Maus Haus: Playing Mausritter with my kids

Playing role-playing games with my kids has taught me, more than anything else, how to be a better GM. It is incredibly fun when it goes well.  But it can be hard when it does not go well, and so I thought today I would talk about why I am playing Mausritter with my elementary school-age kids.  I also want to lay out why I think Mausritter is a better call for younger kids than something like DnD 5e.  

This post (and its forthcoming follow-up) is inspired by the excellent reflection by Widdershin Wanderings on their experiences teaching Cairn to middle-school kids, and Clayton’s Haus Rules for Mausritter.  But unlike those two posts, I wanted to first reflect on the principles that led me to playing Mausritter, specifically, with my older elementary-age kids.  

Principles of Play

I should begin by saying that I began telling stories together with my kids when they were young.  It’s something my grandfather and mother did with me, and I wanted to pass it on. So I would start a story, and when we got to a part where the hero or heroine makes a choice, I asked them what they wanted to happen next, and we went from there.  Epic and episodic stories ensued over the years, from the Magic Cloud to Little Monkey Girl, from Hank the Dragon to Adventures on the Purple Planet. 

At its heart, telling stories together is the simplest, and original, RPG.  But at some point, once we started playing board games together, I could not wait to pass on my love of more complicated TTRPGs.  I mean, Exploding Kittens was more complicated than some of the RPGs I saw online. 

So when my daughter hit 2nd grade and my son was in kindergarten, I started them on Hero Kids.  Hero Kids is a grid-based d6 system, an incredibly simplified version of DnD that is straightforward and easy, bright and attractive, and came with good GM advice and tons of adventures (from a Bundle of Holding).  It is an excellent, award-winning game marketed for ages 4 to 10, and can easily be mixed with the outstanding d6 game Adventurous for additional options without too much added complexity.  

At first, the kids really got into making their characters, and I thought it was going well.  

But good heavens, Hero Kids was a mistake.  First principle of playing RPGs with kids: match the complexity to their age.  I went from freeform storytelling to grid-based combat with a 5 and 7 year old, and making that transition required constant rules-reminders and immense patience on my part when my kids insisted on grabbing their pieces and zooming it around the map whenever they were bored.  Or scared.  Or had a cool idea.  Or wanted it to go talk with their sibling’s pieces.  Or wanted to protect any of their pets by swapping places. I would like to say I never yelled at my kids for playing RPGs wrong, but I am not a perfect person.  In fact, my evident irritation at them not staying on the grid is what eventually killed that game after a few sessions.

Age is a tricky thing: some kids are emotionally built to sit at a table and follow instructions, and others struggle with complex instructions, reading, or sitting still, or being patient and waiting their turn.  Every kid is different.  Mine were not ready, and honestly I was not ready.

So we went back to storytelling together for a year, and I pondered on what I did wrong.  That’s how I arrived at my second principle of playing RPGs with kids: do it for love of a good story, and if a rule gets in the way, break it.  Flexibility in playing RPGs is something I had struggled with up to that point.  I am a neurodiverse person who memorized much of the AD&D Player’s Handbook and Monster Manual as a kid, and knew 5e like the back of my hand.  But I had placed my reverence for a silly set of system rules over my first responsibility as a dad, being patient and loving with my kids.  I had messed up.  

Fortunately, my kids are wonderful and forgave me, and went on to create to a fantastic, years-long make-believe session with the fantasy paper minis from Rich Burlew, the author of OOTS (which, after a bit, I began to read to them, bleeping out all the bits inappropriate for 8-year old ears).  They would set up our table for weeks at a time, and tell each other about elaborate backstories and create drama for the kobolds and yellow musk creeper and trolls and penanggalan.  Yes, the penanggalan remains a favorite character in their game!

But at night, my search continued for a replacement RPG.  After reading about a lot of systems, I found one that seemed perfect.  It’s called Amazing Tales, and it is incredibly simple, intuitive, and story-first, and comes with wonderful GM advice and a few great pre-made adventures.  Its freeform nature means you can play as anything, and yet fairly resolve any action.  Players pick five things their players are great at, assign dice to each skill (d20 for the thing you are best at, down to d4 for the thing you are only okay at), then try to beat a target difficulty number.  It’s my favorite game to ease adults into RPGs: I once ran my mom through an impromptu Amazing Tales one-shot where she played a magical pigeon.  

