Root's Ramblings Issue 18

Things are a bit slow on the design side, mostly due to real life stuff, which is typical for me. However, we did make some exciting progress with our Mothership ID4 project. We've worked a lot on cleaning up the scenarios content, and Xenon drew up some excellent ships we are planning to place on cards for the ship-to-ship combat scenario:

Looks pretty awesome, huh? I'm sure you can guess which is an alien ship and which is a human ship. If you can't, then that's a problem for us to solve! Let us know what you think of the above in the comments.

I am now responsible for writing the introduction section including how to use the scenarios and stuff like that. Once we are satisfied with the draft, we will start considering the layout process and get the draft edited for clarity.

Project Hunger

The development on this project is still on a soft hiatus, but we've been discussing revisiting some of the mechanics and considering the possibility of changing the system. We currently are using the Resistance system by Rowan, Rook, and Decard, but we are considering switching to the Havoc engine after we've both run the Eat the Reich game by the same publisher. Things are moving super slow on this project, but we expect to speed up after we finish the Mothership project first.

Mausritter Campaign Report

After a year and little more than a week, my in-person group has wrapped up our Mausritter campaign. What a journey it was!

Start Date: March 24, 2024
End Date: April 6, 2025
Frequency: monthly mostly at a local coffee shop for ~3 hours.

Resources I've Used
- The Estate Sandbox Campaign boxset.
- Tiny Tails
- Wooden Character Sheets

The Party
Mephis: business-mouse running family business (old money) and aim to expand business.
Crocus: a kid, and last child of a large family, out to seek attention, love, and found family.
Heather: a priest who worships the Humans as Gods with strange sacrificial rituals and a member of the town council.
Birch: a vagabond with a wealth of adventuring experience and in town looking for new experience.

Brickport
We started the campaign in the starting location provided from the Estate boxset. It has a great map, key NPCs, and some rumors/hooks to spare. The party used this town as their home location, so they obtained a quest from the mayor to find out what's the issue is at the water fountain, a key source of clean water for the town. Mephis was especially interested in the dock access privilege for their business, so that was a nice incentive used as a part of the reward for completing the quest.

Sewer Passage
The party decided to navigate through the underground sewerage system to get to the drainage exit to the front yard where the fountain is located. I saw this as a perfect opportunity to offer the party a side adventure by using a pamphlet adventure, Giant Snake in the Sewer, from the Estate boxset. It is amazing how much time the party spent on this particular adventure (a total of three sessions), and a player drew an absolutely sick map based on my description of the area map in the pamphlet. The drawing is eerily accurate, so...

SPOILER if you don't want to know the content of this adventure:

I'm still blown away by his talent! I love seeing the touches left by the group such as the wooden stick being stuck in the mouth, and the poor snake's... exit is all blown out. I'm sure you can draw your own conclusion about what happened.

END SPOILER

Snackburg
The party finally made their way out of the underground sewer and into the drainage area outside in the front yard of the estate. I've pulled out a town called Snackburg from the Tiny Tails to use along with another pamphlet adventure (will discuss below) as well. I replanted it into the side of a bridge over the stream coming from the drainage area. Everyone was able to regroup here in an inn and learn more about the town, including some dark secrets. I really enjoyed this town as I was able to introduce some NPCs to give the players more lore to give them some moral dilemma focusing on the nature of magic and whether it is a good thing or not. Of course they left the town as the citizens prepared for a revolution and headed for the water fountain, the heart of their original quest in addition to the new quest they accepted. My favorite location in the town has to be the Spicy Rooster or perhaps the Cheez-Inn because of the greedy innkeeper.

The Fountain
For this location I used the adventure, The Bubbling Tower of the Fountain Mage, from the Tiny Tails collection. When I first saw the adventure I knew it would be a great fit for this campaign. It was easy to tie-in some NPC relationships and dynamics from the previous locations with the NPCs in this one. The party had a lot of fun with this, especially with the puzzle-solving aspect which was lacking in the campaign up to this point. They also defeated the BBEG in a very interesting way where the BBEG end up being one of the "good guys" now and have a role to repay the damages caused by it's "evil days."

Wrap Up
We wrapped up the campaign with a nice epilogue where each player get to tell a short story of what happened to their character after the battle of Fountain and what kind of impact the campaign had on their character. All players reported feeling very satisfied with the campaign and felt it was very memorable which is great for my self-esteem as a GM. They also shared some feedback on what worked well and what could've improved.

What Went Well
- The plot are focused and interconnected for most part.
- A lot of exploring different environment such as underground sewer system, drainage area, a town insert in the side of a bridge, the fountain, etc.
- Danger! The journey was very dangerous but not overly difficult to the point the players felt it's pointless to try.
- Intrigue regarding the BBEG and a nice plot twist at the conclusion.
- The wooden character boards are amazing! Highly recommended!

Area for Improvement
- I'm going to print out the item and condition cards and cut those up to use because the cards provided in the box set are not really reusable. Some of the cards are already damaged in my cleaning attempts.
- Lack of treasures for level up, so I'm going to keep that in mind and make sure to provide more opportunities to find treasures and bring to a town.
- Scheduling - who doesn't have this issue?!
- Time tracker. The handout is nice but I'm having a difficult time remembering to mark as I GM. Something I'll need to experiment and see how I can improve on tracking time during the campaign.

We, as the group, have decided to play Let us Build a Tower in our next campaign. We will start in a couple weeks and I'm looking forward to running a puzzle-heavy campaign. Stay tuned for a report on this campaign in the future.

Please leave a comment about what you think of the report above and if it's something you would like to see more. Have you played/ran Mausritter? Did you have similar experience or feedback as we did? I'm curious!

My goal here is to rate a few games on itch.io every issue, especially those in need of reviews.

Crowded Stars by Colonel Cavedude: A simple pamphlet with d100 ships to be used for ship encounters. It has a very few information such as ship name, type, and a general sentence about the ship. Not much to goes on and it was designed for 0e, so may require some modifications to be used with 1e. Not sure how useful this can be, but might be nice if you want to have a d100 table for quick inspiration. Rating: 3/5

Depres Font - OFL by GGBotNet: this designer makes A LOT of fonts and I believe most if not all are PWYW! Highly recommend to visit their itch page and take a look at their fonts. This one has a horror/creepy vibes and I can see this being a great fit for some adventures designed for Liminal Horror or even Mothership if you want some scratchy looking font to be used as in-game writing or something similar. Rating: 5/5

Techromancer by Crumbling Keep: this pamphlet adventure is PACKED with content... almost bit too much because the layout is very heavily packed with text and a lot of overlapping with art - making it bit difficult to read. I do appreciate how they insert some iconography to represent type of save to roll and events, so that's easy to follow. I'm very disappointed they did not provide accessibility with their audio files - I don't see any text files with transcripts for deaf and hard of hearing community to use in their games. Rating: 3/5