Review 39 - Stumpsville
In an attempt to create some brain whiplash (I'm writing this review immediately after writing last week's), we're going to move from information firehose to succinct and simple. It's another introductory adventure too. This week I'm talking about Stumpsville, the sample adventure site included in the Mausritter core rules.
The sole writing, illustrating, and design credit on this goes to Isaac Williams. I also want to point out here that Mausritter has perhaps the best GM advice content in any tabletop adventure game that I have ever read, both in its presentation and in terms of the actual advice being given. I'm more than certain that a lot of it takes inspiration and guidance from other games, but it feels like such a cohesive whole here that I feel like any person brand new to the hobby could pick up this game and be prepared to run it in a very short time. The introductory hexcrawl and adventure site only solidifies this.
The premise of Stumpsville is very simple, and indeed it is a single two-page spread that comprises the entirety of the adventure. The mice of a nearby village are worried because nobody has heard from Stumpsville for quite some time, and the PCs are sent to investigate and find out what happened.
Getting it to the Table
As mentioned, this is a refreshingly brief and concise adventure compared to certain other things I have reviewed. Will this single adventure site give you fifteen sessions that will provide dozens of hooks to different parts of a larger world? No, of course not. But it accomplishes what it sets out to do very well, which is to give you an introduction to the game and its philosophy, while giving you a nice entry into the larger hexcrawl that is also provided as a starting point.
This one required absolutely zero preparation other than reading through the area key a couple of times to get familiar with the details. I also copied the stat blocks of the creatures that were likely to be encountered into my own game tracker, because they were not included in the adventure itself. I'm not going to hold that against them because they're all in the core rules, which is itself only 25 pages long-- not a big issue to refer to them in that way.
Everything about the adventure site can tie directly to the rules and principles as presented in the text, from the need for caution to avoid rolling for extra encounters to the importance of paying attention to details of the surroundings to reveal clues that indicate traps or places where treasure might be hidden. I really only have one criticism about the encounter table, which I'll detail in the "What Didn't Work" section.
There were also some details that were just a little bit too concise where a GM would need to do a little creative thinking in order to tie the loose ends together-- the idea is that the PCs are looking for clues as to what happened to the residents of Stumpsville. What actually happened is mentioned in the introduction to the adventure site, but the GM is not told specifically how to convey this information to the players. A seasoned GM would likely decide to transmit this through interaction with the hidden villagers in one of the houses, or gleaned from questioning any of the rat gang that the PCs can talk to instead of just killing, but a new GM might struggle on that point.
What Worked?
- Beautifully concise layout. Bullet points detailing the important stuff, with slightly more explanation of the more complex bits.
- Situation, not plot. The players will learn about the current state of affairs in Stumpsville and then it is left up to them to decide how to proceed. This isn't D&D5e where a guns-blazing approach will work, so it ties back to the principles of planning carefully and stacking the odds in your favor. There are plenty of features that can be used to the PCs advantage if they think about it carefully, like the guard snake and the convenient flute that puts the snake in a trance. Now if only they could get the flute away from the rat who is playing it...
- Non-linear environment. There are multiple ways to various parts of the village, so there are choices to be made right away, weighing the risk against the convenience. My players didn't like the looks of the (trapped) main gate and looked for a back door. One exists, but it's locked and they ran the risk of running into encounters trying to get it opened.
What Didn't Work?
- Potentially significant change due to random encounter. The final entry on the encounter table is "guard snake, escaped from its cage". This is a potentially fatal encounter to just have happen randomly, and while I'm ok with avoiding the idea of "balance" and players knowing when to retreat, this felt like it could potentially put the adventure at risk of being a lost cause. I might be a little bit biased because this ended up being how my players dealt with the fact that they were massively outnumbered by rats-- they devised a clever plan of neutralizing the snake with the flute and then releasing it once they were safely behind the cheese cave gate, letting the snake take care of the rats. It might have been find if they'd found the snake wandering around before, but since the rats are clearly described as being loud enough to be heard from the courtyard, it seems more likely that the snake, upon escaping, would have headed there first. Maybe I'm thinking about it too hard. It's a mouse game.
Final Thoughts
Overall, this is a great little adventure site that is just the right size to give people a feel for how this game plays and can easily be used to kick off a brand new campaign. It's simple to approach from the GM perspective, and it's among the best introductory adventures that I've ever had the pleasure of running.
You can get the Mausritter core rule PDF which includes this adventure site and a full hexcrawl for free at Isaac Williams' itch page, and I highly recommend that you do! Thanks for reading!