But for all I enjoyed reading through and learning from Amazing Tales, I barely played it.  Because when I proposed playing RPGs with my kids again, later, they agreed and then counter-offered.  My daughter wanted to run the game this time, and her system?  Playing with their paper minis, and flipping a coin.  If you are good at something, flip with advantage, and if not, flip with disadvantage.  I learned months later from this post that she is evidently a small John Harper.  

So what did I do?  I followed the second principle: my Amazing Tales rules were going to get in the way of her story, so I dropped them.  Coin-flipping and paper minis it was, and my daughter was a creative and hilarious GM, albeit impatient with our antics (almost like she’s related to me or something).  

Playing with them again taught me one more lesson.  Kids don’t see a big difference between games of make-believe and role-playing games, and playing with pieces for both is just good fun.  I have already written about why I think that is, on a deeper level, but this led me to Principle number three: a great kids game should have lots of room for imagination, scaffolded by fun game pieces.  

Excited by this insight, I went ahead and bought two games with physical pieces (!) that seemed great for kids in elementary school: 

1) the Land of Eem Dungeoneer Adventures kickstarter (arriving in a few months)

2) at PAXU, the Mausritter boxed set (and the Estate adventures, I am a sucker).  

If you are not familiar with Mausritter, the PDF is free and the boxed set comes with wonderful physical inventory pieces (the knapsacks for holding pieces in the Estate boxed set are especially beloved by my kiddos).  

The inventory pieces can be printed out at home, but the cardboard pieces from Exalted Funeral are great.

DnD vs. the N/OSR, for kids

But still, I hesitated to GM for them again, and Mausritter gathered dust on my shelf.  And then last year my kids got invited to play DnD 5e: my daughter in the 4th grade club in her school, and my son with a bunch of his friends and a wonderful teen DM.  I worried my window of us playing simple N/OSR games together was slipping away, as they got busy with their own lives and red-pilled into the DnD-verse.  

Many people will tell you online, based on their own experiences, that kids as young as 8 are ready to play DnD 5e, and that’s right as far as it goes.  But I don’t think modern DnD is right for all kids, for three reasons.  

1. Rules complexity is a limiting in-language that signals ‘I belong’.  Ever since ADnD, the game has been bound around and limited by too many rules, which partly exist in my humble opinion for psychological reasons.  As a nerd, belonging was hard.  But if I memorized a long set of rules and showed system mastery, instantly I belonged to a group.  What’s more, I was ‘cool’ for knowing all the knowledge!  Now as an adult, I do believe rules have their place and I like games with intermediate crunch–but I see two ral downsides of all those rules for kids.  

First, complex rules are both a price of admission and a gate–if you don’t memorize a goodly number of them, you can’t play like a cool kid.  And if you keep going outside the rules, you get asked to stop by impatient peers–which led my daughter to leave her DnD 5e group after a few months.  

Second, following so many rules means wearing an early corset on your developing imagination.  Before you have even explored all the worlds of fantasy, you learn that character concepts have to be molded to fit the rules, and rarely vice versa.  So kids learn to imagine playing a certain way, but not another.  Dad, my wizard can’t wear a sword (JRR Tolkein, what were you thinking?).  Dad, I am going to memorize every single spell in the PHB, and then rules-lawyer you about all the magic we imagine because it’s…fun?

2. The N/OSR is better for imaginative problem-solving.  DnD 5e promotes a culture of play where the answer is not in your imagination, but which skill or item button you press on your character page.  In the N/OSR, the rules are simple and you are weak, so you must be clever.  Dad, I roll Perception (sorry kiddo, you see what you see–do you want to move closer?).  Dad, I attack the giant head-on, because I am strong (kiddo, you should have thought of a way to sneak around, you have 3 HP so he knocks you out and puts you in a sack).  

