Review: Mausritter Boxed Set

The Mausritter Boxed Set, still available at Games Omnivorous

Mausritter isn’t the first “sword-and-whiskers” TTRPG, but it approaches it with solid OSR rules and robust tools for GMs. My introduction to the genre was Mouse Guard, but not the RPG. I picked up Book 2, “Winter 1152”, while killing time in a bookstore. To this day, the ominous presence of and climatic confrontation with the owl in that issue is my goal for a dragon encounter in a traditional fantasy RPG. I was hooked and flew through the rest of Mouse Guard, in no particular order. But this isn’t a review of Mouse Guard, it’s about the first sword-and-whiskers TTRPG that made me immediately begin planning my own campaign: MAUSRITTER.

Mausritter is a roll-under system with 3 stats (STR, DEX, WIL), largely derived from Into the Odd, familiar to those who enjoy fast, compelling games. Character generation is quick and heavy on random-generation (a big point in its favor for me, but your preference may vary). Two highlights of play that distinguish Mausritter from its OSR forebear is its arts & craft inventory system and magic system, inspired by Last Gasp Grimoire and Goblin Punch, respectively. The inventory system is the bit of mechanical eye candy that makes me most curious to try it. The tangibility of managing items in physical slots turns encumbrance into a type of minigame that may entice (or at least appease) players who roll their eyes when I say that inventory bookkeeping is fun, actually. It is an especially neat way to integrate conditions like Exhausted or Hungry, each of which take up a slot. And if players want to share gear, they literally hand an item across the table and the other player adds it to their character’s inventory. This has a lot of potential. But as much as I like this way of tracking inventory, I am worried that it may have some snags outside the Platonic ideal world of reading RPGs. Is it burdensome for an ongoing campaign for players to keep up with their character sheet and all their little knicks and knacks? Will the minigame be as fun for the players as it is in my head? However, Mausritter is an ideal game to experiment with such an inventory system because the inventory art serves as world-building. From the inventory on their sheet, the players will know that mice use thimbles as helmets, buttons as shields and d20s as maces. The inventory system puts that art upfront at the gaming table instead of hidden in a rulebook only the GM consults.

The physical rulebook is cute, befitting the tiny, furry characters. Opening the front cover feels like entering the hidden world of mice behind the drywall.

The gamemaster resources is where Mausritter really shines. It has plenty of random tables to assist a GM in creating a hexcrawl full of adventure and hijinks. Random tables are one of the best ways to communicate implied setting. If the inhabitants of a settlement have a 1-in-20 chance of being "Lab escapees, naive about the world”, it tells me just as much as a chunk of text about how nearby humans perform research on mice. Mausritter has faction rules that help in making the setting feel alive and are similar to fronts in Dungeon World but with more concrete guidelines for when to advance a faction’s progress toward its goals. One of the most inspiring tools in this toolbox is Mausritter’s bestiary. Each of the creatures is packed with inspiring details that makes each stand out—Cats are cruel despots, owls are powerful sorcerers and frogs are gallant knights. Finally, the Mausritter core book has a starting hexcrawl and settlement, so you can easily pick it up and start a campaign ASAP.

Mausritter’s accessories are high quality, the mark of a good boxed set. The character sheets come in an entire pad of sheets, so you can have 100s of mice without having to print a new sheet. Also, psychologically, having player’s pull off a sheet from a thick pad of sheets implies that the world is deadly, the mice expendable and their lives short. The item do-dads are sturdy, and I hope will stand up to use and abuse from players. The boxed set also comes with a little Mausritter-branded erasable marker for writing on the inventory cards. The GM screen achieves the only purposes I have for a GM screen: the exterior evokes the setting for the player’s and the interior is a cheat sheet for the GM. Tables for randomly generating mouse NPCs, an evergreen GM tool, gets an entire quarter of the GM sheet real estate. Even once I’ve memorized the rules for overland travel, it’s always nice to have a random table of names.

Honey in the Rafters is a location-based module that is more toolbox than adventure. And I prefer that. I don’t need an adventure with beginnings, middles and ends, so popular with games like 5e D&D—my players and I supply those things. This, instead, is a collection of factions, encounters and locations. It can be plopped into any Mausritter adventure. In fact, it is already slotted into the example hexcrawl in Mausritter’s main rulebook. Especially neat is the custom spells and items in this module. I absolutely know that at least one of my players will be replacing their sword with a lollipop as soon as they find one.

A great TTRPG product inspires you, and Mausritter’s boxed set has inspired me to start a campaign. My wheels have already begun to turn, and I’ve decided to set it on the campus of my alma mater. All of my players either attended the same school or lived in the surrounding college town for a number of years, so we are familiar with the environment (from a human perspective). What I would do is draw a simple hexmap of the portion of campus (and adjacent downtown area), and then the players, and I would start placing landmarks on the map from the perspective of mice. Where are the mice settlements and the cat lairs?

Once, when I was in the library late at night studying with some friends, a mouse scampered by us. The quiet library immediately exploded into action. After an hour of a handful of us chasing the poor mouse around the three stories of library, someone finally caught it in a cardboard box lid. We decided to set it free outside. No sooner was the mouse freed than a hawk swooped down and spirited the mouse away. This story, combined with Mausritter’s implied setting, was the germ of my setting idea: imagine the Hobbit, but instead of dwarves journeying to a mountain to reclaim a treasure guarded by a dragon, it’s mice journeying to a library to reclaim a treasure guarded by a hawk. Am I just inadvertently feeding more mice to a ravenous hawk? That’s up to the players.