My Mausritter Open Table Campaign

FREEBIE: That Strange Old Island - Micro TTRPG Setting

Over the last few months, I’ve been running a large-party, open-table Mausritter game and posting about it occasionally on Bluesky. Folks were interested in how I’m structuring the campaign to support regular 6+ player, 2.5 hour sessions.

Let’s get into the nitty-gritty of it all.

Step 1: Invite A LOT of People.

If you are willing to run a game, you can always find people to play. And I mean always. Running TTRPGs is like being a drummer in a world full of punks—you’ll always have a band (or two or three) if you want one. You just need to put yourself in the middle of folks.

In my case, I opened invites to my entire workplace: “Hey, I’m going to be running a game for people. It’s like D&D but you are mice going on tiny fantasy adventures. Want to join?” That’s it. Post it in your restaurant staff text chat, drop it in a slack channel, put up a flyer at your local library, or put it on your most used Discord. Try to build a sizeable pool of vaguely interested people (10-20 folks is good).

Step 2: Start a Group Chat. Pick a Time to Play.

Find out what social media or messaging apps the interested folks use, and pick the most common one. If you don’t use it, you do now. Meet people where they are.

For my group, this is Facebook Messenger. It’s where our work chat was so we just migrated over to a new group chat with the interested folks. From there, I put out feelers for a good time for Session 0 the following week. “Alright folks, I’m free Tuesday and Thursday night next week. Who wants to play from 7-9 one of those nights?” See what folks say, and pick a single time with the most crossover. Set the date, and communicate it to the group. It’s okay if not everyone can make it. In fact, it’s very likely.

If I get commitment from 2+ players, I play. You may want to set a high end cap as well, but I don’t. For lightweight games like Mausritter, running big groups works quite well for me. Session #2 of this campaign had an 8 player party, and we still wrapped a full dungeon in 2.5 hours.

If there’s not enough commitment that week, I either adjust the date if possible or postpone a week. No big deal. We’ve all got lives to live.

Step 3: Ask Which Quest They Want to Play.

Now that you’ve got your time and some committed players, post a poll about what quest they group would like to play. Give at least 3 options. Whatever wins the poll is what you run.

For ease, I recommend utilizing any of the huge library of great pre-written Mausritter adventures. This lowers your need to prep and keeps you stocked with great quests for players to choose from. We started with Stumpsville from the core rules and then moved into adventures from The Estate (with others in the mix).

Step 4: Play the Game. Keep It Snappy.

Before playing, do whatever prep you enjoy doing. I don’t enjoy prep so I often just read through the adventure once or twice. That’s it. Most good Mausritter adventures can be easily “sight read” during play.

Keep your sessions to 3 hours or less. For my campaign, we play from 7-9:30pm with the first 30 minutes being more or less catching up, doing little bits of campaign admin work like making a first-time player a new character, etc.

The rest of that time, we play. I let me players know up front the adventure needs to more or less be wrapped up by the end of our session. They don’t have to resolve every strand or beat every baddy, but we need to get to an exit point at that time. Once everyone has that in mind, it’s never been hard to find that conclusion.

Step 5: Wrap Up the Important Stuff. Save the Rest.

Take the final 10-15 minutes to wrap up the important bits of post-adventure admin: How much gold does each player get? How much XP does each player get? Make sure folks note it down (and note it down yourself). After the session, drop these details into your group chat as well.

Anything else, like shopping, how the actions of today’s quest resolve back in town, etc. will all come up later - so for now, tell everyone goodnight!

Step 6: Do the Faction Turn. Report the News.

Using Mausritter’s faction turn system (including in the core rules), I build out a list of factions. For the first turn, this will take a bit more work than any of the following turns, since you’ll want to include any aspects of your starter adventure - from the enemy faction, to the citizens of your central mouse city, and anything else you may have mentioned or that may be teased within the adventure itself. In the future, you’ll just need to add a new faction or two as you introduce them through play.

The faction system is a great way to reward players for what they did during the session and to show the consequences of what they didn’t do.

For example, my players were meticulous about scouring Stumpsville for hostages and loot. At the end of Session 1, they had to hightail it back to town without saving many of the remaining mice (yet). During the faction turn, I added “Rescue the kidnapped Stumpers” as a goal for Pinesgrove which, when completed, brought a rival adventuring party into play. Now, my players have another group gunning for the same glory and gold they are, but they also got a lot of XP for their approach (and made close allies with the few mice they did save).

The Faction rolls and information (as seen above) is hidden from my players, but—because time does pass between sessions in the game world—I do report how things develop and resolve in a post-session news bulletin (as seen below). Each item is a result of faction rolls, translated into how the players hear about this in the world. Some aspects wouldn’t be known to them and, as such, aren’t included here at all.

