Overview
Rattarians are humanoid rat-folk reborn into Postremo Limine after their original worlds collapsed. They are not native to this plane, but remnants of a race that once thrived in soot-covered cities, steam tunnels, rusted factories, and endless industrial sprawls.
When their souls re-manifested within Postremo Limine, many instinctively gathered in the Node known as 1888 London, a place that mirrors the grim beauty of the worlds they lost.
To outsiders, Rattarians often appear as scavengers, vermin, and back-alley engineers. To themselves, they are rebuilders: survivors determined to recreate fragments of their old society from the refuse of broken worlds.
Their cities hum beneath the smog, powered by salvaged machines, half-remembered designs, steam pipes, and improvised engines. In the layered darkness of Postremo Limine, Rattarians have found both familiarity and purpose.
Physical Traits
Rattarians usually stand between 4 and 6 feet tall, though many carry a hunched posture from years of tunnel movement, pipe-crawling, and workshop labor.
Their fur ranges from ash-gray to soot-black, with some individuals showing patchy fur, old burn marks, scarred skin, or chemical stains. They have elongated snouts, whiskers, sharp yellowed teeth, and large light-sensitive eyes adapted to fog, darkness, and underground spaces.
Their hands are clawed but highly dexterous, suited for climbing, tool use, wiring, and delicate repairs. Their prehensile tails can grip pipes, tools, wires, or ledges, allowing them to work in cramped spaces with unusual control.
Some Rattarians develop or install mechanical augmentations, including self-fitted limbs, brass respirators, grafted lenses, spine braces, or tail-mounted tools.
Rattarians cannot vomit, making poison and spoiled materials especially dangerous once swallowed. However, they compensate with a strong sense of smell, careful food testing, and social feeding habits.
Their naked tails help regulate body temperature, especially in hot tunnels, steam chambers, or cold underground passages. A relaxed Rattarian’s ears may flush pink when they are happy, comfortable, or socially content.
Culture
Rattarian society is built around hierarchical clans known as Warrens. Each Warren controls a district of tunnels, steam lines, markets, pipeways, or abandoned infrastructure.
Most Warrens are ruled by an Elder Engineer or Pipe-Lord, figures who combine technical skill, political authority, and clan memory. Power belongs to those who can keep the machines running, the tunnels safe, and the Warren fed.
Rattarian society is usually divided into four broad tiers.
Pipe-Lords and Elder Engineers rule the Warren, negotiate with outsiders, maintain ancestral machines, and control access to major resources.
Wrenches act as enforcers, guards, mechanics, and peacekeepers. They are dominant toward lower-ranking members, but defer completely to the ruling engineer caste.
Gears are the average members of the Warren. They work, trade, repair, forage, raise families, and keep daily life functioning. Most Gears avoid internal politics unless survival forces them to choose sides.
Bolts are the lowest-ranking and most submissive members of the Warren. They are often denied the best food, safest sleeping spaces, or strongest protection. Some remain loyal and climb through service, while others leave to join weaker Warrens, surface gangs, or Diver crews.
Rattarians are driven by pragmatism, not ideology. Loyalty belongs to Warren and trade. Everything else is negotiable.
They are mostly nocturnal and prefer to operate under cover of darkness, smog, or steam. Despite their reputation for betrayal, Rattarians are intensely social among their own. They will often risk themselves to rescue trapped warren-mates, even when food or profit is available elsewhere.
Rattarians also rely heavily on social trust when judging safety. They often look to peers to decide what food, routes, machines, or outsiders are safe. The scent of another Rattarian’s breath, tools, or fur may influence whether something is accepted or avoided.
Female Rattarians commonly share nesting duties, nursing, guarding, and caring for one another’s pups. Young are often raised communally within the Warren rather than by isolated families.
Though crude on the surface, Rattarian culture is deeply ritualized. They record history in rat-glyphs etched into pipe walls, rusted plates, brickwork, and machine casings. Steam music, made through rhythmic hissing from vent valves, marks celebrations, funerals, warnings, and work shifts.
Their language, Rattish, blends gnawed clicks, breathy squeaks, tail taps, and industrial terms borrowed from Diver speech.
Elders carry relics called Core Bones: machine parts fused with ancestral remains. These relics symbolize the union of flesh, memory, and industry.
While humans often see Rattarians as vermin, Rattarians see themselves as the city’s memory, preserving what others abandon.
Abilities
Rattarians possess powerful scavenger instincts, allowing them to locate usable scrap, fuel, wire, tools, food, and technology in places others would consider empty.
Their tunnel sense gives them exceptional spatial awareness underground. They can detect vibration, airflow changes, weak walls, hidden drains, and nearby movement through pipes or floorboards.
Rattarians are gifted at jury-rigging machinery. Even with broken parts and limited tools, they can build functional engines, traps, lifts, pumps, signal devices, weapons, or filtration systems.
They are naturally resilient against many airborne toxins, bloodborne infections, industrial pollutants, and sewer-borne contaminants, though they are not immune to all poisons.
Their pack coordination allows silent group tactics in narrow spaces. Through clicks, pheromones, tail movements, and breath patterns, Rattarians can coordinate ambushes, repairs, escapes, or market warnings without speaking aloud.
Rattarians are especially dangerous in tunnels, markets, sewers, pipeways, and mechanical districts where they know every drain, vent, ladder, and hidden route.
Relationship to Postremo Limine
Rattarians occupy an uneasy place in Postremo Limine. Most surface factions distrust them, yet many depend on their repairs, salvage networks, tunnel routes, black markets, and industrial knowledge.
They prefer trade, leverage, sabotage, and ambush over direct confrontation. A Rattarian Warren rarely fights fair if it can flood a tunnel, cut a steam line, collapse a passage, or poison a supply route instead.
Allied Diver groups have reported limited cooperation with Rattarian engineers and guides, though betrayal becomes more likely when resources grow scarce or when a Warren’s survival is at risk.
Outsiders should avoid drawing weapons, flashing bright lights, or threatening pups near Rattarian markets. Steam Police patrols, surface raids, or forced inspections can provoke riots that spread rapidly through the pipe networks.
Flooding tunnels is rarely effective. Rattarians know drains, overflow routes, emergency shafts, and hidden air pockets better than most invaders.
Entities generally treat Rattarians like any other race of Postremo Limine, though Rattarian Warrens often survive by reinforcing hidden districts, abandoning compromised tunnels, and rerouting entire communities before danger reaches them.
A lone Rattarian may be dismissed as a scavenger. A prepared Warren is an entire city beneath your feet.