3. Modern DnD is a black hole of sameness.  Its cultural dominance and ubiquity calcifies fantastical imagination (and yes homebrew and settings can vary, but you are still pushing against the GRAVITY OF SIMILARITY). I could see DnD 5e expanding my kid’s imaginations, but also making them expect all fantasy worlds to line up with the one they were reading in the Monster Manual and Player’s Handbook (although Pokemon and Minecraft help push back a little). Dad trolls always have to be bad, black elves are bad, kobolds are not helpful fae, sorcerers don’t memorize spells, magic missiles always are magical force darts, and dragons are color-coded.    

So I took action, a stealth N/OSR lobbying campaign.  I let them check out my RPG library, which features Dolmenwood and Mausritter (they loved playing with Mausritter’s pieces), and their minds were blown repeatedly that one can play DnD with different rules and cooler options. I also bought both the Land of Eem Dungeoneer Adventures book series for them (they loved it!), and let them know it was a RPG that would be coming to our house soon.  

But after I checked out the Mouse Guard books from the library and we read them at night, Mausritter won the honor of the first game they wanted to try, and Dolmenwood and Land of Eem are scheduled for next year. (My son, the biggest DnD 5e fan, read the entire Dolmenwood Player’s Handbook and was delighted to meet the creator at last PAXU–Gavin gamely asked him for his favorite Dolmenwood spell and was happily surprised when he rattled off three of them).

The goal of our Mouse Knights campaign

So starting about six months ago, we played our first Mausritter game, and we are five sessions in and having a blast.  But we are not exactly playing it rules-as-written, which I will get to in my next post.  Suffice it to say for no that I say a LOT of “yes, and…” to every zany request.  

They wanted to draw their mouse characters and invent equipment–done.  My daughter wanted a pack-rat to carry all eight of her mouse-children around–done, but I capped it at four.  My son wanted to craft crazy inventions with minor powers–done.  My daughter wanted a wand to cast spells with, instead of an obsidian tablet–done, with restrictions.  They asked me to have a DM PC who is a hedgehog–done.  Here’s my character sheet for Fergin the hedgehog:

Mausritter is a magnificent system, because you can hack it to hell and gone and you still have

A) an OSR system with low HP, so choices matter.

B) simple rules which make it easy to make up monsters, equipment, powers, etc., and 

C) all the glorious tactile pieces they love to play with, discover, and draw on.  

Next time, I will get to the Haus Rules we have so far, many crafted through negotiation with my kids.  They all follow the principles: simple, flexible rules, with imagination first.  And they all serve a larger goal.

Rather than set my goal to be teaching them an OSR playing style, I follow my kid-RPG principles and have an easier goal: to have a fun game, one that gets out of the way of their rampaging creativity.  One that they want to keep playing, with their dad.  Cause that’s the whole point, isn’t it? 

Death, the discovered country (LoF, part 6)

In role-playing games, how to deal with the ultimate failure, death?  There are plenty of ways to punish players for lesser failures, and as the Knight at the Opera points out, defeats other than death are a space with a lot of potential.  

I love the deadly nature of N/OSR play: allowing players to lose the game makes ‘winning’ all the sweeter.  But I also love the deep character investment of players in trad games like 5e, the hilarious backstories, and the poignancy of loss when they die.  

This post is about how I put those two things together, and designed a different way to die in RPGs.  The design goal: Let players fail, with major consequences, and yet keep playing their characters in a way they enjoy.  

I *think* this death mechanic is more or less new to TTRPGs (likely I am wrong though).  This post is not a full description (future blog post!) because I am tired of super-long posts.  This is also not a discussion of all the ways that different RPGs handle death (another future blog post!).  This death mechanic likely is not be for everyone. But I can report that it has played well–it works for my weekly OSR-flavored 5e game, and for Mausritter with my kids.  The players don’t want to die, but when they do, it doesn’t end the game or mar their characters.  

This is the last of the tricks I use to create a landscape of fear around my players.  They are more likely to take risks if they know they will survive them, after a loss.  Oddly, it does not dampen their fear–they know the GM will strike them down in a heartbeat, and that dying sucks.  It’s just not the end...if you can keep paying.

“But that the dread of something after death, / The undiscovered country, from whose bourn /  No traveller returns, puzzles the will, / And makes us rather bear those ills we have, / Than fly to others that we know not of?”

