November Mausritter - Session 5
Artist Unknown. Photograph from The American Museum Journal. 1915.
This post concludes my ongoing micro-campaign of Mausritter by Isaac Williams. As ever, I'll endeavor to keep this spoiler-free for the players, but if you are planning to ever play The Estate adventure collection, steer clear.
Toe to Head
This week our party consisted of:
- Rosemary Butterball, fragile but skillful kitchen collector
- Adolphus Gris, river boat gambler and would-be strategist
- Fennel Witter, a sewer guide with a larcenous streak
As we began, Fennel arrived at the right foot of the Murrelet's tower, a rusting suit of armor standing in the corner of the human's garage. The cockroach guards outside allowed her in, assuming she was with the other mice who had just recently arrived.
Rosemary and Adolphus found themselves in the armor's right leg, standing over the Wizard Murrelet's sleeping "apprentices." They gave their valuables to Horatio and Mauster Rogers to ferry back to Brickport (their respective players being unavailable). They made their way up to the cuirass and their linked up with Fennel.
The party discussed their plan for dealing with Murrelet. They decided the wizard was too dangerous to confront directly and eventually settled on sending Fennel, the only mouse Murrelet had not met yet, up to deliver a drugged cucumber slice in the hopes of befuddling the wizard.
Before they went up, Adolphus paused to interview one of the wizard's "upper deck" apprentices, who was busy indexing the clutter that filled this space. They discovered that Murrelet had recently ensorcelled his previous cook.
Up at the shoulder, Adolphus applied disguise make up to make Fennel look like the apprentice they had just interviewed. Rosemary peeked under a nearby door, using her gelatinous form from her recent sliming to squeeze her head through the narrow opening. The room beyond seemed to be filled with glass jars, a large chest, and an engraved chunk of wood. Afterwards, she slithered out through the seam in the armor's neck out onto the shoulder. There she found the weight of the statue was being held up by a mouse-scale sword, stabbed through a bracket into the wall. She considered taking it, but thought better of it.
Duplicitous Dinner
With cucumber in tow, Fennel crept into Murrelet's tower. The wizard was busy, alternating between berating a large bat that loomed nearby and dissecting a spider. The spider seemed to be partially composed of clockwork. Fennel waited in the shadows until Murrelet pulled a bell cable for a servant to remove the spiders' remains.
Fennel's disguise worked and she successfully persuaded the obstreperous wizard to try the cucumber. He took a bite and sent her and the bat away.
In the hall, Adolphus told the bat, which seemed to be mute, to wait and see what followed. The bat shrugged agreement.
Fennel returned and, under the pretense of clearing the wizard's plate, asked him to finish the cucumber. Muddled and tired by its effects, he agreed. As soon as he did, Adolphus sprung into the room and demanded he free the slumbering apprentices and restore the bat's voice.
Despite his significant willpower, Murrelet found himself unable to take a hostile action thanks to the muddling cucumber's stacking effect. Fennel threatened him at mace-point. Defeated he agreed. He bid Fennel smash a nearby tablet, a spell under construction featuring the silhouette of the helmet they stood inside of. When pressed by Rosemary, Murrelet explained he planned to animate the suit of armor to take over the human house. Like all spells, this one required an equivalent exchange - the mobility of a huge number of mice.
For the bat, Murrelet asked them to fetch a coffer from the base of the tower. The party had already recovered the coffer's contents, a live tongue. When replaced in the bat's mouth, it magically fastened itself back into place. Enraged, the pat demanded payment of Murrelet's debt. The party didn't intervene as the bat carried the wizard off, flapping away through a port in the shoulder.
The Spoils
With the master of the tower dealt with, the party set about looting its contents and checking in with the various residents.
In Murrelet's study, the party found three spells: Fear, Grease, and Be Understood. The wizard didn't keep much in the way of notes, but the spider dissection documents featured an underlined name - Zipporah.
The party successfully negotiated a new contract with the martial cockroaches: 500 pips per week, plus lodgings, for their continued services. The cockroaches happily fell into line, glad to be rid of the meddlesome wizard.
