‘Let’s do a drawing,’ says Ada, my three-and-a-half-year-old daughter.
I ask her what she wants to draw.
‘An adventure,’ she says.
She gets out various bits of coloured paper and pens and starts drawing shapes on each. This isn’t the first time this has happened. I take a couple of scraps of paper and fold them in half, drawing us a couple of mice on them. We’re going to play the ‘fighting mouse game’ and Ada will be running it.
Mausritter is the most successful game in my house. Not only can I run games for my family, but the fact my daughter can run a version of her own invention makes it the thing we play the most here. In her homebrew version there might be less dice, less ‘structure’, but she does stick a silver star onto our paper mice at the end – something which might be the best levelling up feeling I’ve ever had.
We’d started off playing Honey In The Rafters, the introductory adventure in Mausritter’s boxed set about sugar cultist mice and a cursed bee hive. We swapped out one of the magic items (a potent boiled sweet giving you advantage on rolls) for Haribo sweets, which she put directly into her inventory without any explanation required from us. Until it was time to use it of course.
Now, this story isn’t a particularly special one, in fact it’s surprisingly common amongst those in the Mausritter community. This is a game that, despite its often frankly brutal nature, easily lends itself to being played both with children and amongst families. Moreover it’s a game with a hugely supportive community online, just last year the Mausritter Library surpassed 500 adventures, zines, bestiaries and myriad other useful sword-and-whiskers tools.
The curator of that library is Matthew Morris, also known as ManaDawn Tabletop Games, who also has contributed over 70 of his own Mausritter modules to its virtual shelves. Like all good OSR stories, Morris’s Maus-sized adventures began with a murder. After he had created a Brian Jaques’ Redwall style campaign for his Dungeons & Dragons group, a winged and clawed epiphany landed in front of Morris.
‘I was looking out my back window and I saw a field mouse get into a scuffle with a Bluejay. I watched this Bluejay violently murder a mouse,’ says Morris, ‘and I was like, “that was intense.” And then it hit me. There’s a game where you’re not playing in a medieval world of mice where humans don’t exist, you play a real size mouse in a human world that is brutal and violent.’
This was the start for Morris’ foray into the world of Mausritter -and ours too- as we discover how the game came into being and what makes it such a well-loved game by its community.
