Brevity and its Discontents

A review of Mausritter and "The Ember Tree"

I’ve recently started a Mausritter campaign, with the intent of playing through The Estate boxed set. I’ve run some Mausritter before, including some of The Estate, for my family, until my nephew decided he didn’t like role playing games :(. But now I’m back at it with my adult friends, part of my overall desire to actually play some of the modules I’ve collected over the years.

I have a high opinion of Mausritter. I essentially agree with Playful Void:

Mausritter (plus the Estate) is the best game I’ve ever bought. It might be the best game I’ve ever played (that’s a complex beast). It is nigh perfect. It is a better fantasy adventure game in the style of D&D than any game that has ever been called D&D, and any game that has attempted to better it before.

The conceit of Mausritter, in which one plays as a mouse, perfectly communicates the danger PCs face in a dnd-esque world without having to be grimdark; in fact, tonally it’s quite the opposite of grimdark, even though it can be a very punishing game. It’s wonderfully tactile, encouraging resource management in a way that feels intuitive and fun (though, a con might be all the bits and pieces one has to collect and save after a game session). Finally, it’s the best expression for me of the Into the Odd ruleset because of the integrated ways it deals with inventory, equipment and spell usage, and conditions (where conditions take up an inventory slot). I also like the idea of warbands, which naturally encourage mice PCs to find pips to pay an army if they want to successfully take on…a cat, or something similar in danger (this alone is a great idea to port into a ‘normal’ fantasy dnd game: dragons require armies to defeat).

Losing Games - Mausritter

It’s also a very brief game. It packs into 42 pages really everything you need to run an OSR campaign—as in, not just run a one shot, but to create and stock a little world with settlements, dungeons, and factions. To accomplish this, it is extremely successful at being succinct. Player advice + GM advice + all the rules for combat and exploration take up basically two two-page spreads, so four A5 pages. I know some people hate the minimalist trend in OSR games, or find this to be too lightweight, but looking at the rules it really gives you all you need to resolve procedural adventuring (though as a caveat, I’m not sure how all this lands with a new GM, or someone new to the OSR). There are undoubtedly some gaps: for example, the one area where I wish there was something more formalized would be zones for movement and encounter distance).

Also brief but perfectly succinct are its GM tools, which take GMs through creating a small hex map, with settlements, adventure locations, NPCs, and factions—with examples. It doesn’t seem unrealistic, either, that your mice will be traversing hexes, engaging with dangerous factions that slowly pursue their goals, improving their community, building strongholds, and recruiting armies—i.e. mid-high level domain play—and there are (brief) rules for all of it!

Is brevity always a virtue?

This brings me to the adventure scenario that my group choose to pursue for our first session, “The Ember Tree” by L.F. OSR. All of the trifold adventures from The Estate boxed set are beautiful, well-designed, and evocative. I read all of them in preparation for running the campaign—an easy thing to do when they are so short—but didn’t, like, memorize them. This proved to be ok though, because the way the module was written I could quickly scan individual locations or even all of the locations to know what to present to players and answer questions that players had. It was very helpful to have, instead of sprawling pages of notes, just my mausritter GM screen, the trifold module, and the turn tracker sheet in front of me (especially when item and condition cards were flying all over the place).

The one main rules adjustment that I made was making it possible for the players to speak to the creatures of the modules, caterpillars and termites, because social interaction is fun. But this is not a play report; play reports are boring. Suffice to say, the players went through a bunch of the locations, got some treasure, saved the caterpillar prince, and one mouse died.

Losing Games - “The Ember Tree”

Rather, I’d like to note some of the ways that brevity proved frustrating to running the module at times. I should emphasize that it’s not a bad module, we had fun, and I was able to figure things out on the fly, but there were some cases where the module was maybe too compact and the writing too succinct, which is probably more a function of the trifold form of these adventures then the fault of the author.

• Interactivity: locations were easy to scan…but on the other hand, there was sometimes not much of interest in them due to the compact design. For example, there is a location with a “hot sap river,” with the only challenge being that the mice have to cross the river, and with that challenge most likely breaking down to a dex save at some point, or the PCs take some damage. Even if it doesn’t come down to a roll, it’s the most interesting challenge. There are also d6 “molten silverfish” playing in the sap, a sort of magical creature I guess that has no listed motivation to interact with the PCs at all. Some more ideas would be helpful here to provide more interactivity and make these locations feel more full.

• Telegraphing: there were several potentially valuable items that show up in the environment, but no text guiding the GM on how to describe these items. For example, there are something called Emberleaves, that are valuable to a specific NPC in another hex. But how do I describe these leaves as different from other leaves; it seems like either the GM is saying a mundane thing—there are leaves on a tree—or has to point a big flashing sign at one particular facet of the environment so that the players pick up on it. It didn’t seem to reward player creativity in exploring the environment.

• Combat: there is a lightning elemental that my players encountered that has “d4 Charge, then next round, d12 Shockwave (damages DEX, area effect).” Is that a charge as in “charging up” or a charge as in running at someone? What is the area effect in a game without spatial distances, even zones? After the charge+shockwave, is the lightning creature expended, or do they still exist? The lighting elemental “wants to be freed,” but in one of the rooms they are freed by the players taking the item in which they were imprisoned, so why are they attacking? I figured it out, but there was a lot of questions that needed to be answered in a short period of time.

• The magi-metaphysics of the world: different authors have different ideas about what this mouse-fantasy world is all about. Some have a quite down to earth conception of what your mouse adventures are; it might be about mouse using a spool of thread to climb some rafters while avoiding bees. In this module, L.F. OSR has created a more high-magic setting. The entire premise is that lightning struck this tree, but that some of the energy was trapped in a gem, and now this gem “radiates energy” turning the tree into an inferno of heat and lightning. In fantasy settings, this kind of thing will always raise questions about how the magic works in consistent ways, but this is not possible given the brevity of the module.

  Like, seemingly the gem itself is not hot, or maybe it is? And the tree is on fire, but also not burning down? And wouldn’t the humans do something about a tree in their yard belching black smoke? And how can any creatures even exist inside this burning tree? For that matter, where are these termites coming from? Again, not unanswerable questions, but at odds with situation of a GM like myself who pulls this module from a box and tries to run it with little prep.

In sum, the design aesthetic of Mausritter is all about brevity, and in the main rulebook, that is leveraged to more or less great effect. Issac Williams (the author of the game) manages to succinctly include all the rules for adventure gaming in just a few, compact, two page spreads.

The brevity in module design makes them both easy and difficult to run. Easy, because one can quickly scan and find all the important information during a hectic game session. This is not a game that is going to ask the GM to prep a huge binder or an Obsidian vault to be ready for their games.

On the other hand, the brevity includes a lot of unexplained or incomplete ideas. I think the incompleteness doesn’t bother me at all in the ruleset, because if I’m making my own adventures I have an intuitive sense of how something is supposed to work. I could write a brief one line item description, but have a memory in my head of what that’s supposed to look like at the table. However it is more of a problem running someone else’s module, when they don’t have the space to elaborate and explain all their ideas, or even the space to include more ideas to make a really full, interactive adventure.

Skimming all of the trifold adventures in The Estate, I don’t think this problem is unique to the contribution by L.F. OSR, and I’m sure I’ll have to think on my feet in different ways in running all of them. Nevertheless, as I said above, they are beautiful and evocative, so I still can’t wait for my next session.