A lot of monsters in one area?

[Lanman]

I am new to the game, I've been playing about 2 days now. I keep running into a room full the same monster. For example 15 white rats seen. And I was just in town and there was about 12 beggars following me... Is this normal? What settings do people set at birth?

Thanks

[buzzkill]

That's all fairly normal. The mice are "breeders". Kill them quickly to avoid a bigger problem. There's lots of neat stuff to discover in the dungeon. BTW, a group of 15 isn't necessarily "a lot". Have fun.

[Derakon]

If you hit '/', then the game will prompt you for a symbol; hit 'r' for example and it'll start listing off all the rodent enemies you've seen before, and you can bring up your "monster memory" for any particular one. If you see the text "It breeds explosively" in the monster memory, then that means that each turn, any awake monster of the type can create a clone of itself in an adjacent tile.

As for the beggars, some monsters appear in groups. There's also monsters in the dungeon that appear with "escorts" -- for example, Orc Captains show up with an escort of other orc-type monsters.