As promised, a follow-up post on my house-rules for playing Mausritter with my elementary-age children, derived from negotiating with my kids over four sessions of our ongoing Mouse Knights campaign. These rules are a work in progress and when we wrap our campaign in a year or so, I will update this post. The previous post on my Mausritter principles of kid play is here.
In true OSR style, I am going to present our table rules and then comment on the rationale for the changes in italics.
These 11 table rules would likely work well for playing other Odd-like games with younger kids, like Cairn.
Haus-rule #1: Mice don’t die. They are Guards for their village and made a magical oath. I told them in the first session that magic has bound them to the village Guardstone, and they and their pets will resurrect at that stone if they ever die. They won’t have their equipment, though.
Dying is not fun, and my kids are emotional and and imaginative and spent a half hour drawing their mice and dreaming up their backstories. When we first played Hero Kids a few years ago, they didn’t even want to accept damage to their characters, crying when they got hit hard. So how to avoid many tears, while still having stakes in combat? This time around, I decided on auto-resurrect to help lower anxiety and emotions around bad rolls in the face of danger.
So we have resurrection, sans equipment, often many hexes away in their home village. They love their equipment and will always go back for it, and they have companions they HAVE to go rescue, etc. They learn of dangers firsthand and then can work together on how to beat them next time. Thus far we have had one death, and it was laughed off and learned from.
And for variety, I plan to mix and match auto-resurrection with defeat-in-leiu-of-death: like others, I find defeat is often more interesting than death, and it will get worse for them after a defeat. Rescue attempts, ransoms, parleys–all fun situations that can result from putting mice in a hard spot, rather than bringing the game to a hard, emotional stop.
Haus-rule #2: More HP. At first level, they got the HP of a second-level character (2d6). When they hit second-level, they re-roll their HP and only increase if they roll higher.
This house rule increases the survivability of our mice PCs and makes them more heroic. My kids want to feel like heroes, not be defeated all the time. Mausritter is plenty dangerous even with this small bump.
Haus-rule #3: Use a shared array for attributes. For the three basic attribute scores, roll three times for the table, and allow the players to use those numbers for any Attribute.
My kids get seriously jealous of each other, and random dice do not give them equal attributes. So after a lot of squabbling, I rolled for the table (10,9, 9) and they could use those scores in any order for their attributes. Problem solved.
Haus-rule #4: No Will damage from magic, just wild magic. Magic dice are supposed to do Will damage on a 6: instead they trigger a roll on the Feral Magic table.
I don’t like attribute damage as a solution to making magic costly. If you want players to use magic regularly, don’t over-penalize them for using it by damaging their characters. I feel it’s far better for magic to be unpredictable and risky: that makes magic fun and exciting and a touch fear-inducing, the way magic should be for kids. The Feral Magic table by Hugh Lashbrooke has few truly negative outcomes and much potential for hijinks: it’s wonderful and free. My daughter once cast a Heal spell, rolled wild, feral magicked a giant sphere of darkness, then my son used that darkness to secretly sink a competing ship. It was a great moment.
Haus-rule #5: Additions: more birth signs, coats, species to play. At character creation, they can roll on the Expanded Birth Signs table from the Hansen Expansion and choose from the dispositions and coat patterns available there and in the main book. I also added in playable species from Ferntree Hollow and generated a Hedgehog character from the “monster” listings in the Hansen Expansion (special power: roll forward to do d4 blast damage in a line).
There’s just the right amount of crunch in Mausritter for easy creation: rules, but not too many of them. The kids love their star signs and coat patterns, and our party is a fairy mouse, a mouse, and a DM-PC hedgehog.
Haus-rule #6: Blast damage. Following Cairn, blast damage is when a spell or attack hurts all creatures within its range. It can damage warband-scale creatures.
Adding rules and items from other Odd-like games (Cairn, Into the Odd, Electric Bastionland, Mythic Bastionland, etc.) is a snap.
Haus-rule #7: PCs benefit from a declared specialty. Mausritter is classless, but my kids want to be special and good at the things their characters care about. So they decided to declare specialties, and I limited them to one new speciality per level: my son’s mouse is an inventor and sneak, my daughter’s fairy mouse is an enchanter and a mom, and my hedgehog is good with people. Specialties come with extra items (e.g., a packrat to carry mouse-kids (with extra inventory slots)), special abilities (e.g., being able to invent new weapons from existing materials), or favorable outcomes (not advantage, but they are less likely to fail, or they can roll to sneak in more situations).
A fully class-less game is good fun, but my kids wanted their PCs to start out knowing and having things, diagetically (in-game), and can learn and make more. They created backstories and came up with (and keep coming up with) non-traditional ‘skills’ their mice have learned. I limit the power level of their additions, but the rule of cool applies.
So far, their specialty-derived items add inventory space, or are weapons that do standard damage and cause one extra effect (e.g., tripping or a minor enchantment, at a cost of inventory space). Cairn 2e has great ideas for backgrounds, and the d100 lists of minor magic items from d4caltrops are great creative inspiration (I make suggestions, they riff, and vice versa).
Principles of fairness and niche separation also apply: if one kid is seen as being too powerful, the other one complains or tries to copy their powers (triggering jealous bickering). So I am clear now that each one has a specialty the other shouldn’t copy, and that I want each child to get to do equally cool stuff.
My kids like to invent new items and add on to their homes and home base (a boat). Last session, my kids spent over an hour re-drawing their boat and the additions they made. They made many additions, and a flat fee simplified the process for me. Limiting their crafting is like refereeing a game of Calvinball. To keep things realistic, I tried to impose downtime and high money costs for crafting, but that was voted down in an emotional appeal.
Daughter: “Dad, why can’t we make what we want, without you charging us too much? This game is no fun!”
