One of the great things about being part of the House of Bob and the great community of patrons that support us is that we get the chance to explore RPGs outside of our usual wheelhouse!
When my regular home group ended our latest Pathfinder 2e campaign, the consensus around the table was to try something simpler and quicker to pick up for a short one-shot or two. I scoured Discord, Reddit and the rest of my social media circles to see what people were playing. I came up with a cool list of stuff I was interested in checking out and took that to my players for them to check out and vote on what we would try playing next. Here’s what I offered to them, and what they chose:
And finally…
It was no surprise that after our stress-inducing Alien RPG Halloween one-shot, the group was looking for something more… pastoral. They chose Mausritter.
If you haven’t heard of this game before, Mausritter is a rules-lite, old-school style RPG that puts the players in the roles of brave little mice. Armed with sewing needles, fish hooks and spools of thread, these courageous yet diminutive rodent heroes strike out to find food and adventure!
Designed by Losing Games and based on the Into the Odd system, Mausritter is available in a beautiful hardcopy box with lots of tactile tokens and character sheets (currently sold out) or as a digital pay-what-you-want download. If you do nothing else today, go pay $0 for that 48-page PDF and devour its beautiful design. I had scarcely read the first ten pages before I was inspired by the setting and character-building rules to come up with all sorts of scenarios my mice might stumble into.
Mausritter requires rulings over rules and is potentially quite deadly. The author indicates that your players should be prepared to lose their mice and roll up another quite quickly. It emphasizes getting back to the action as fast as possible. If you’re coming from a crunchier system, it may be a bit of an adjustment to realize that your little mice need to avoid combat, think on their feet and use the environment to their advantage.
I was so inspired by Mausritter, that I immediately began writing and designing a one-page adventure zine using the Mausritter setting and rules. You’ll find a .zip attachment on this Patreon blog post that includes Rotmound. I hope you like it and try it out with your group.
