Making My Adventure Location for Mausritter Part 2

The Encounters

Jan 13, 2025

“A great pale menace hunting silently through the night, an old dead stump hiding dark secrets, a hive pushing their industrious pursuits to the limits, and numerous other perils thrive in the forgotten Bone Meadow where the hardy mice of The Thickett call home.” - Excerpt from my Itch.io page (click here)

A major point separating a TTRPG from a novel is that nothing is set in stone when it’s a game. Players have choices to make in a plethora of situations, whereas characters in a novel will solve a problem in one particular way, no matter how many times you re-read the novel. This is what I love about TTRPGs, no two games will be alike even if the scenarios are the same. Player agency to solve problems was a big proponent of old-school D&D and it’s something Mausritter excels at. The DM lays out a foundation and the players overcome the obstacles however they deem fit.

Reviewing other submissions and official adventure modules you can see this design principle in full force. While there are some overarching story beats, the modules thrive in their random encounter tables. However, a way they bridge the gap between DM/Creator and Player is the choice in who or what the players may encounter. It is the small details, such as where, when, and why, which fill-in-the-blank of the encounters that can occur there.

Let’s talk about a little writing practice you may have been taught a long while ago.

The Five W’s

Fear not, this will not be a writing class, it’s more of an examination of how I approached writing my encounters. Something to keep in mind if you feel stuck on something.

Pictured below are the two initial pages of encounters I wrote before paring them down.

Random NPC mice names aside, you can see I’m trying to cover a wide range.

In my initial writing for these encounters I really wanted to exemplify what kinds of things could happen at each location. Secondarily, there was an implicit day/night cycle when I included Amariel the owl as a main antagonist. Owls are nocturnal, so there needed to be a possibility of dangerous encounters at night.

However, as I discussed in the previous part of this series, I wrote too much. There would be no way I could fit this many different encounters onto the end product. This would be my biggest challenge of this whole project- condensing everything with consideration to the design limitations. A trifold pamphlet of A5 pages, can only hold so much! Ultimately, I think I did a good job doing this, but compared to other published adventure modules, I definitely used every last bit of space and jam packed it full of goodies for the DM and Players.

Regarding the two main antagonists, Vrishka the snake and Amariel the owl, I’m trying to identify who they are, where you can find them, when they might appear (see the day/night tables of the meadow), what they may be doing. They why, I decided, would come from motivations I would include in their respective stat blocks.

These 5 elements (who, what, where, when and why) leave a final piece of the story for your players to fill in; the how.

Limiting Yourself

One particular aspect of the design limitations which helped me pare everything down was the aspect that this needed to be one adventure location. The work had essentially been done for me in the initial design by the creators of the game jam (click here). The bone meadow needed to be where everything happened. Thes other locations, such as the gnarled stump or the tree which serves as The Pale Terror’s lair, needed to be secondary and exist in a context which supported the themes of the adventure.

I combed through my current encounters and decided to maintain that unique day/night cycle by tailoring the encounters to fit. Creatures and happenings typically found at night, could almost only be found at night.

This presents a great variation in encounters and provides the PC’s (Player Characters) a problem to solve if they wish to seek out a specific encounter. For example, if the PC’s have decided the bigger threat is Vrishka the Python, they would need to seek them out in the daytime, otherwise they are more likely to meet the wrath of Amariel the Owl.

As I built out the encounters I returned to the initial description of the zone I chose.

This whole time I had molded the area to fit a narrative regarding the struggle of a group of mice and two large predators. I needed to bring back the elements presented in the initial description, a meadow of bones and bees. A Queen was born.

I had decided a mystical beehive should exist somewhere in the meadow. But why this meadow? Knowing the buffalo carcasses should play a bigger part in the mysticism of this area, I sought out a magical, mystical way to incorporate the bones left behind from the noble herds. After all, Mausritter is a “sword and sorcery” style game. The connection was made between the presence of the bees, and some special white roses which grow from the thickets of bush where a buffalo once perished. There needed to be some twist on the bees. After all, Amariel the Owl was this great,silent, terrifying threat and Vrishka the python is hypnotizing the mice to do his bidding. What could the bees do to cause trouble for a habitation of mice.

Bees produce honey, and I imagine mice love honey, so what if the honey was spiked and affected the mice in a troublesome way? Enter the Mausritter conditions mechanic.

In Mausritter, conditions take up a slot in the PC’s limited equipment space. Most conditions are negative and clearing them would take priority to get that important inventory space back. What if the bees’ honey caused a condition? The official Mausritter adventure “Honey in the Rafters” (by Losing Games, available HERE) introduces curse conditions based on the encounters with cursed pollen and cursed bees from a mysterious sunflower. I didn’t want to ~~steal~~ borrow this same mechanic but twist it. After all I had so much going on already, and Vrishka the Python introduced a condition themselves. Eventually I devised that the honey would create a condition, but it would be a temporary positive condition. This condition would energize the Queens hive creating an industrious machine with which she could seek to remove the ruler of this land. (I couldn’t simply name her Queen Bezzos, that’d be too on the nose. )

Finding the industrious bees going at all hours probably gave some curious mice the idea to try the same honey. Wouldn’t you know it, the honey was a hit! Move over mouse coffee, The Wight Queens honey gives you tons of energy and tastes great.

The energized condition would eventually turn into a temporary buff to stave off the exhausted condition for a time. Once the time elapsed, the mouse would then become exhausted. What’s that bit about art imitating life…? As you’ll see when I cover the status block for the antagonists, this condition would come into play with Queen Mazzezzam’s special magic.

Connecting the Encounters

This adventure location needed to feel alive to me, and with the presence of the day/night cycle, I thought some of the encounters should carry over between the cycles.

Some examples of this in my finalized encounters are:

Vrishka can be found enthralling mice, or the mice under hypnosis, while Vrishka sleeps, can be encountered.
The presence of bees switches tone between day and night alluding to something mysterious happening to the bees because of their presence in nighttime.
A possibly hostile encounter with the Trap Door Spider during the day definitely becomes hostile at night while it waits for a meal.
Amariel the Owl uses the cover of darkness to hunt silently by diving from her perch high above.

The encounters on their own present intriguing problems for the PC’s, but they are not the whole of the story. Remembering the why is important and something I pay particular attention to in the stat blocks for the antagonists.

Making My Adventure Location for Mausritter Part 2

The Encounters

The Five W’s

Limiting Yourself

Connecting the Encounters

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