Son: “Dad, I think what she is trying to say is that your costs are keeping us from making cool stuff.”
Daughter: ‘Yes, I like this game but the fees are not fair. Why do you keep charging us and saying things take a week to make?”
Me: “Well kids I want the game to be realistic, so you are not super-powerful and have to use your minds creatively to solve problems.”
Daughter: “But Dad, we ARE using our minds creatively, to craft items to solve our problems!”
Dad: “....Fine. You can craft things, within reason, for 50 pips. Final offer!”
I honestly never expected my daughter to point out that Calvinball is, indeed, a fun game to play. And she’s not wrong–manipulating the game world to win is a long-held OSR principle. There’s honestly not much daylight between using terrain to ambush some hobgoblins and spending the evening A-Team style making a rat trap and some rat-blinding dust. Both take imagination.
As long as I manage to keep the crafting realistic, and their power level low-enough where they are still constantly challenged, this rule should be fine. It helps that warband-scale creatures in Mausritter are immune to damage from single mice–they will never stop feeling small.
Haus-rule #9: Why not? Creativity is rewarded, often by changing the world. In play, we co-create the world: they have added quests, enemies, mysterious figures, allies, all as they imagine. My only job is to point out when it’s too much, in order to maintain balance between my two kids, make it all make sense, and to keep the world presenting a challenge.
Another OSR principle, actualized in play as me saying a lot of “yes, and…” I want my kids to be creative, so when they want the game world to bend to their wishes, it definitely flexes more than it resists. I do say no sometimes, but mainly in situations where they really are not putting their imaginative backs into solving the problem at hand.
Example of play: we are in the Song of the Frogacle boat race (AMAZING adventure). My daughter asks if she can heal our paper boat with her Heal spell. Why not? To reward her creativity, I change the universe, Heal now works on inanimate objects.
I have never seen a fixed world (‘blorb’) as a prerequisite to OSR play; it’s not the only way to Rome. Instead, co-creating a game world together, including rewarding creativity by changing rules, is a natural way to follow the OSR Principia Apocrypha.
Haus-rule #10: Strict time records are not kept. We use exploration Turns and Watches, but they are more suggestions and tools to remind me to regularly inject fun events, then something I strictly track. In our game, Time is a story, and it passes as the story needs.
This one is less of a planned house-rule than a recognition of reality. In a given session, I field hundreds of questions, mediate disputes between the three of us, get interrupted constantly by their excitement, and otherwise just try to keep my eye on the ball of where they are going next. Tracking time amidst all of that is…challenging. I think even ol’ Gary Gygax couldn’t do it.
So I try to track exploration Turns and Watches, but don’t stress if I forget them and then come back to them later. Careful time-tracking is a suggestion, a reminder, but ultimately less important than the story my kids are telling.
Haus-rule #11: Mice are big and independent. Trees are normal-sized relative to them, there are no humans, and they live in their own world.
So this request came straight from my kids, who do not like the idea of being small relative to plants, or scuttling around in the ruins of a human world (don’t get me started on how confused my son is by the fluctuating scale in the book, Redwall). Giant cats are fine, but every plant a giant? No way. Anyway this is what they needed to enjoy the world, so of course I said yes. Inches became feet, regular animals became giant animals (giant snakes, enormous badgers, etc).
Now, I am allowed to include the occasional super-giant tree, but otherwise I describe the world as human-free (far off giants exist), with three-foot mice and mostly normal trees. The mice tend to make villages in fallen super-giant trees, because who wouldn’t do that if they could? For those familiar with animal-themed RPGs, this is similar to the 5e setting of Humblewood, which is great because I can pull extra inspiration and images from there. My kids still feel small relative to the things that threaten them, but they no longer feel puny relative to the world. Kids deal with enough of that feeling in real life, I get it.
This rule is last because it is the most work to implement. Most Mausritter settings assume mice live underfoot of humans (or amid the remains of human civilization) and set adventures in old human buildings and giant trees. This is what I call the ‘default Mausritter setting’. Adapting existing adventures to be human-free, while worth it for my kids, can be a touch difficult if you are a parent short on time. Something awesome like Junk City is a non-starter, for example.
Fortunately, there are many good adventures that are, or can be adapted to be, human-free and/or re-scaled. And I am permitted a few giant houses and super-giant trees here and there, to use others. Thus, I am pulling maps and adventures from the Estate adventures and the Baron’s Grip and Kiwi Acres settings, among others. But honestly, I am excited by the increasing diversity of Mausritter settings, and look forward to more adventures set in magical worlds with different civilizations of small animals, like Ferntree Hollow, Tales from Behind the Ferns, Rinn, and Tiny Fables.
Pro-tip for parents: Don’t assume every Mausritter adventure is going to be kid-appropriate. There are lots of free Mausritter resources, and almost all adventures and settings are reasonably priced. But this is a game made by adults and some adventures are for adults only: themes of horror, war, and oppression do pop up. Fortunately, they are quite easy to filter through (Mausritter adventures are clearly described and often very short (3 pages and a map), a virtue for sure). And personally, I am also excited to play innovative mini-settings like Hell in a Hog Waller with other adults: WWI with mice and magic missile guns? Sign me up.
Pro-tip 2 for parents: Not into playing mice? Cairn 1e is free, just like Mausritter. And evidently there are third-party inventory tokens, including ones on Etsy, although I now want MORE for my adult Shadowdark game.
Further Resources
I want to thank ktrey of d4caltrops for a conversation that made the death haus-rule commentary far better. If you liked this post, you will enjoy the excellent reflection by Widdershin Wanderings on their experiences teaching Cairn to middle-school kids, and Clayton’s Haus Rules for Mausritter.
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