I’d Rather Be a Mouse Than an Elf
[Hodag RPG, you can stop reading now]
Note: This post coincides (but not by coincidence) with Mausritter Month! Go back one or two or perhaps seven adventures from various indie creators in support of a great game.
I recently watched Studio Ghibli’s Arrietty, which is based on The Borrowers, a series of children’s books about tiny people who live beneath your floorboards and pilfer your excess sugarcubes and tissues. The movie had its flaws, but the fantasy of being tiny has always appealed to me ever since I was a small but unfortunately never tiny lad. Toothpick swords, matchbox beds, thimble helmets, postage stamps hung like portraits on your tiny walls. If that doesn’t appeal to you at all, you are simply much less whimsical than me. Which is fine, the world needs people like you to cheerfully fill out forms in triplicate at the department of motor vehicles and such. Some people hear about anyone spending their free time pretending to be a tiny person under floorboards or even an elf fighting dragons and wonders to themselves, so often aloud, “Why would anyone bother with such utter nonsense!”
Based on the above biographical information, it should not shock you to learn that I am a tremendous fan of Mausritter. I reviewed its first boxed set some time ago and have spent many hours either pretending to be a mouse or facilitating a group of my friends pretending likewise. My experiences running Mausritter has led me to the belief that it is the ideal introduction to OSR-style gameplay. If you have a friend who is on the fence about sitting around a table pretending to be elves and wizards, see if they would like to first sit around a table and pretend to be mice wielding needles and going on tiny adventures.
There are two reasons that mouse-fantasy is superior to elf-fantasy, but both draw on the same truth. Being a mouse exploring our own world but from a diminished point of view is more easily cognizable than being an elf exploring a fantasy medieval milieu. This may not be as true for someone so steeped in Tolkien that they can hardly look at a cherry tomato without thinking fondly of Denethor, the last steward of Gondor. But everyone knows what a mouse is. Except perhaps Albertians born after 1950.
Speaking of Albertians, famed son of Edmonton, Ty of the Mindstorm blog, recently wrote on the concept of Baseline Worldbuilding. As Ty explains, “the further you depart from [the cumulative total of a person’s lived experiences and consumed media], the more cognitive load it takes to visualize and understand the world.” Because we can all imagine a mouse in a house with ease, it fits into more people’s narrative baseline and makes worldbuilding off of that baseline easier. But more importantly for the purpose of my argument about the OSR, it makes danger and reward more easily cognizable.
The OSR playstyle is about many things and 1,001 blog posts have been written trying to pin down the wiggling playstyle to a corkboard so we might examine it. However, for my money, the best articulation comes from Bastionland, who explains the importance of Information, Choice, and Impact. When we are talking about narrative baselines for worldbuilding, we are mostly talking about the Information leg of the OSR’s three-legged stool. And for most people, the referee has to do less work to impart information about the world, the dangers, and the treasures that could accrue to a mouse than they would if you were playing as Glóin, son of Gróin seeking to reclaim the Lonely Mountain for your kin. The latter isn’t impossible by any means! In fact, I assume most of my readers already know the stakes well. But I assume all my readers know that if you are a mouse, you should fear cats.
I have ran many encounters with elves and wizards and the like fighting dragons; I have ran many encounters with mice fighting cats. The latter has always, always been more tense. Yes, dragons are scary, but how scary? There are so many types! And video games, TV shows, D&D itself, and of course the original myths have all taught the lesson that dragons are fearsome but ultimately exist to be defeated by brave heroes. It doesn’t matter if the dragon has 1 hit point, 16 hit points, or 2,500 hit points–either way, it was designed for the heroes to find some way to defeat it.
Cats, on the other hand, do exist and do regularly kill mice. That is sort of their thing, actually, aside from being lovably misanthropic pets. When you imagine a knight in shining armor fighting a dragon, you are probably giving that knight way better odds in your imagination than you would when imagining a mouse fighting a cat. Accordingly, it doesn’t matter much whether Mausritter and other tiny-character-in-our-world style games give cats 1, 16, or 2,500 hit points. They are scary beyond their mechanical meaning. Every cat encounter in Mausritter is frightening because the players are thinking in terms of their baseline understanding of mice and cats. And cats will eat you, so be careful. And they are. My mice player characters are always far more cautious than my player characters who are elves. The world is tense and deadly when you’re just a little guy. If you’re going to do something risky, you are going to come prepared.
The danger of being a mouse and how it made player characters act in a more OSR manner of play was obvious to me from my first session of Mausritter, but for some reason it took watching Arrietty, a movie that isn’t about being a mouse, to realize the other great thing about pretending to be a mouse.
There is treasure everywhere for those small enough to see. We are simply too big to see how valuable all our stuff is. But once you put yourself in a mouse point of view, everything is treasure, if you are able to carry it back with you. A chocolate bar? Imagine getting a mattress-sized chunk of chocolate. Dental floss is a very durable rope for a mouse, with a nice minty smell, in a convenient container for cutting off a string of rope when you need it. A water bottle will take care of your family’s water needs for at least a week. And don’t even get started on all the treasures in your kitchen.
The default setting for most fantasy TTRPGs is basically a post-apocalyptic world where there are all these pockets of life-changing treasure but surrounded by commensurate dangers. Each session is all about taking on as much danger as you can handle to obtain as much treasure as you can carry back. This is also the default, with barely any effort on the part of the referee in terms of transmitting the worldbuilding to the players, when you are a mouse. The world is dangerous, sure. Cats, owls, garden snakes, are all as high-stakes, if not more so, than any greataxe-wielding ogre would be when you’re a mouse. But every human-constructed dungeon is a palace full of treasure beyond your understanding. Pulling rubies out of the eye sockets of a demon idol statute is cool and all, no doubt. But can you imagine finding a statue of a bear twice your size that is full of delicious honey and bringing it back to your mouse village? You would be a hero, as long as you survive the housecat standard guard.
