How I’ve been running Mausritter, part 3

I wanted to post this weeks ago, but apparently it never left my drafts folder. Read this as if it’s posted on 14 July, please!

Last week I played the fifteenth episode of the Mausritter campaign I’ve been writing about before (part 1 after episode five and part 2 after episode ten). I also made it the season finale, taking a break of a few weeks for the first time since it started. The plan is to pick it up again somewhere in September, but first, I wanted to think a bit about how it’s going.

In part two of this series I wrote a bit about how I was changing the way I prepare things. I think I still stand behind the method, but I must say that in practice, it didn’t really happen. It turns out I am terrible at preparing stuff: when I am excited about a game, I read all kinds of things and jot down all kinds of ideas, but when that excitement ebbs, there is no force of earth that can make me prepare. I’m just “too busy” and all of the sudden it’s an even-numbered Tuesday again.

The new way of preparing became just that: at the end of the session – when there was a bit of post-session hype left – I would jot down some ideas and hooks of what I thought was going on in the world. And then I would just leave it for next session. I guess, in (I think) the words of Brennan Lee Mulligan: you can never prepare so much that you do not have to improvise, but you can learn to improvise so well that you will never have to prepare.

To tell the truth though: instead of improvisation I often deferred back to old notes and existing random tables. When entering an adjacent hex that on my map was still blank, I would roll on the tables in the rulebook and generate it. Unfortunately, most of these hexes they visited where in the forest, which means I have used up the full forest table and everything I will roll there from now on will already exist elsewhere. (I just realized: me not allowing certain duplications is also me not embracing the play to find out mindset. Oh well.)

That time I actually prepared

One other thing I said in the previous blogpost is that I would embrace the principle of always making the biggest move I could think of. Sometimes that still goes poorly, it turns out. I had a mixed table of regulars and newer players, but the two regulars said they wouldn’t be there next week. They were also very close to an Abandoned Car full of rats that had problems with them. I thought: great, let’s kidnap these mice as a cliffhanger for next episode.

The next session I indeed didn’t have the two mice at the table who were now captured, and I did indeed have the other half of the regulars. But although I prepared a cool heist to get their fellow mice out of the Car (including a hand drawn map of the car and me thinking out several details about how to enter and exit it) the current party expressed no interest and went to the exact opposite side of the map, leading to a fully improvised session in which I was frantically reading notes of months prior and rolling and rerolling on the aforementioned random forest tables.

The worst part of it was that for three sessions in a row – probably including the upcoming first session after the break – I will have to come up with some reason why the mouse that is there this session has actually escaped the Car on their own. The lesson learned: do not abduct player characters and do not prepare a linear story where the outcome it too big to fail.

This also lead to me not preparing a thing for the finale, and of course my players smelled this too and went into the exact direction I wanted them to go, but this time I was underprepared so there were still a lot of holes in the story. Knowing what to prepare is really an art in itself.

The finale

The finale itself went okay, but I was not too impressed myself. I had a few very nice details planned, but it is very hard to express those things in the fiction when your main characters are allowed to roam the world freely.

I think I messed up a bit by giving them a map, which lead them to a place, and then having no clue myself how to steer them back to the actual location of The Thing They Were Looking For after revealing my interesting twist that it was there but had been gone. I ended up fixing the story by adding a post-credit scene where they saw the mouse who had The Thing, but as the audience, not as the mice. I’m not very pleased with the solution, as it gives me something I might have to fix when we resume the campaign.

It’s interesting to me how as a player, it can feel like certain parts of the story can only be true if those facts come from the book or the GM’s notes. As a GM, I now think the only things that feel true are the things that are invented by us all at the table.

After the break

I’m not sure how to prepare for after the break. It seems like the box-set I have ordered / backed on kickstarter will not arrive until January 2027 and even if it arrived tomorrow I am not actually sure if prewritten content would serve this campaign, now that I made the first part of it so open. On the other hand: having a break is exactly what I need to change the tone slightly, which is why I took the break in the first place.

Another thing I want to introduce is the question: what do you think this is? I recently played Pirate Borg as a player and I noticed that the GM asked us questions like that all the time, and I really liked it. With most of these players I played Brindlewood Bay and it that game this technique is called ‘Paint the Scene’ and all locations in every mystery come with a prewritten question. I really like the idea to include it in an OSR style game.

I guess I will try to come up with some new events for the world. I might solve the open loop of The Thing by writing some “love letters” to my players. This is a thing from the “Powered by the Apocalypse” tradition: after a break or hiatus, you write some custom moves for the characters with in it some new backstory or some events that happened, but most importantly a choice (or roll) for them to make. This can resolve some immediate issues they had before the break, and can create some bigger issues to play with during the next phase of the campaign. I might indeed sign them with “love, your GM”, as per tradition, or I might make some of them in-world written letters from NPCs.

After that, I want to rely more on improvisation again. I’ll report back after episode 20, if we ever get there.