good ideas from Mausritter

Mausritter is a fantasy role-playing game in the neighborhood of Bunnies & Burrows and the Redwall novels. Neither of those are my normal bag but I can see the appeal of playing a cute little mousey with a sword. My good buddy sarkos pointed me towards it and after a quick glance it has at least two things referees for other FRPGs could borrow:

1) Card/tile based encumbrance tracking. This is easier to show rather than tell, so I'll share an image from the Mausritter website:

 

 

As the website says, this "minimises bookkeeping and maximises hard choices." A physical medium like this can also make it super easy to adjudicate who is holding what in what hand. You ever discover that the mapper (who should be wielding ink and paper) is also the torchbearer and is holding a magic wand ready as well? Having a spaces labeled "right hand" and "left hand" that only fit one item card each solves that nicely. 

Also, I dig the six space backpack. If I used that I'd actually keep the items in the backpack shuffled and face down during combat. If someone wanted to get something out of their pack, they would turn over one or maybe two items per round searched. Do you make use of what you've found or do you keep searching?

2) Need a quickie adventure? You could do a lot worse than Mausritter's online adventure site generator to get started. It's not a complete dungeon generator, but it's enough to riff off of.