Fox Raiding the Chicken Coop Rules

“Red whisker, come to play

home from home, never stay.”

Every Fox has two scores, Cleverness and Hunger. Cleverness is how clever and quick the fox is at both breaking your defenses and evading capture, and Hunger is a changing score based on how many of your chickens the Fox will kill when it gets in the coop.

Every Fox starts with 1d6 Cleverness and a Hunger score of 1 or 2. Every season, the Hunger score increases by +1. Of course, the Fox is eating more then just your chickens, this is just a vague approximation of it getting more and more desperate of eating whatever it eats out in the forest, and getting more and more confident about its hunting.

The exception to this rule of during the Spring, where female foxes raise young. If the Fox hunting your chickens is a vixen, increase hunger by +1d4 so she can feed her kits.

The Fox's cleverness is directly countered by your defenses. The chicken coop itself counts as 1 to 3 based on if it has a door and how well made it is. Stationary defenses, such as locks, doors, chains, walls, barriers, scent markers, scarecrows, minor magical sigils and so on grant +1 defense. Active defenses, such as active spells, guard dogs or human watchmen, or having a cockrel among your hens count as +2 defense each.

Every time the Fox succeeds at raiding your chicken coop, its hunger is sated this season. The Fox's hunger drops to Cleverness score if it was higher, and otherwise stays the same. You have a bunch of feathers on the ground and missing chickens.

Every time the Fox fails at raiding your chicken coop, its Cleverness increases by one.

When the Fox has become too dangerous and troublesome to deal with with a few simple defenses or guard dogs; you need to go on a hunt. You must take a number of fox hounds equal or greater to the Fox's cleverness, or else it will slip away. Other hunting rules include tracking, shooting, and dealing with elves screeching at you about “animal cruelty” or something- make these up yourself.