Super Adventures in Rat-Infested RPG Cellars

Anyone who's played a few RPGs knows that one of the first things a level 1 newbie hero has to do is go sort out someone's rodent problem. There are rats in the cellar, rats in the basement, rats in the storeroom and rats in the larder, and clearing them out is a job for the least experienced of adventurers.

At least, that's the cliché, and it's as infamous as having to go see the village elder, or collect 10 wolf pelts. But how common is this trope in reality? When did games start treating it like a joke? Where did it even come from?

Today I'm going through RPGs I've played from the newest to the oldest on a quest to see how deep this rat cellar goes. It's not going to be an exhaustive list, I haven't played that many RPGs, but if rat quests are really as ubiquitous as advertised then by the end I'm going to be exhausted.

This will include SPOILERS for any games that do something interesting enough with their rat quest for it to be worth spoiling.

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Small Saga (2023)

First on the list is indie RPG Small Saga. You'd think a game where you actually play as a rodent would be the exception, but nope! You start off underground, fighting rats.

To be fair this isn't a quest exactly, you're just heading through the sewers and the rats are in the way, but it's not a battle you can avoid.


 2010s 

South Park: The Stick of Truth (2014)

If you're looking for RPG clichés, probably the best place to look is an RPG parody like South Park: The Stick of Truth. It didn't take me long to stumble across a bar with a basement full of rats and an owner who'll reward you if you sort it out for him.

So there you go, I've already found at least one game that gives you the innkeeper, the side quest, the rats and the basement, ticking all of the trope's boxes. But it's doing it as a joke.


 2000s 

Dragon's Age: Origins (2009)

Dragon Age's big selling point, aside from being a spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate and being really edgy, is that you get a different prologue chapter depending on the type of character you're playing. So chances were good that at least one of them was going to feature a trip to the rat zone, and yep the Human Noble origin story gives you the trope right at the start.

Technically your quest is to collect your dog from the larder, but the dog went in there hunting rodents, so soon you're surrounded by these tiny giant rats. Your rat-slaying buddy Ser Gilmore even hangs a lampshade on it, saying it's like the start of every bad adventure tale his grandfather used to tell.

Gilmore, please, don't do that. It's almost as bad as when people in films go "This isn't like a movie, this is real life!"

The mage origin also has a mouse in it, but he's a shapeshifter who hangs around with you and spends half his time as a bear, so that doesn't really count.

Oh, but you do have to clear out a storeroom full of giant spiders, so there's that.


The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (2006)

Oblivion starts with you fighting your way through giant rats to escape the tutorial dungeon, but that's just a warm up as there's a proper rat-themed quest available the moment you get out. You don't even have to walk to town, as you can fast travel to any city the moment you emerge in the sunlight.

If you head to Anvil, the city's Fighters Guild offers you a quest to help a woman called Arvena Thelas with her rat problem.

But there's a twist! Arvena actually loves the rats in her basement and wants you to protect them from a starving mountain lion! So we've got a proper subversion this time.

See, this is why most people keep their rodents in cages! Well, okay it's not to avoid this situation specifically, but it is usually a good idea.

It would've certainly made it easier for me to kill the lion without accidentally smacking any of the rats in the process.

But the quest's not over yet, as now you have to walk behind a hunter as he takes a leisurely stroll across the countryside to sort out the rest of the mountain lions. It's fine though, it's not like I'm in a rush to play every RPG with a rat in it or anything, take your time mate!

Though when you report back to Arvena it turns out that there's a second mountain lion in her basement! This is a good quest if you want to collect lion pelts. The next phase has you trailing a suspect called Quill-Weave without being seen, in order to catch her leaving meat to lure in predators. You have to be there at the right time though, and the game doesn't tell you when that is, so there's a bit of waiting involved.

Incidentally, on the 7th day of each month Quill-Weave likes to leave town to visit a friend in another city. This doesn't affect the quest at all, she prioritises rat murder over her regular activities, I just think it's amazing that Oblivion's NPCs do things like that.


Final Fantasy XII (2006)

Final Fantasy XII begins with a prologue chapter that throws you into a story of war and treachery. You're a soldier fighting to prevent his king from being assassinated before he can sign a treaty, and events ultimately take surprising and tragic turn.

And then the game jumps to this other dude, Vaan, fighting dire rats in a sewer. No context.

It's a very impressive sewer and they're fairly dire rats, but I already did the basic combat tutorial in the prologue! I suppose this does help demonstrate how the protagonist's life has been going, as this isn't even a quest. Vaan's not getting paid for this, the rat slaying is just practice, and he apparently does it a lot as one the locals jokingly calls him 'Vaan Ratsbane'. That's sadly as close to a last name as the poor guy gets.


Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel (2004)

Sorry, I had to blur this shot a bit because the interlacing artefacts were bothering me.

The first task in mediocre Fallout spin-off Brotherhood of Steel is to clear out raiders in the bar and there's not a single rat in sight. Then when you sort that out and speak to the bartender, he doesn't have any rat-related concerns either.

But he does point you toward the town's mayor, who wants you to clear out a radscorpion infestation in the supply warehouse. Radscorpions are kind of like rats, except with more legs. And a poison tail.

Plus there are actually giant rats in here as well!

The mayor sent me here to clear out the radscorpions specifically and I even got a counter telling me how many are left to kill, so this doesn't really count as a true 'rats in the cellar' quest. It's pretty close though.


The Bard's Tale (2004)

The 2004 Bard's Tale reboot is a comedy game, so it wastes no time skewering RPG tropes. And rats.

Seriously, you accept a quest from a buxom barmaid to clear out the rats in her cellar while you're still in the intro sequence. The Bard's eager to show her that his sword is big enough to handle any troubles she might have and she's certainly not discouraging him from imagining the trouble they could get up to later that night. Provided he can get this job done first.

So the player steers the Bard through the tavern's back room and down into the caves below, and with a single click the rat is vanquished.

The game's got Tony Jay as its narrator and he's suitably impressed with the Bard's victory. Well, sarcastically impressed might be more accurate. Lots of heroes earning the nickname 'Ratsbane' in this article.

Then a giant fire-breathing rat emerges from the darkness to demonstrate what a real rat problem is. You have to race back upstairs so the barmaid can thrown water over you. Fortunately it's just a comedy game so the Bard escapes without third-degree burns. Or any burns at all, actually.

He still has to defeat the giant rat though, but if you want to find out how he pulls that off you're going to have to play the game yourself.

Or I could just tell you. You do a tutorial which teaches you how to summon a magic spider and then that goes off and kills the rat for you. This earns the Bard a room at the inn, but he ends up sleeping alone. Turns out the barmaid didn't find him hot, she just wanted to see him burn.


The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (2002)

Oblivion subverts the 'rats in the basement' quest by having you protect Arvena Thelas' rats from a mountain lion, but Morrowind had already done its own twist on the trope. In this you have to kill the rats in Drarayne Thelas' attic. That's a completely different room!

It's still accessible right at the start of the game though. You just need to head to the Fighter's Guild in Balmora and it's the first quest they give you.

Sorry that the screen's so red by the way. The bitey little rodents took a third of my health off the moment I entered the room.


Icewind Dale II (2002)

I played Icewind Dale II for an hour or two, doing every quest I could find in Targos, and I didn't come across any rat-slaying missions. Though I did run into a group of mercenaries with stories to tell about the RPG starter quests they had to do, and the ways they resolved them.

It turns out that there was a cliché rat quest in Targos, but Anson here did it already. If you're wondering how a professional handles the problem, this is what he did:

He just threw a cat in there.

It was a stolen cat though, not a party member, so I don't think he got any XP for it. Unless it counts as special attack.


Dungeon Siege (2002)

I remembered Dungeon Siege having a bit of a rat quest early on, but it turns out I was wrong. There is a guy called Edgaar near the start who has basement clearing side quest for you, but it's not tiny rats he wants slaying, it's Krug. Those are the big orc-looking dudes currently invading their farmlands.

I'd killed a dozen or so of them just getting to Edgaar's house so I could take this screenshot, so a few more didn't seem like too much trouble. In fact my first problem was finding the secret cellar door, as nothing in here wants to open (it was outside). Then I found the next complication: Edgaar's basement is bigger than his house... and I was only seeing half of it.

As I was clearing out the Krug I stepped on a grate and dropped down beneath the floor.

The grate turned out to be a lift that took me to the second floor of the cellar, which contains boxes, cobwebs and bloody boss fight against a Krug called Brankar the Scavenger! But no rats.

Well okay, he wasn't really much of a boss with just 24 heath, he just took a few more level 1 fireshots to the face than the average Krug before he went down. In fact, I had auto-attack turned on, so I let my hero take care of him for me.

But as I was clearing the place out, getting the supplies Edgaar promised me, I realised that one of the walls could be destroyed. This opened up a passage leading to another secret room. But still no rats.


Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (GBC) (2001)

I was searching my site for the words 'rats' and 'basement' and this came up. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone on the GBC doesn't start with a rat quest to my recollection, but it definitely has rats. They're all over the bloody place!


Max Payne (2001)

Max Payne doesn't have a rat quest either, in fact the game's not even an RPG, but I'm giving it an honorary mention because of its Killer Rats Easter egg.