Next, invite your players to use this time (in the group chat) to let you know what they’d like to buy in town or see if they’d like to check in with an NPC, have a character moment, etc. Essentially, treat small moments between sessions almost like a play-by-post, but nothing done in this time should require rolls. It’s all character moments, world flavor, and bookkeeping (like shopping).

Step 7: Repeat Steps 2-7 (and Repeat Step 1 As Needed)

Now, you’ve done the full cycle. Laid out like this, it may seem like more work than it really is. In practice, you ask people if they want to play, start a chat, offer times, play, do your admin, turn the world state, and go again.

If you lose interested players or feel like having a bigger pool would help make for bigger and better sessions, then repeat Step 1 but if you’ve got a good group, just keep repeating Steps 2-7.

Everything here is just a matter of removing all barriers from actually playing so you can… actually play! With all that said, GO PLAY!

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NEW RELEASES

Update #3 is out now for Tacticians of Ahm! It brings big (and hopefully final) rules changes, more examples of play, more guidance, and new art! Get it HERE!

MeatCastle GameWare - Annual #2 is in stock and available now over in print!

The Light in the Fridge is a one-page TTRPG where you play leftovers in the fridge with one night to reach the top shelf and fix the fridge light before their world is plunged into darkness. I recently wrote this Honey Heist hack in under 24 hours for a job interview writing test. Since I got the job, I decided I’d put it out in the world as a free download. Check it out!

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FREEBIE: THAT STRANGE OLD ISLAND

I’ve been looking to kickstart my creativity again recently so I decided to go with something small and recently jumped on board the Tiny World TTRPG Jam, a micro setting jam of 8-pages or less. There are some optional challenges for the jam and one is to make your book diagetic (essentially, existing within its own universe) so I took that on as well.

This zine is a weekend’s work of fun, weird worldbuilding born out of a long-ago Newfoundland and Labrador-themed bit of early European exploration folklore. Enjoy!

In 1508: Johannes Ruysch's fleet of exploratory vessels were beset by harsh winds and demon attacks near an unknown island in the north Atlantic.
In 1542: Marguerite de La Rocque, a french noblewoman migrating to the New World, washed ashore Isola de Demoni after being set adrift at sea, with her two children and her lover, by her distraught and vengeful husband.
In 1725: The Isle of Demons is removed from all New Worlds maps by order of both the Catholic Church and the Church of England.
In 1881: I left my home, the Dominion De La Rocque, to explore the outside world and attend an American University.

This small book contains but some of the records and studies of my home, an island where the living and the dead coexist and where no one ever truly leaves. One day, I will return to that strange old island, but today is not that day. - Frederick Reid

That Strange Old Island is an 8-page micro TTRPG setting inspired by the history and folklore of Newfoundland and Labrador. It is system-free and diegetic. It works well with games like Cthulhu by Gaslight and Liminal Horror but could be widely adapted to anything capable of supporting late-19th century play.

Get all the files, including pages, spreads, and printer-friendly versions, HERE!

If you’d like to tie the download to your Itch account, you can find it for free HERE.

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MORE COOL STUFF

I am working on Blood in the Snow, a short adventure for the Cloud Empress Winter Jam—although I missed the deadline of the jam itself! I’m still planning to finish this one off since I’m 60% of the way there already. In the meantime, you can check out the jam page HERE!

If you’re interested in my thoughts on non-TTRPG things, I did a GOTY thread about video games I played and love in 2024 over on Bluesky. Check it out!

I also did a year-in-review thread of all the books I really loved last year. Check it out here!

Maxwell Lander recently launched his new game: OddFolk! I’m creating two new action kits for it - Artifact Crafting and Slasher Horror! Check it out!

Spicy Tuna RPG announced their newest game, Blackthorn - Pulp Horror RPG, and launched the Backerkit sign up page! I’ve seen a bit of the behind-the-scenes on this, and I’m really excited to see more. Check it out!

My cousin, Jared, recently launched his own webstore with a weird and wild comic, dark and crazy art, cool stickers, and more. Check it out!

The Panic Table has Dog Eat Dog, a new Mothership actual play series, coming up, and this one looks really interesting for a few reasons: it’s only two players, and it’s explicitly competitive (which I haven’t really seen in an AP before). I love small player count play, and I think having it be competitive means we are likely to see some really cool character decisions and drives. Plus, it looks nice too!

A few folks have been putting out some really cool year-in-review zines you should absolutely check out (and then make your own): Aaron King’s Favorite Books of 2024 and Chris Air’s Weirdo Faves of 2024!

The Shrike, Leo Hunt’s weird and wild hellcrawl for Old School Essentials that I edited, is out now digitally over on DTRPG! Check it out!

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Thanks, as always, for your time and support! Thank you as well to everyone who has shared the last few Missives, left comments, and added to the discussion themselves! It means a lot and brings even more subscribers into the fold! We are now over 2,200 subscribers which is HUGE! - Christian