Retrospective: Mausritter Three-Parter
After Action Report
I just finished a three-session run of Mausritter. Let's reflect.
First off, it was from the beginning planned as around three sessions worth of gaming. A couple players stated interest in trying Mausritter and I recruited another two to end up with five. We did a quick and dirty session zero that's barely worth the name, roughly detailing tone and atmosphere and scope. We ended up with the titular mice existing during sorta post-humanity, with human artefacts to be found and mouse-sized opponents to be fought. Because of the limited scope we decided on per-session scheduling, which I avoid for long term games.
For planning, I made a conscious decision to return to mostly analogue prep: One, small, scrappy notebook for train-of-thought brainstorming, sketching rough ideas etc, and a 'proper' notebook for organised prepwork. The decision came by way of hoping to gain better focus on the task at hand, away from everlurking distractions of the internet, to easier get into a creative mindset when needed. To get shit done.
We quickly rolled mice during the first session. I printed out a whole bunch of item and some spells cards fitting Mausritter's slot-based inventory system and let players pick from the pile, going around the table. For spells they had to roll, and only two players picked one spell each. I find this to be a nice middle ground for players new to the whole OSR/minimalistic character building approach, giving them at least some choice in terms of starting gear, without bogging everything down with an early shopping scene.
I meant to lay out the Mausritter 'best practices' but skipped that in the heat of the moment, which in hindsight wasn't a great call. It wasn't bad either, just … would've smoothed the transition for some players, you know?
Anyway, Prince Parsnip was kidnapped by rats. The player mice were tasked with his return. The first session included character gen and approaching the rats' hideout, a human-built compound in the middle of a lake. The characters were presented with the option to talk to a scout still at the ambush site and track the prince from there, or talk to a shady seeming contact, which the players quickly deduced was a rat. At that point, he was sorta neutral, but over time I rolled with the players heaping prejudice after prejudice onto that poor rat wizard.
A quick investigation of the ambush site revealed tracks leading lakewards, the prince's magic LEGO sabre and a mouse scout who was press ganged into service by appealing to his sense of loyalty. At this point I decided to seed more cool and especially flavourful magic items. I put some out on the upper floor of the rats' place, but the players didn't investigate the right places. I think I should've scattered more stuff and instead of risking them finding nigh on nothing, have them find stuff early on (it's a mini-adventure after all, no need to hold back!) and, if needed, dial back the loot later on.
At the lake, a cormorant was shooed off by mimicking a (bigger) bird of prey and a boat was fashioned from a water lily. A carp nearly chomped on the mouse severing the lily's root, but got off with a spear embedded in its forehead, creating a new Moby Dickesque myth. At the end of the first session, the mice arrived at a huge, rectangular slab of glittering, transparent crystal in the middle of the lake—a sorta brutalist concrete-and-glass front of some kind of lab, built into a hillside. We called it when the mice spied a bunch of rats disappearing in the depths of the compound.
Second session, they were presented with three different, equally waterlogged rooms. The lobby into which the rats went, past a broken sliding door, a cluttered room with no obvious egress and a third, accessible through a broken glass front. A smart suggestion later, the roof's gutter pipes were ascended, two rats patrolling the gutter despatched and a skylight located. Mice Impossible-style a plant fibre rope was descended, the press ganged scout left behind to guard the rope. Sticking to the dry highground, the mice dodged a snake acting as inadvertent guard dog for the rats and pushed deeper into the compound.
They found a trash littered room, like a cathedral to them, had to dodge a rat patrol carrying something into said room, using milk (one of the random starting items) to bribe a rat assistant into ignoring their presence and started to sneakily explore the room. A rat wizard—the same one they didn't contact early on, but I don't think anyone made that connection—was concocting some vile brew in the far corners, and the players managed to avoid him for the longest time. A (cargo) lift led to a lower level.
Struggling with time constraints I made up a mean cliffhanger with the wizard discovered the mice scurrying around in his trash, threateningly grabbing a magic rune from his belt!
During the third session, the wiz then made skeletal (mice) limbs erup from the trash, attempting to pull under one of the mice, but one player used their single-use Command spell rune to tell the rat 'to go for a swim'. That created enough confusion for them to overwhelm him before his ringing the alarm could amount to anything, and in the end both him and his assistant were bound and gagged and hidden under some trash.
Following the lift deeper into the earth, a squeaky clean room was discovered, hosting a bunch of white plastic ID cards on paperclips used as miniature whiteboards by someone. The same glyphs printed on one side—along with an image of some ungodly creature and a barcode—were present in the handwritten backside, indicating the rats had deciphered human language. 'They're less stupid than we thought!'
A roomba from the encounter table turned out to be pivotal to navigating the lower floor when I decided to just run with the idea of the roomba opening the doors, instead of the rats having gnawed a hole into them or something. A bunch of very chilled—hypothermic, that is—prisoners got released, and the players baited the guard rats out of the lab where the prince was being held in a cage contraption. The smock clad science rats stayed behind, cowering, and the more martially minded ones were doused in oil and roasted to a crisp in quick succession.
Running out of time again, I compacted the final scene, handwaving the prince's release and everyone's return home, swiftly transitioning into a kind of credits narration as the adventure's end.
Hindsight Time
I am unhappy with how the final moments were shoved into too little time, but I don't think it was enough content to sensibly extend the entire thing into a fourth session. At the same time, I am loath to disrespect the players' work-life-balance and agreed-upon time frames by going over time, which leaves me in a bit of a pickle… I don't have a good solution to this, except maybe become clairvoyant.
What I am very satisfied with is both the size based horror, evident especially early on when faced with bigger wildlife, but also the balance of humourous and tense moments. My games tend to be chock-full of silly jokes and tangents, but we managed to nicely swing back from those to paying attention to e.g. a room description or a horrific moment, i.e. finding a bunch of chilled-to-death experimented-on rodents. Certainly this is down to the players being mostly great, but I also want to credit my own ability to command the table when needed.
At times, some players struggled with decision paralysis, despite me asking specific questions, repeating descriptions and prompts, rotating the spotlight away from them for a moment to give them time to consider the options. I think this is where skipping the Mausritter best practices hurt the most, because a player asking questions is, in my experience, the easiest way to come to a decision.
Personally, I struggled quite a bit with describing certain human elements, building parts, pieces of tech etc. from a mouse's perspective. I should have prepared that better, coming up with good lines for certain elements ahead of time.
I had a very cool map meant to be discovered as a floor plan or fire escape plan or something, but it never was discovered. I labelled it in Google translated Irish to represent the mice being unable to read it, while still allowing to see similarly labelled rooms, general layout, doors etc. Because I spent decidedly too much time on it, let me share it with you at least:
