After School Revival

Mausritter play report

On Tuesday nights I run Mausritter for 2 hours. We've been playing The Estate and having a great time with it.

In our last session - which due to Circumstances was a month ago - the group found this magic item:

They decided that in our next session they wanted to go ghost hunting with it, which seems entirely reasonable.

Smash cut to a month later and I haven't prepped anything because I forgot, and I can't see anything in the Estate collection that screams "ghost hunt". But I've been writing my megadungeon for Dungeon23 and it's got some undead stuff in it, and I thought it would be pretty easy to reskin it as a dungeon for mice. I'd written 16 rooms and had a map of a further section of the dungeon that I had vague ideas for, and I figured that was more space than the group could cover in 2 hours, so I decided to run it and see how it went.

Here's a quick play report of the session.

I placed the dungeon in the base of the fountain on hex 6 of the Estate map, which isn't keyed for one of the adventures in the box. After asking around and gathering rumours they learned two things:

At the end of the last session the season changed to winter. I had one of the players roll for weather and got Bitter, cold. This is one of the extreme weather conditions that calls for a Save when travelling outside, imposing an Exhausted condition on mice who fail it. I let them know that the temperature had plummeted to dangerous levels, and that the fountain was frozen solid.

Before they set out I asked them if there were any preparations they wanted to make. The Ghost Amulet had been stored in the bank and wasn't in anybody's inventory, so I thought a prompt to look over what they had might be useful. They took on a couple of hirelings - a Scholar named Jerry and Local Guide named Clive - and withdrew some funds from the Mrs Frisby Memorial Fund to buy new armour and a sword for Lily Black.

Nobody thought to take the Ghost Amulet. I chose not to point this out to them, though I did ask several times "any more preparations you want to make or equipment you want to make sure you have?"

They set out across the courtyard to the fountain. Nobody had bought gear for the cold weather, so they all rolled Saves. Whipskiffle Tipple and Big Mama both failed and took Exhausted conditions, as did the two hirelings. I rolled for encounters as they crossed the courtyard but got nothing.

The entrance to the dungeon was a small mousehole at the base of the fountain, icy stairs plunging down into darkness. I got a marching order and Big Mama led the way, taking no precautions as she strode down the slick stairs. One failed DEX save later she'd taken a little damage and marked usage on her torch from the fall.

The group found themselves in a chamber with a locked door and an old tapestry on the wall depicting a cat wrapped in vines, feasting on the bodies of a thousand mice. Lily Black noticed that a cold breeze was coming from behind the tapestry and upon looking discovered a section of the wall that had been knocked through into an adjoining room.

In the next room they found another door. Big Mama decided to kick it down. Mausritter has you roll on an encounter table every 3 Turns and this was Turn 2, but kicking in a door noisily should always carry some risk. I checked for encounters, rolling a 1 on 1d6, and so I rolled on my table to see what happened. I got this result:

A bear is obviously far too big for a Mausritter game so I reskinned it as a huge rat. With encounter distance rolled I placed the bear coming around the corner, and a poor reaction roll indicated it was going to be hostile.

The group decided to take the fight to it and won initiative. They immediately asked what sort of weapons were studded in the back of the rat. We've been playing for a while and the group haven't found much in the way of interesting items, so I decided that alongside lots of mundane blades and spears there would be 1d6 magic swords in the thing. I rolled a 2 and then chose randomly from the magic swords in the back of the Mausritter core book, coming up with this:

Wrought iron.
While wielded: You roll critical damage Saves with Advantage

Rusty nail
Critical damage: Give a Frightened Condition

Whipskiffle Tipple swung for the rusty nail with their warhammer, driving it through the rat's skull and killing it instantly. The group took the wrought iron sword but left the rusty nail, not realising it was a magic weapon.

Faced with the choice of several directions, the group headed for the nearest door and entered a room with a large iron door with rusted hinges and the paws of stone statues emerging from the walls. They ignored the statues, showing more interest in the runes carved on the door. Jerry the Scholar informed them (after a successful WIL test) that these were ancient religious writings of some kind that he couldn't properly decipher.

Whipskiffle Tipple had some grease in their inventory from a prior adventure, so they used it to lubricate the rusted hinges and get the door open. Inside they found a stone well capped with a silver half crown, black slime oozing out from between the coin and the bricks.

Uncapping the well they were treated to a rush of cold air. Their light wouldn't reach to the bottom of the shaft but they could hear running water. After a brief conversation about going down it - and realising they had no rope - they decided to leave the coin behind (being a four-inventory-slot item) and press on. (I was pretty happy with this decision, because the well shaft leads down to the 3rd level of the dungeon and I haven't written anything there yet.)

Time spent in this room took us on to Turn 3 and so I rolled encounters. My initial roll was a 6 again - the bear/rat that they'd already killed - but my second roll turned up this result:

This had the really nice effect of injecting some tension into the session. They didn't know if this was the ghosts there were looking for or someone else in the dungeon, and they didn't know whether it meant somebody (or something) was headed towards them. They decided to press on deeper into the dungeon with some haste. (Rolling a second 6 confirmed what I already knew, which is that the encounter tables for each floor of this dungeon need to be bigger.)

Coming to a junction with lots of possible directions they chose to head back to the west, entering a room mostly empty except for an iron hook protruding from the wall next to another door opposite the one they entered through. After playing around with it they discovered that pulling it caused the doors in this room to lock, and a secret door in a passage to the west to open. There was some discussion about whether they wanted to explore it and how to do it without splitting the party, and they ultimately decided to leave Clive the Local Guide behind in the room with the hoop. They agreed on a signal for their return so that he could let them back into the room, and they headed south through the secret door.

This led into a section that I haven't written yet. I had told myself that I would simply not put passages to these sections in the dungeon during play so that this couldn't happen, but a) I really like that secret door puzzle and b) I'd already mapped this area and had a few ideas for what it might contain, so I decided I could wing it. This also marked an hour of play, so I called for a quick break that I could use to brainstorm some ideas.

In the first room they found a trio of statues of mice in robes, one with their paws outstretched, and a door leading to the south. Whipskiffle Tipple placed some rations in the paws and they smouldered and turned to ash. (I decided at this point that this offering would improve the reaction roll of the creature I'd placed in the final room of this section of the dungeon, a decision I didn't know I was going to make until I made it.) Another reaction roll provided "a gust of wind from deeper in the dungeon", which occurred immediately after making the offering and seemed to be caused by it. This was a really nice confluence of events that I wouldn't have thought of myself, and I had the wind billow into the room from beyond the southern door.

They pressed on to the south, finding exposed wooden coffins that had swollen and burst, soaking the ground with grave juices. They didn't disturb the remains in any way, so the skeletal mice stayed dormant as they moved through the room toward the next chamber. Finding a long passgeway, Whipskiffle made a loud moaning noise like a ghost and heard it echo back to the group, magnified and amplified somehow.

At the end of the passage they found an old chapel bisected by an arched walkway between two rooms accessed by different paths through the dungeon. This was clearly an old chapel, with crumbling statues and mosaics on the walls in place of stained glass windows.

Beyond the arches was an altar and a coffin statue, cold mists billowing up out of it. The party approached cautiously at first, until Whipskiffle howled again. The ghost in the coffin rose up out of its casket, calling back at Whipskiffle in an attempt to communicate. A poor reaction roll gave a result of Hostile, which I modified to Unfriendly after the offering. This was the moment where the group realised they had forgotten to bring the ghost amulet. The combination of this and them already being spooked meant that they took the ghost's actions as aggression and attacked it, assuming they were defending themselves. Jerry the Scholar immediately failed a morale test and fled, and combat began.

The combat ended when Whipskiffle took hold of the ghost's bones inside the casket and destroyed them. The party, grievously wounded, looted what they could find and fled back through the dungeon. Since the session was coming to an end at this point, and due to the fact that this might be our last game for a while, I didn't check for encounters and they managed to escape the dungeon and bank their XP. They never found any lost children, but now the megadungeon is part of the setting and they can go back to it whenever they want.

This dungeon obviously hasn't been written with Mausritter in mind but it was really nice to get to actually run it so early into the process of writing it. It's given me a good idea of what's working in it so far, and it's helped focus my ideas for this first level in the direction of ghosts and the undead (which were already partially present but are now going to be more present as I write over the next couple of weeks). I'm looking forward to getting this to the table again, potentially with a different group, and seeing what happens.

#playreports