# Mausritter tags: #game/rpg/mausritter ![[Mausritter (cover).jpg|600]] **Mausritter** is Isaac Williams's, of Losing Games, rules-light fantasy RPG where you take up the sword and don the whiskers of a brave mouse adventurer. It is frankly a better *Mice and Mystics*-flavored fantasy adventure game than the board game that name-drops its way into the acknowledgements, and it does it by being built on the chassis of **Into the Odd**: player-authored tools, inventory-as-resource, GM-judged rulings, and death around every corner. It hoisted an ENNIE Gold for Best Family Game in 2021, which is only mildly ironic given how gleefully it will feed your whole party to a cat and tell you to roll up a new mouse by sundown. ## Setting The mouse kingdoms survive on the edge of collapse. A hard winter or a heartless cat could end them all, and the settled mice huddle in their burrows, walls, and hollow trees, scraping and saving for a tenuous existence. You are not those mice. By choice or necessity you are an adventurer, abandoning the warmth of the settlements to delve into the dark and dangerous places other mice won't touch. The world is old, and great empires of mouse and beast have risen and fallen, leaving their treasure — and their dangers — behind for anyone brave (or broke) enough to go looking. It's a small-heroes-in-a-huge-world fantasy in the storybook tradition of **Mouse Guard** and *Brambly Hedge*, but with the survival pressure of a frontier hexcrawl. Currency is pips; travel is measured in hexes and Watches; the big things out there — cats, owls, humans — are properly terrifying, which is why 20+ mice band together into warbands to face them. There is magic, in the form of living spirits trapped in runes carved on obsidian tablets, and there are factions and mouse settlements and, in the included example of the Earldom of Ek, a whole sandbox to poke. ## Core Mechanics The engine is classic old-school, inherited with an Into-the-Odd shrug. ### Character Creation Your mouse has three attribute scores — **STR** (strength and resilience), **DEX** (speed and agility), and **WIL** (will and charisma). Roll 3d6 for each in order and keep the two highest dice, for a value between 2 and 12; then you may swap any two. Roll d6 for Hit Protection (HP) and d6 for starting pips, then cross-reference HP with pips on the Background table to find out what your mouse was before the adventuring life — the kitchen forager, the cage dweller, the hedge witch, the tin miner. From there, pick starting gear and a name. ### Inventory, Conditions, and Usage Nearly everything is a matter of inventory. Your mouse has slots across four zones — main paw, off paw, body, and pack — and most items (and Conditions!) take up a slot. Conditions are negative effects placed into inventory: *Exhausted*, *Hungry*, *Injured* — each with a clear requirement to remove it (a meal, a short rest, a full rest). Items have **usage dots** (usually three); when all are marked, the item is depleted or destroyed. Weapons and armour mark usage after a fight, torches every six Turns, rations after a meal. Carry more than you have slots for and you're encumbered, can't run, and roll saves with Disadvantage. ### Saves and Combat When a mouse does something risky where failure has consequences, the GM calls for a save against STR, DEX, or WIL: roll a d20 and succeed if the result is **less than or equal** to the attribute. Advantage and Disadvantage roll 2d20 and take the lower or higher result. Combat is fast and deadly. If you attack unsuspecting foes, you go first; otherwise make a DEX save to act before your opponents. **Attacks always hit** — you just roll your weapon's die and apply the damage minus armour. Damage first strips Hit Protection, then bites into STR; after taking STR damage a mouse must make a STR save or take critical damage, gain the Injured Condition, and be incapacitated — left untended for six Turns, they die. Zero STR kills. Mice are fragile and the game knows it: *fight dirty, run, die, roll a new mouse* is printed right there in the best practices. ### Rest, Advancement, and Money Healing comes in three rests: a **short rest** (1 Turn, d6+1 HP), a **long rest** (1 Watch, full HP plus d6 to an attribute), and a **full rest** (a week in safety, clears most conditions). XP is earned by hauling treasure back to a mouse settlement — 1 XP per pip brought safely home — and by spending pips selflessly on community improvements. Mouse-level advancement means rolling d20s against your attributes to creep scores up and rolling new Hit Dice for more HP. ### Magic and Hirelings Spells are spirits bound in obsidian tablets. Casting means holding the tablet and reading it aloud, choosing the power to cast with, then rolling a number of d6; each 4-6 marks usage, and your effect depends on the dice invested and their sum. Roll any 6s and the caster takes WIL damage and risks the Drained Condition — magic is a bargain with something that bites back. Spells recharge by odd little rituals (burning in a fire, burying by a riverbank), and the spell list — Fireball, Heal, Magic Missile, Catnip, Grow — is exactly the kind of thing that turns a cat into a plot device. You can also spend pips to hire torchbearers, scholars, and knights, or form a 20-mouse warband to throw at beast-scale problems, which is very much a metaphor for the hobby's oldest habit: hire enough help and your problems become somebody else's. ## Editions - **Rules v1.0 (2020)** — the original PDF release. - **Rules v2.0/v2.1 (2020)** — expansions and cleanup during the first print run. - **Rules v2.2 (2021)** — the print/box-set edition line. - **Rules v2.3 (2022)** — the current PDF revision, and the edition on hand. - *In the library:* Rules v2.3, plus a "spreads" layout of the same rules, Character Sheets, GM Session Sheet, and Item Condition Sheets. - **Boxed Set** — print edition published by Exalted Funeral in collaboration with Games Omnivorous. - **The Estate and The Lich** — the two headline adventure collections, separate from the core rules. ## References - [Mausritter - Official site - mausritter.com](https://mausritter.com/) - [Mausritter by Losing Games - itch.io](https://losing-games.itch.io/mausritter) - [Mausritter System Reference Document - mausritter.com/srd](https://mausritter.com/srd) - [Mausritter - Isaac Williams](https://isaacwilliams.net/) - [Mausritter Boxed Set print - Exalted Funeral](https://www.exaltedfuneral.com/products/mausritter-boxed-set)