There's a hole in the wall at the start of chapter two and if you can get a grenade in there then you'll declare a war against rats. They come out after you armed with Desert Eagles and their tiny size makes them a serious threat. Plus they're annoyingly hard to get a screenshot of.


Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance (2001)

Sorry this is so blurry, I had to get rid of the interlacing.

Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance's intro shows your character getting robbed, so your first mission when you get control is 'get your money back'. You start off in the Elfsong Tavern chatting to innkeeper Alyth, so that's the first part of the rat quest trope sorted already. In fact, it's a bit like the beginning of The Bard's Tale, except the buxom barmaid has jiggle physics (it was the early 2000s).

She'll let you into the sewers to chase the thieves, because of course the inn has a sewer entrance, but first she wants you to go into the cellar and sort out the horde of rats that suddenly showed up.

Oh, and she wasn't exaggerating when she said there was a horde of them down here. The cellar is the size of a dungeon and every couple of rooms there are more rats to slay.

So I met an innkeeper, they gave me my first quest, I had to go down to the cellar, and I had to slay rats. That's it, that's the whole trope, played entirely straight!

I haven't played Baldur's Gate III yet, but I hear that you get to return to the Elfsong Tavern in the final act, take on another rat quest and then go back down to this storehouse to annihilate another 36 of the poor rodents. The Sword Coast really needs some health inspectors.


Icewind Dale (2000)

Things aren't any better up north in Icewind Dale, as the tavern you start in is also having a bit of a pest problem. If you chat to the innkeeper Grisella she gives you a side quest to clear out the vermin in her cellar so she can keep the ale flowing.

It's the very first quest in the very first room at the very start of the game, and it's even given to you by an innkeeper! There's only one thing preventing this from being the absolute ideal representation of the 'rats in the basement' trope... the pests aren't rats, they're bugs.

Sorry Icewind Dale, this list is 'rats only', so you are disqualified.

Meanwhile, Planescape: Torment subverted the trope entirely by having its rats be part of a hive mind that grows stronger the more of them there are in one place. Man, I hated those rats. I've tried to get into Planescape on two occasions and the first time it was those rats that made me quit. I didn't get a screenshot of them though, sorry.


 1990s 


Parasite Eve (1998)

Parasite Eve looks like a Resident Evil game, but it is a proper RPG and the first proper enemies you face after jumping down a hole into the basement are these mutated rats. They're not a quest given to you by an innkeeper though, they're just in the way. In fact, I'm not sure Parasite Eve even has innkeepers.


Baldur's Gate (1998)

The original Baldur's Gate starts you off with a number of simple challenges to get you comfortable with the interface and one of them is to slay the rats infesting a storehouse for a bloke called Reevor. Though technically this was a quest the hero got yesterday and they've been putting it off.

Icewind Dale II had that guy telling a tale about solving this problem by just throwing a cat in the room, but there are already two of them in here! They're being lazy and ignoring all the rodents, so it's not actually a surefire solution.

You can't really see the creatures as they're too well camouflaged, but the red circles indicate rats, the blue circles indicate cats, and the green circle is a harbinger of their inevitable doom. I mean the rats are doomed, I'm not going to do anything to the cats. Well, I tried talking to one but all I got was a 'meow'.

Baldur's Gate's been around for a while now, it's the first real-time-with-pause Infinity Engine game, so you might suspect that this is where the cliché originated. Nope, the hero gets extra sarcastic about it in their journal, so it was already a familiar trope.

Incidentally this quest is called "Reevor's Storehouse", and the one you do in the Elfsong Tavern in Baldur's Gate III is called "Roveer's Storehouse", so BG3 is referencing two rat quests from the start of two previous games simultaneously. They even included the lazy cats, so they either the developers did the research or they've got very good memories.


Fallout (1997)

I don't remember anyone in Fallout giving me a quest to go down into a cellar and kill rats, but that doesn't mean I didn't fight any. The first thing you do in the game is leave the safety of your Vault and head out into a cave full of the creatures. They're not the greatest threat you'll face, but a screenful of tiny enemies isn't necessarily what you want to be dealing with in a turn-based battle system.


The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall (1996)

Daggerfall also starts with you fighting rats to escape the tutorial dungeon. I wouldn't count this as an actual quest though, even if you are encouraged to hit them.

But like in Oblivion, if you escape and make it to a Fighter's Guild, then you can pick up an actual genuine 'rat in the basement' quest. You might have to talk to the guy a few times before he offers you the quest you're looking for though.

He describes it as a job 'too menial for fighters of the guild', so the developers are acknowledging that it's kind of lame. Though I expect that the game is just picking a location in town and spawning rats there, so I'm not really showing you the rat quest here, I'm demonstrating the rat quest system.

