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| Mausritter by Losing Games, published 2020 |
What is it?
Super streamlined pick-up-and-play Oldschool style RPG where you play little mice on big hexcrawl adventures.
Why play it?
It's compelling. It's easy. It's perfect for a new GM. Mausritter is a sleek system that forces everything into a small-scale and provides a simple oldschool-inspired system that foregrounds action, narrative, and roleplay. Super simple character creation with lots of resources and QoL tools for GMs. Superlative framework to add features and systems to.
Novel features
Cardboard chit inventory system, time system watch/turn/round), GLOG-inspired magic, random generator tables, fantastic rulebook layout
Resolution mechanic
Same as Into The Odd. D20 roll-under. Static saving throws, attacks always hit.
Rules crunch
Very light / Light / Mid / Crunchy (1st print 48 pages, 2nd print 44 pages)
Ease of learning rules
Easy / Okay / Difficult
Deadly?
Safe / Dangerous / Deadly
Character classes?
No. Characters get starting equipment from a random DCC-style Background.
Adventure included?
Yes. Robust random tables are included to generate entire campaigns.
Setting agnostic?
Yes, but players always play the role of mice, so there is an implication of scale.
System compatibility?
Some OSR modules could be adapted to suit Mausritter, but it would be a lot of work. Luckily, there’s a great community with lots of official and fanmade adventures for Mausritter.
Overview
Mausritter is a hack of Into the Odd where players roll up some mice and throw them into a dangerous adventure. Added to it are a compelling inventory system built on positioning cardboard chits on your inventory and tracking usage directly on the chit, as well as a GLOG-inspired magic system. It’s gathered a very strong community since its first Itch.io release in 2019 and it keeps selling through every print run--it’s currently out of print as I write this and I’m just a little bit salty that Exalted Funeral ran out of copies of the second print run box set.
Creating a mouse is simple. Roll 3d6 and drop the lowest for STR, DEX, and WIL, then you get a d6 HP and d6 pips (currency). Your HP and Pips determine your starting gear, and you also generate a disposition, physical detail, and fur color. Time to get into the game!
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| Promotional image of a character sheet from the Mausritter website |
Just like Into The Odd, players only roll when there is a risk involved because all rolls are saving throws. The rulebook also notes that saves should only be the result of a player’s decision or choice, which is a good example of how this oldschool-inspired system is built to accommodate a more modern mindset, being less adversarial. Roll a d20 equal to or beneath your modifier to succeed. After losing all HP (hit protection), characters take damage directly to stats. Where Mausritter’s novelty begins to emerge is in its inventory system, which sets it apart from being merely a hack of Into The Odd.
Taking Inventory
The character sheet includes “slots” where items, depicted on cardboard chits, are equipped. After using an item (or at the end of combat) players roll a d6 usage die and on 4-6 they mark off a usage dot on the chit itself. This gives the experience a fantastically tactile element, which is enhanced by the inclusion of status effects (hungry, injured, etc) that take up inventory slots. Players need to either resolve the condition or drop equipment to make room.
It also means that the boxed set and all the official modules come with a punchboard of cards that gives you a wonderful at-a-glance flavor for the kind of content that’s being explored.
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| Picture of the item pages included in The Estate adventure collection from Games Omnivorous. Yes, that's Nate Treme's art on the green one! |
Timing is Everything
Mausritter has a brilliant system for tracking time. Williams has provided a lovely GM session sheet (pictured below) that will give you a better idea.
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| Mausritter session tracking sheet with a grid for tracking time, character stats, and space for notes |
Each day is broken up into four chunks; the six-hour “watch” is the time it takes to travel 1 hex (a mile) or complete a long rest. During exploration, a “turn” is about 10 minutes, which is the time it takes to explore a room, examine a trap, or engage in a few “rounds” of combat. Every 3 turns the GM rolls for a random encounter (as indicated on the tracking sheet). Every 6 turns, you roll usage dice on your torch or lantern.