–Jean Luc Picard

Trick #4: The Nine Lives of Revenants

In a nutshell: the PCs make a deal with a strong magical entity to bring them back, but the required costs escalate with every resurrection.  Death is not free.

In this version of death, kicking the bucket has consequences, but it is not the end.  At least…at first.  There are a lot of possible options to consider (future post!), but they all share a similar outcome: many resurrections, with a cost.  

When a PC dies, I pause the game and we step out for a GM-player side chat.  There they visit the magical entity they made a deal with (their Patron), and choose whether or not to pay the cost to come back. The PC doesn’t remember meeting the Patron to sign the deal, and they cannot speak about their Patron to others.  This makes their first resurrection something of a surprise, and keeps them from spoiling the surprise for the rest of the PCs (or sharing their Patron’s demands).  In my games, I tell level 1 PCs that they vaguely remember making a deal with someone about death, but they don’t remember the details about coming back.  

The key feature of these costs is they are future focused: the loss of future experience points, treasure PCs can’t spend on future gear, or bonds and memories that no longer will benefit them in a tight spot.  They don’t alter the player’s vision of the character right now, but they do dim their future prospects. The consequences of death matter, but since they are in the future, there is wiggle room to fight them.

And most importantly, the costs of death focus the PCs on the elements of the game world that the GM feels matter most.  Death creates motivations for further adventure, and ties a PC to the world. 

If the GM wants to draw the players into treasure hunting and mercenary deals, ever-increasing amounts of gold and treasure are required to bring them back each time.  If the GM wants PCs to sign on working for different factions in the game world, simply give those factions the ability to sponsor resurrections and have death alter how experience is earned.  Once a PC can only earn full experience points by completing secret missions for their faction, they have motivation!  Similarly, if a PC comes back from death with lost memories and a paucity of bonds (all of them eaten by the Patron), they will be incentivized to create new ones with a vengeance.  

In this style of play, death becomes a (painful) learning process.  The N/OSR movement has long been an advocate of throwing out game balance, and the death mechanic presented here is intended to support that style of play while also allowing players to keep their (suitably chastened) heroes breathing.  At least, for now.

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The Landscape of Fear series so far:

Part 1: Fear of monsters is central to society. If NPCs fear, the players will too. 

Part 2: Fear is an easy shortcut to player engagement.

Part 3 The first step to fear: making PCs care about failing.  OSR and traditional RPGs often fail at this task.

Part 4: Next, foreshadow overwhelming danger: immediate and future.

Part 5: Place attractive rewards/traps in their path.  Keep the surprises coming, slowly spiral events out of their control.

Part 6 (this post): The center can hold?  How to encourage both failure and recovery from failure.

Fear hooks and the Quantum Horror (LoF, part 5)

Tempting, dangerous choices, clear rewards with unpleasant surprises–that is the key to helping PCs to simultaneously feel fear and agency, I think.  This is the ‘mess around and find out’ post in this series on fear in adventure games.

I mean, who wouldn’t throw those dragon teeth?

The Quantum Horror: Fear vs. agency

Fear is fueled by three main things: uncertainty, surprise and loss of control, and high stakes.  If the PCs care about failing, and are properly uncertain from foreshadowed danger, then all it takes is an overwhelming surprise to make them afraid. 

If you were running a horror game, that’s all you would really need.

But in a game focused on heroic adventure, players expect to make choices that matter, to have “agency” to drive the narrative.  No matter how well they foreshadow it, if a GM inflects terrible, fear-inducing events on the PCs, those events preempt player choice. The PCs may feel like the GM is using them to tell a pre-ordained story, or that the GM is unfairly not allowing them to flee the horror.  For example, no matter what PCs do to avoid Strahd, their choices don’t matter: they have to kill the Count to leave Barovia.¹ 

I call this conundrum, the Quantum Horror.  

The Mothership Warden’s Operations Manual² states that “Horrors occur because at some point a line was crossed that wasn’t meant to be crossed.” They name this event the "Trangression", which wakes the Horror from its slumber. It goes on to state, “Usually, your players only realize that they have Transgressed by the time it’s too late.”  This is typical for the genre: the Transgression often does not result from player choices.

