Keyboard shortcuts

Press ← or → to navigate between chapters

Press S or / to search in the book

Press ? to show this help

Press Esc to hide this help

Campaign

Tails of Thawhallow is a Mausritter campaign about being small but heroic mice, who are travelling through the dangerous wilds in an effort to help their community and others.

6 Truths

  • The world is very ancient. Civilizations of many kinds have risen and fallen through untold eons. Treasure, relics and magical artifacts are littered throughout the world for those brave enough to search for them. The humans of this world are at a medieval technology level.
  • Brave adventurers that have successfully completed an expedition and returned to a settlement with valuables become members of the “Tails Guild”. They wear an embroidered patch that features a mouse tail over the crest of settlement they supported. These patches are seen as a high mark of honor. These honored adventurers are colloquially referred to as “The Tails.” Very few adventurers have ever earned more than one patch.
  • The region of Thawhallow has been experiencing inexplicable weather patterns. After facing an unusually severe drought during the summer, an early frost occurred right before harvest. Nearly all the crops in this region have failed, and the various settlements are all afraid of what that will mean for the upcoming winter.
  • The Bandicoots are a notorious gang of rats known for pillaging settlements and traders.
  • A local legend tells a tale of a place beyond the borders of Thawhallow with buildings of unimaginable size. They say food rains from the sky where giants roam, and the mice who live there never go hungry.
  • The Hyliola are getting ready to hold their annual choral concert with their choir which is renowned throughout the region. They are offering pips for musicians, composers and instruments.

Vibe, Tone, Theme

  • You’re small, everyday mice trying to make your way in an unfathomably large and dangerous world. There’s nothing inherently special about being an adventurer, other than the fact your heart contains the courage and will to be one. Seek to make a name for yourself that will be remembered by micefolk everywhere.
  • You care for your communities, and go out into the dangerous wilds to seek any kind of care and comfort for your community that you can find.
  • I want to shoot for a semi-serious tone that still has the whimsy of anthropomorphized animals and being very small.
  • I want to feel something at the table, so help create emotional stakes and emotional moments.

Game Style

  • Mausritter is an OSR/NSR style game.
  • Mausritter best practices:
    • Ask lots of questions. Make notes. Draw maps.
    • Work together. Devise schemes. Recruit allies.
    • Dice are dangerous. Clever plans don’t need to roll.
    • Play to win. Delight in losing.
    • Fight dirty. Run. Die. Roll a new mouse.
  • Modular campaign. To save myself prep, I will be using a stack of pre-written Mausritter modules (with my own embellishments of course). Please avoid reading the setting information in the player rules, or reading published adventures.
  • Character Death
    • This is a lethal system and the probability that you die is high. However, you probably won’t be dying as often as you expect. The longer your character is alive, the more emotionally attached you’ll grow, leading to a much bigger story moment when death finally happens.
    • Make character death a big moment. Our characters should experience grief, shock, etc when their fellow adventurer dies. Let’s help each other make these moments feel big. Help celebrate the life of fallen adventurers, and sing their songs so they are not forgotten.
    • If you die, you simply roll up a new character and get right back into the action. Getting back in play is more important than realism, but it’s fun to come up with a reason you caught up to the party or they found you in the next room/hex.

System Notes

  • Combat is fast and dangerous. Attacks always hit. HP depletes first, then STR. When STR is 0, you die.
  • XP is gained by bringing treasure and goods back to a mouse settlement, or spending your pips selflessly on community improvements.
  • Inventory management is a big part of this system. Please be very familiar with the inventory rules.
  • There are no classes. Spells are items you can find. We are not limited to the spells listed in the book.
  • We will be using hex crawl rules for overland travel, and dungeon crawl rules for adventure sites. Time management is important. Time passing costs rations, torches and can trigger random events.

Player Expectations

  • You are in charge of your character sheet and inventory. Please take this home with you in case we have to play remotely. If you forget your character sheet, you will role up a new character for that session.
  • I expect you to learn the rules and the play fairly. There are only 18 pages of player rules in Mausritter which are simple, concise and well laid out. Please read them at least once, and then re-read certain rules as we play to relearn them as needed. Accurately keep track of your character and inventory. Help each other (including the GM) learn the rules and be consistent.
  • Get immersed in the fiction and take it seriously. Treat it as if it was real. Stay in character as much as possible and help make everything feel real. Try to stay focused and topic while we play.
  • Collaborate and conspire with the GM outside of the game. If you have a cool idea, I want to help make it happen. If you have feedback, I want to try and incorporate that. I am always available to talk about the game.
  • Bring your creativity. I am going to invite you to help me build the world with prompts and questions. Your primary domain is over your character, help make them fun and interesting! You are invited to make suggestions and ask questions to help develop the world as well.
  • Support each other at the table. “Yes and” the cool idea by trying to find a way to make it work. Help make sure that the spotlight is being shared, and help prompt the quieter voices. Try to minimize playing devil’s advocate, and keep the action moving forward.
  • Be on time and be committed to show up to most sessions. There is flexibility to be up ~30 minutes late occasionally if you let everyone know. Showing up halfway through is disruptive and hard to prep for, so I would rather you are there for the whole session or skip it.
  • Open Table. We will play with whoever is available for that session. If you need to miss a session please give as much notice as possible. Your character was always just hung up slightly behind the party so you can always jump right back in.

Allie’s OSR Principles

  • The world does not see the character sheets. I take this literally. I don’t look at your character sheets, and trust that you keep accurate records and play fairly. I do not design scenarios to test one character or another.

  • The narrative emerges from play. There is no plot armor. A character’s death contributes to the ongoing story, and should be celebrated as such. Backstory is far less important, so you are welcome to have as much or as little as you want. I encourage you to create backstory in the moment at the table when it makes sense to.

  • Time is a resource. Use it wisely. Things in the world begin, end, improve, and decay. Nearly everything my players face is timed. That treasure sitting in that temple is not going to be there forever, somebody is looking for it as well.

  • Engage the fiction, not the stats. Use your creativity, ingenuity and problem solving skills, not your character sheet to solve challenges in front of you.

  • Fight to survive, explore to grow. XP is given for finding things that have value such as treasure and goods, and bringing them back to a mouse settlement. XP is not given for fighting monsters.

  • Let the dice gods speak. Random tables and countdown dice galore. I will have some general faction machinations going on in the broader world, but random tables are going to drive a lot of what happens so we can all be surprised by the story we move through. There’s no big plot that is planned, we’re creating that together.

  • Have fun, create, borrow, DIY, and share. This is a game for creative, collaborative people and people who appreciate creativity in others. A world with magic cannot be bound by catalogs of spells, items, and character features. The game cannot be mastered by memorizing numbers or by accounting tricks, only by adaptability and creativity. There will be some spells, items, features, and creatures unique to this game. I will be giving players a lot of opportunities to help build this world with me, so be prepared to contribute your ideas. You are always welcome to ask if something can exist in this world, and I will try my hardest to say yes if it is reasonable.