This system is elegant and it puts rules to time, which is almost always abstracted and estimated in TTRPGs. Here, time is explicit, which makes it way easier to give the players a sense or urgency. Folding in encounter and usage rules into this system makes it feel logical and natural. It’s the sort of solution that makes you think, but of course! Why hadn’t we thought of this sooner? Bravo to Losing Games.
Making Magic
Like Into The Odd, spells are physical objects that take up space in your inventory. In Mausritter you choose a number of unused dots on the item (from 1-3) to invest, and roll 1d6 for each point. Mark usage for 4-6, and you take d6 WIL damage for every 6 you roll, and potentially suffer the drained condition that gives you disadvantage on future WIL saves.
The 16 spells included in the basic rules are simple and change in power based on how many [DICE] you rolled and the [SUM] of the rolls, GLOG style. The odds are clear, the risk/reward and small numbers involved make the whole affair clean and neat, and the horizon is wide open for custom spells. If your table would rather use a crunchier system instead, you can easily rip this one out and transplant something else. Design like this should be the gold standard for modern RPGs.
Toolbox for the Ages
Beyond the included adventure and hex map, Mausritter offers a very robust set of random tables to create everything you need for a campaign. In just a few pages the book introduces the concept and rules for running a hexcrawl and provides tables to generate interesting points of interest and factions to populate it. The ethos of the game is to create scenarios for the players to interact with, not stories; this encourages the GM to worldbuild and run the game from this perspective. What’s more, there are tables to generate individual rooms of a dungeon and fill them with enemies and loot, which is so cool! The last few pages include tools for generating adventure seeds, seasons, NPCs, and weather.
This is excellent stuff, and in such a tiny rulebook this makes GMing look quite appealing and exciting to anybody who picks it up. The daunting prospect of creating a whole campaign is as easy as rolling a few d6s and d20s. Add to this the incredibly low barrier to entry, and the fact that all these tools are available in digital form for free on the website, no actual dice rolling necessary, and Mausritter makes you want to grab some friends and play a session right now. I think this whole toolbox is a triumph!
Making Magic (again)
Mausritter packs a ton of content into just a few dozen pages, but it does so with such aplomb that I have to call it out. The book is simply gorgeous. The art, fonts, and layout work together to create a rulebook that’s a joy to read.
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| Example of page layout in Mausritter |
Subtly, each section and heading is numbered to make the rules easy to navigate. On top of that, the rules are presented in a coherent logical order that you don’t even notice, which I think is actually rare among RPG manuals. I haven’t even had my hands on the second print run, but given that it’s actually a few pages shorter than the first run, I imagine it’s only become more streamlined.
Every page is packed with information but organized to never feel cluttered. Tables are easy to read and scan and they aren’t cramped or split in weird ways. Williams calls out Mothership as an inspiration for the page layouts. It definitely resembles Sean McCoy’s book, but Mothership feels austere and slightly claustrophobic in comparison to Mausritter’s levity.
Mausritter is a labor of love: the layout is wonderful, the art is evocative, and rules are as spare as possible. The fonts, style, and theme present a cohesive and compelling game that is transmitted to the reader instantly. Even still, there is still such a wealth of tools in this svelte book that it's hard to believe.
I can’t think of a better system for a new game master.
Mausritter brings down the scale and entreats you to build a game that’s down-to-earth and open-ended. The core rules are intuitive and simple, but the game has personality and nuance enough that it can’t be called spare or incomplete. It’s a rules-light system that is attractive, welcoming, and it throws the doors open to add your own systems, content, and houserules. I think that if you wanted to not play as mice, you could very easily scale things up and do so. But why not try it out? Mausritter offers lots of action and roleplay in a system that steps aside to allow you to get right to the meat of the adventure.
Worth Stealing
Can I just put “everything”? The time tracking system is genius and could be dropped into virtually any system. The inventory system using chits is very slick, and so is the idea of conditions taking up inventory space. Naturally, usage dice is a great system that’s been adopted by lots of different systems. The GLOG-style magic is a slight upgrade to Into The Odd’s system as well. The fantastic complement of random tables could be pretty easily adapted for other games. Mausritter is a shining example of great layout and game design as well and I think it would serve as an exceptional template for designing appealing books.