B/X Monsters A to Z: Ferret, Giant

 For good or ill, giant versions of normal animals are a mainstay of D&D, and here we have another one, the giant ferret from the Basic Set.

According to the description, giant ferrets look like three-foot-long weasels. I'm not sure why we need the comparison to weasels -- did the average person not know about ferrets in the early 80s, or did Tom Moldvay just think they didn't, or did he just need an icebreaker statement about ferrets and that's what he came up with? I'll be forked if I know, but at least the information about the animal's length is useful for visualizing it. As their real world counterparts hunt rats, so giant ferrets hunt giant rats, and are sometimes trained for this purpose, though their unpredictable tempers make this a hazardous proposition. (At least one official adventure module, B11: King's Festival, features a giant ferret trained by orcs.) 

For relatively small and very slender creatures, giant ferrets have very robust stats, with an AC of 5 and 1+1 Hit Dice. It's probably safe to say these can be attributed mainly to speed, agility, and ferocity. Further supporting that assumption is the celeritous movement rate of 150'(50'); likewise, its damage per attack of 1-8 points seems far more representative of a frenzied flurry of bites rather than a single chomp. Their morale of 8 is neither particularly cowardly nor suicidally brave, so it's possible to drive them off, but probably not without inflicting some casualties first. In their normal Number Appearing (1-8 in the dungeon and 1-12 in the wilderness) they could be either a nuisance encounter or a very stiff challenge for Basic level characters, depending on the roll of the dice.

Besides their usefulness in dealing with giant rats (a single giant ferret is likely more than a match for several giant rats at once), the long, snake-like body of a giant ferret could be immensely useful in getting into very tight spaces to retrieve items or manipulate simple objects or mechanisms, e.g. to unlatch a door. Characters who can charm animals or communicate with them directly might plausibly be able to overcome the creatures' unpredictable temperament and make reliable companions/pets of them.

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