Meet The Weresquirrel

Back in the day doing tabletop gaming I ran the silliest games.  The players would be taking a tour of a wizard's castle and find themselves in mortal combat with a living room sofa.  You know the kind of sofa that's so comfy it's hard to leave?  This one would cast cast a sleep spell on you then close and release digestive juices: a Venus Flysofa.  It was a tough fight; the dang thing had 17 hit dice.

So when the same group was traveling through a forest and it was time for a random monster encounter, they met up with weresquirrels.

"What?"  They weren't sure they'd heard it right.

"You've heard of werewolves, weretigers.  These are weresquirrels."

It was impossible to talk for a while because they were clutching their sides laughing.  Sometimes I would randomly insert a different animal into a known monster type and work out the details from there.  One session they would have been fighting hell hounds and instead battled hell bunnies.  Another day one of the guys farted one too many times and the whole party ended up fighting a pack of barking spiders (special attack: poison gas).

I really didn't know where this was headed while I was saying it--what exactly do you do with weresquirrels?

"What do squirrels bite?"

Laughter halted, jaws dropped.

"You better hope these things don't get a critical hit."

It was completely unplanned but it worked.  And the players--who were all male--got into the role play including the critical hits.  Somehow they loved it.  Turned out to be one of that campaign's best sessions.


So during a Skype chat in Battle Pirates (speeding ahead several years) we were reminiscing about old gaming experiences and this story came up.  Completely different group of people, again all male, and they loved the joke too.  It turned into a game name and stuck.  When the Community Manager at Kixeye asked me to become a forum moderator we tossed around ideas for mod names.

"You don't think Weresquirrel is too unprofessional?"

"Looks fine; it's funny."

That's how it went.  There are things outside the scope of Kixeye's forums that are worth comment and discussion.  So after a day of various back end preparations (mostly hunting down free licensed squirrel pictures) here's a new year's blog.