The "upper deck" apprentices, promised eventual mastery of the cosmos, decided to leave. They took some minor trinkets with them but nothing of significant value.
The "lower deck" apprentices, freed from their ensorcelled slumber, also wanted to get as far from the tower as possible. Some agreed to convoy back to Brickport, while others headed off to points farther off in the hopes of beating the first snow. Among the crowd, the party finally talked with Milaster Burley, the missing son they had been searching for. He shared that he had been sent here by Reverend Basil, the now-imprisoned reverend in Brickport, after he had inquired about the whereabouts of his sister.
Searching the rest of the tower, the party found another 1500 pips in assorted trinkets, a glass jar full of coffee beans, and 11 primed spell tablets - potentially valuable to the right buyer.
Fennel decided to stay behind and supervise the martial roaches while the rest of the party escorted Milaster and the other mice to Brickport. The trip to town was uneventful, most of the town's temporary population having left after the Frocagle Race. Along the way, Milaster expressed that his mother, Gwendoline Burley, was the real power in Brickport. Rescuing him and his sister was as much a show that you can't mess with the mouse settlement as the gesture of a concerned parent.
Nonetheless, Gwendoline was delighted to see him. We close on a party at the Biscuit Tin Inn to celebrate his turn and the party being paid for their efforts.
Meanwhile...
With the party reconvening to put their newfound warband of martial roaches to work, we get four vignettes of major players around the Estate.
Sabrina the Witch-Cat delivers a bribe, stolen silverware from the human household, to the Blue Magpies. Where once the two factions were enemies, now they are uneasy allies.
Zipporah the Spider Queen rules from her throne room in the face of a grandfather clock. Her court is full of clockwork automata and cyborg spiders.
The Blue Magpies pop corks on sparkling cider to toast their new silver nest in the heart of the Orchard. Below them, chaos reigns as mice are menaced by monstrous rotten apple creatures.
Grak Batter and the crew of the Rat Rocket are lost in the sewers beneath the manor. Their metal canoe is harried by skeletal rats as they search for the Spell of Undeath.
GM Notes
So ends our micro-campaign of Mausritter. It was a somewhat abbreviated session, in part because I was anticipating a fight with Murrelet and potentially his assistants. The party has unfinished business regarding the Chapel of Eternal Peace and Sabrina the Cat, but those felt like they would need more than a third of a session to unfold.
I'll save thoughts on Mausritter as a whole for an overview/index post, like I did with The Electrum Archive. Overall, I enjoyed running it, but there are parts that I would adapt for this style of ensemble play where different players join each session, but we don't always end back in town.
I feel like I was a bit overly permissive this session. I let Fennel through the front gate without paying a tribute (or conning her way in), though I stand by that decision based on my overwhelming prejudice towards getting the party together at the beginning of the session regardless of who the group is composed of and where they might be joining from.
The interaction with Murrelet was more nuanced. On one hand, this could have been a bombastic set piece encounter. On the other hand, the players had a clear plan that leveraged items they had quested for previously and seemed like a reasonable approach. I had Fennel test WIL to persuade the wizard to eat the first bite of cucumber, but figured that being muddled and suggestible and generally preferring to avoid "double jeopardy," he just ate the rest.
This led to a fun tense moment where Murrelet rolled with triple disadvantage against his sizable WIL of 15. If he had passed all 4 rolls, we would have an Initiative roll (with basically 50/50 odds for each party member), then he would have absolutely annihilated the party with the raw damage of spellcasting in this system. I hope that the stakes there were obvious and I tried to ham up the four rolls to make it feel climactic.
In retrospect, I think I probably would should have called another WIL test to see if he caved. I justified to myself that he would just give them the prize and then exact horrific revenge later, but I don't know that I conveyed that in the moment. At the very least, he's now a question mark in the setting. Will the bat finish him off or will he return to be a thorn in the party's side?
Closing out the "season" of play, I enjoyed sharing some of the faction turn content I had been rolling in the background. It sets the stage for future campaigns. There's still a lot of the Estate left to work with and folks seemed reasonably interested in another micro-campaign in the new year.