Horror RPGs and modules work because player choice comes in upstream--this is what they signed up for.  In adventure games, GMs need to allow player choice before inflicting Fear or Horror. So how to get PCs to actively choose Fear³, and avoid this Quantum Horror problem? 

The Beauty of Temptation

If you are part of my weekly game and crew the good ship Murderbucket, please stop reading, some of the examples below will be spoilers.

The main trick I use is temptation.  I know my magpie players well enough to guess where they will do, and what shiny objects might attract them. So I place those shiny objects in their path (I follow the nicely stated philosophy of the “Quantum Ogre Reborn”, but you can do this with blorb prep as well). Just like adventure hooks, I put out a bunch of shiny “fear hooks”.  

A fear hook has just enough information to tell players that something bad might happen, and just enough reward hinted at to make players interested.  The fear hook might be a literal shiny object, like a treasure chest full of gold that fell out of the enemy airship as they fled.  Or the fear hook might be a difficult but beneficial choice, like helping the elves forge an alliance with vampires to destroy the orc legions.  

Although they are similar, the main differences between an adventure hook and a fear hook are expectations and outcome.  In general, players expect that they will survive an adventure hook presented by the GM, and that the eventual outcome will be a reward for completing the adventure hook.⁴  

With a fear hook, the reward is clear and and often immediate, and the expectation is a possibility of real danger.  Fear hooks are an attractive short-cut: sometimes the risk pans out and you get a new magic sword.  Sometimes it doesn’t, and you get a flaming sentient pyromaniac axe who burns down your ship.  But because fear hooks are tempting, shiny objects, they invite Transgression.  

When a player bites and interacts with the shiny object, they get both rewarded and cursed.  The curse might be literal, like the mimic measles inflicted by opening a suspect treasure chest.  Or the curse might be metaphorical, a bad deal or reputation that will come back to bite them, like their vampire allies luring them into Barovia after the final battle.  Either way, just like the Road Runner, the players are slow to learn because the reward is worth the cost.  Even though they know there are no free shortcuts to power, they take them anyway.  On that road, they don’t mind the imposed Horror, because their poor choices clearly caused it to arrive.  This is the critical difference between running a horror RPG and running a fear-driven adventure game: player choice is paramount.   

Trick #3: Tempting Dangers, Beautiful Curses

“Temptation is the fire that brings up the scum of the heart.”

–William Shakespeare

Before I go further describing tempting fear hooks and curses I have used, I should say that neither Identify nor Remove Curse work perfectly well in my home game.  Remove Curse and Identify are some of the worst spells in any fantasy RPG.  You take curses–magical, wonderful, terrifying,  incredible calls to adventure–and make them all fixable with a 2nd level spell any tin-pot cleric can cast.  Similarly, Identify takes magic items–mysterious, mythical objects that bend reality and beg for quests to know them fully–and turns them into a 3x5 notecard filled with lore and game-rules that you hand to the player. 

Taken together, that’s some serious lost-opportunity, let’s-play-it-just-like-Gary-did-because-we-don’t-want-to-lose-players Grade A bullcrap.  It’s 2026, we can hack a better game.

So when my players get cursed?  Remove Curse is for Lesser Curses like grumpy weapons and having your hair fall out.  For the real stuff, that spell is a balm, not a cure: Greater Curses piss on being removed easily.  Identify tells you everything about normal magic items, but sentient magic and serious Curses can hide their full powers, or twist what it says.  Nothing is truly safe, until players take the leap of trying it out.  Foreshadowing can hint at danger (and should!), but if they want to take the negative-energy Artifact for a spin, they will reap the whirlwind.  

Treasure-curses: actual shiny objects

At this point, there are so many entertainingly treasure-cursed PCs in my weekly game, it’s a badge of honor.  Good curses play on classic fears: death, the dark, disfigurement, abandonment and so on.  One PC is cursed with rapid vampirism and has a magical sword with a ghost chained to it.  Another wakes up every week to a new dead body, chopped up into bits at their feet.  One has lost their father inside a magical scroll, and a fourth exorcised the mimic measles only to attract the enduring attention of a Greater Mimic, whose colony is spreading through their hometown.  All these curses are pure adventure fuel: annoying enough for them to search for a cure, but not debilitating enough to make gameplay less fun.  

