, Vejmělk explained to me that the subalpine woolly rat belongs to the largest rodents among the murid family, along with cloud rats from the Philippines. Here in the UK, the most common species of rodents referred to as rats belong to the murid family. The Gambian pouched rat, mentioned above, belongs to a different family: African nesomyid rodents.
Subalpine woolly rats can climb trees to chomp on their leaves, nest in burrows, and while they have sharp teeth, you won't find them trying to feast upon the ankles of drunken bar patrons.
Speaking to Live Science, Vejmělka provided some insight into how they grew to such a prodigious size. "Their ancestors arrived from Asia to the island completely absent of any other terrestrial placental mammals (only marsupials and monotremes)," adding that they might be an example of insular gigantism, where animals on islands end up larger than those on the mainland.
So maybe these giant RPG rats aren't so silly after all, but I'd still love it if we could just stop killing them. Rats are lovely. And these fluffly lads deserve to be left in peace, to nibble on leaves and climb trees.
You can check out photographs of these massive rats, and their habitat, in the supplementary material provided with the study.