The first step in slaying this vermin is to go out and ask someone in the street for directions, as the guild isn't going to tell you themselves. Then you need to rely on your map and compass to navigate the misty maze of endless procedurally generated buildings. It's like Silent Hill, except more chaotic and unsettling.

I got to the right shop in the end and swung my sword at anything that squeaked. All the rat-killing practice I've had today paid off and I sorted out the rodents easily. But every time I looked around to make sure I'd gotten them all, another one appeared! I can't kill literally infinite rats, that could take hours!

Fortunately they eventually stopped coming, and the wiki says there are a maximum of seven to fight, so that's not so bad. Though once the rats are dissected you have to walk all the way back to the Fighter's Guild to tell them it's done, so get your map back out and keep an eye on the compass.


Pokémon Red/Blue (1996)

Pokémon Red/Blue doesn't really count but I did think it was funny that the first wild enemy you face when leaving town is likely to be a rat. Well, a rat-themed pokémon.


Warhammer: Shadow of the Horned Rat (1995)

Here's a game that ticks several boxes. Shadow of the Horned Rat has you playing as mercenaries getting paid to kill rats. The clue is in the title.

It's sadly disqualified however, due to it being a real-time strategy wargame instead of an RPG, and the rats being large intelligent humanoids that march across the battle in armed squads. Also there's no basement.


Elder Scrolls: Arena (1994)

Man, what is it with these Elder Scrolls games always making rats your first obstacle to escaping your underground captivity?

Arena can randomly generate side quests for you like its sequel, but it seems like the only mission that involves slaying a specific monster has you going after one high-level creature, not a basement full of tiny low-level ones. So no 'rats in the basement' quest here it seems.


Brain Lord (1994)

Here you go, JRPG Brain Lord has an actual genuine 'rats in the basement' quest. Okay if you want to be pedantic it's a 'mice in the attic' quest, but I can't really be too picky as I'm struggling to find examples now.

When I came up with the idea for this article I assumed rat cellars would be all over the place until Baldur's Gate made fun of the cliché and encouraged developers to put the old trope to rest. Instead the opposite seems to be true, as this is basically all I've got for the early '90s. Granted my knowledge is only as good as my first-hand experience and the references I've found online, and I haven't played that many classic RPGs, but I'm still surprised.

I can at least tell you that I can't remember clearing out any rat-infested basements at the start of Final Fantasy, Dragon Warrior, Dungeon Master or Eye of the Beholder. There are rats in a dungeon near the start of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, but no one sends you there to kill them, so they're just an enemy type that exists in the world.


 1980s 

Wasteland (1988)

Alright, I've reached the end. Wasteland is the earliest RPG I can think of where you get an actual quest to deal with rats (and bunnies and opossums and prairie dogs, all using the same enemy art). You just head west from the Ranger Center past Highpool until you reach the Agricultural Center and then speak to the guy there to take on the job.

I spent ages fighting these creatures but it seemed like there was no end to them. Which was a problem as there was definitely an end to my ammo. You're apparently meant to find and kill the Bunny Master to finish the job, but I never did. Though I saw enough to know that isn't the kind of generic 'rats in the basement' quest that would start a trope.


CONCLUSION

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So that's it. I wasn't able to find the source of the 'rats in the basement' cliché in the end and I struggled to even find a game that took it seriously. Quest failed.

The problem is that I was looking in the wrong place the whole time. It seems to me that these RPGs are making fun of a tabletop RPG trope that existed long before video games became a thing. I've never played a game of Dungeons & Dragons myself, I'm not speaking from experience, but I can see how it'd make sense for a Dungeon Master to give their level 1 players a quest that takes place inside the tavern they start in, and there aren't a lot of suitable enemies for a party that feeble to face. Innkeeper, side quest, cellar, giant rats - it's one of the simplest ways to get things started, so no wonder it became a cliché.

Though D&D didn't invent the concept of oversized rodents lurking underground. There was a famous 1977 Doctor Who serial, Talons of Weng-Chiang, that featured a giant rat lurking in the London sewers... and that was a homage to a famous 1924 Sherlock Holmes story. Well, the giant rat in the story was famous at least, it even has its own Wikipedia page somehow. Anyway, the point I'm making is that sometimes the rabbit hole just keeps going. Uh, rat hole, whatever.


Hey, if you've got any suggestions for other articles like this I could put together, preferably about things I can screenshot within half an hour of starting each game, let me know. For example, "Best Looking Space Fighters in Shoot 'em Ups", that would be something I could theoretically do, while "A Complete History of Secret Boss Fights" is never going to happen.

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Thanks for reading!

If you think you know what the next game is going to be, post a comment below. If you have no idea, post a comment about something else. Let me know about rat quests I missed, or give me some ideas for new articles I can write. Or just say hi!