When they find a magical item, they don’t know how it works right away.  They can experiment, try it on for size, use a spell, etc.  But Identify can mislead them–one beloved example is the Ring of Animal Friendship that Identify said would let them speak with animals.  What was left out is that the spell requires a check, and if they fail, they only speak that animal’s language for the rest of the day.  They love it when a player can only bark and point for half the session.

Poor choices: metaphorical shiny objects

A player should know they are making a poor choice as they make it.  A poor choice is most obvious to a player, especially in retrospect, when it follows fictional or real-world expectations: easy treasure is often cursed, friendly strangers bearing gifts should not be trusted, complicated or stupid plans will fall apart, bad deeds will out, karma is an asshole, heroic deeds require heroic sacrifice, and so on.  Poor choices are also obvious when each option is a bad one, but a choice still must be made.  Do you ally with the vampires to save the elves, search desperately for another option, or try to go it alone in fighting off the orcs? 

If every choice has a drawback that is clearly seen by the players, and they choose the one with a clear immediate reward (the vamps can save us!), a fear hook has been set.  Then player choices, both the difficult ones and the truly bad ones, can come home to bite them.  

That time they robbed the dragon when he was away?  Turns out that dragons home in on their gold like heatseeking missiles.  When they tried to use that fact to take out all of the other problems in the valley (planting dragon gold in various lairs)?  That plan backfired because they made poor assumptions.  The young pickpocket they reflexively killed?  His friends await their return, sharpening their knives.  The time they heroically saved a dragon egg and refused to give up an evil artifact to interested parties?  They are now hunted by two armies.  

At every step, the bad bargains the PCs make give the GM room to inflict Fear and terrible events on them.  Their choices matter, and I like to make sure they always find out exactly how and why their karma bit them in the butt.  I also like to scale the consequences exactly to the degree they should have known better, or worked harder to find another solution.  I think a curse is a choice-robbing bag of no fun if it comes out of nowhere–I want them to be half-expecting the blow they know they deserve for doing something so ill-considered.  Which brings us to an oldie-but-goodie in the game of inflicting fear, jump scares.  

Jump Scares: courting danger

Normality, then break.  Comfort, then loss.  Security, then danger.  It’s changes in rhythm that can really drive an emotional response. Jump scares are an old horror movie staple, and the movie characters often initiate it–they go into the creepy house, they swim in deep waters, and they check the fallen body.  

To replicate that experience for PCs, use fear hooks.  Maybe the ‘fallen’ enemy was carrying a magical wand: is she really dead now?  Maybe there’s a magic sword they need in the cursed house.  They can only find the black pearl in the deepest waters, but they are haunted by ghost octopi.  They enter the pirate lord’s treasure room, expecting traps, and disturbing the clearly magical pile of rubies in the middle causes the door to slam shut as the room fills with water.  

Fear hooks and jump scares can be used to fix lackluster encounters.  Late-acting poisons, sudden changes in environmental conditions, the arrival of deadlier or magical enemies.  One session my PCs were running through a cursed tomb (with three undead knights), and finding all of the encounters easy and not threatening.⁵  The end-of-session vibe was kids in a candy store, next session we loot everything.  I had wanted the tomb to be spooky, and had failed miserably.

Between sessions, I had an idea⁶; What if I placed three tempting magical crystals in the empty tombs, one for each buried knight?  The first two were quickly snatched up and revealed to be stone-scrolls (i.e., spells in Mausritter, ported to DnD).  The third crystal was glowing⁷, in a room by itself–clearly special in a haunted tomb.

And when a brave PC picked it up, I pulled on the fear hook.  The lights went out and the groaning voices of the defeated knights could be heard, rising again.  Darkness had been cast on the tomb: the PCs banged into random walls and quickly began to be strafed by the undead knights they thought they had destroyed, claws and swords flashing out of the dark.  Now, with the tables turned, they RAN, leaving a retainer for dead, hoping they could run the right direction and, in the end, barely making it out alive.  

Jump scares are immediate payoffs to fear hooks, and work well when the Transgression is obvious.  

Combat as Fear Hook: Losing Control

“I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further.”

-Darth Vader

I run an OSR-flavored 5e game each week.  And of all the OSR principles, ‘combat as a fail state’ is hardest to enforce with 5e mini-superheroes.  The players know their PCs are hard to kill, and monsters have to earn their respect.  That said, this problem is not uncommon with high-level OSR games either–that’s why Tucker’s Kobolds exist, after all.  Combat SHOULD be scary. 

Unsurprisingly, I find the most common poor choice my 5e PCs make is a frontal attack on a superior foe⁸. They see a reward, they see clear and present danger, they still go for it.  Instant fear hook.  

It’s important to note here that a given group of enemies may, or may not, be a real danger to the players mechanically in a fair fight (see, Tucker’s Kobolds).  The point is, combat is a fail state and all enemies are dangerous, no matter how weak-seeming.  So, when my players misjudge a foe that they should be running from, rather than mechanically bolstering the foe on the fly, I instead pull on that fear hook. Taking advantage of their choice to enter combat, I change the game under their feet.  

A big part of fear is losing control of the situation.  In a combat arising from a fear hook, every round some new surprise awaits the PCs that makes it harder.  The mob begins throwing stones.  The undead monstrosity bursts into the city above, gobbling up bystanders and getting stronger.  The guards of the ancient city are protected by a mythal: anyone casting magic on them is lit by faerie fire and has to deal with wild magic after-effects.  Reinforcements arrive.  Water floods the room.  And so on.  I keep the surprises coming, and I slowly spiral events out of their control.  It’s to their advantage to end things, quickly, and to never give the enemy an even break–just like real-world violence.

If and/or when the players survive (and regain control), they are going to feel like real heroes.  Proper heroes run away when needed, and eventually win because they survive, make clever choices, and keep pushing down dangerous paths.  Fear makes their choices matter, all the more.  

_______________

The Landscape of Fear series so far:

Part 1: Fear of monsters is central to society. If NPCs fear, the players will too. 

Part 2: Fear is an easy shortcut to player engagement.

Part 3 The first step to fear: making PCs care about failing.  OSR and traditional RPGs often fail at this task.

Part 4: Next, foreshadow overwhelming danger: immediate and future.

Part 5 (this post): Place attractive rewards/traps in their path.  Keep the surprises coming, slowly spiral events out of their control.

Part 6: The center can hold?  How to encourage both failure and recovery from failure.

1 Strahd is the ultimate Quantum Ogre. Although Ravenloft is a popular adventure, it only works because players know the deal before they start. Imagine being excited to save the elf kingdom from orcs, then walking through some mist and ending up in Barovia week after week because your GM likes vampires.^↩

2 Even though it is a sci-fi horror game, the Mothership Warden's Operations Manual is one of the best how-to GM guides I have ever read. Every adventure game GM should check it out.^↩

3 Don't get me started on how Daggerheart does this, it's good design, but consider this more broadly--Fear empowers enemies in Daggerheart, but I am talking about taking the stupidly dangerous path, not mechanically suffering when you rest.^↩

4 Few GMs actively try to tempt their PCs to go fight a monster many times stronger (not without tons of clear warnings first, anyways), or let the PCs earn nothing in return for questing.^↩

5 Not an uncommon experience when running 5e: between Darkvision, turn undead, and superpowered PCs, it's hard to scare them into running from low-level undead in a dark tomb.^↩

6 Dungeons are scary places and should feel so. The lack of darkvision for PCs in Shadowdark RPG (and its ubiquity for monsters), and the emphasis on torches underground, is designed to generate an atmosphere of fear. So I thought, what if I could do that for vanilla 5e?^↩

7 True to my Quanturm Ogre Reborn prep, I had originally placed the crystal in a glowing sarcophagus, but the PCs chose not to open it. So I moved the glowing crystal to a nearby room, no one the wiser, and they picked it up there. They still wonder was was in the casket.^↩

8 Current game culture for 5e enables this sort of behavior by removing tough monsters from your game (only level-appropriate encounters allowed!). One way to fix this is to choose really tough monsters, so that they absorb all the party’s damage without blinking and then hit back like a truck. Another way, and one I prefer at my table since I like monsters to be real-feeling, not auto-scaling in difficulty with PC level, is to simply present PCs with a range of challenge difficulties.^↩