The Mice-Men of Mirewald: Spring

 Where to get it: Creator's itch.io page

Much like its titular characters, The Mice-Men of Mirewald is small and cute. I'm actually reviewing both the main rules document and the setting document, because combined they come in at a total of 6 pages (one of which is a map). The best part about it is the art direction. It's colorful, medieval-feeling, and there are cute mouse-men doing adventuring-type things. It's pretty much ideal for the subject matter.

The system itself is fine. It's a simple limited-dice pool. You roll up to 3 dice and your goal is to roll under a target number, if you're doing something mouse-related and over the same target number if you're doing something man-related. That number is chosen at character creation, along with the single trait and simple equipment list that determines how many dice you roll. The GM sometimes rolls opposing dice, but overall, the system is more of a results-engine than anything super tactical.

Give the short length of the rules, you're pretty much expected to play near-freeform and it will probably work out okay. It's not explicitly stated, but GMs will want to frame scenes around a single problem and then require at most one roll per PC to wrap the scene up.

The book itself provides a simple campaign model - you're mice on a mission to deliver the mail, despite inclement weather and giant (relative to a mouse) predators. There are even short tables that allow you to generate weather effects, sidequests, and dramatic reversals, though I can't imagine the simple premise has enough longevity to make rolling worthwhile. Since there are only 6 entries on each table, I'd probably just use each of them once in an extended adventure.

Overall, I'd say this was well worth the 15 minutes it took for me to read it. It probably won't spark any epic campaigns, but it could serve as a memorable one-shot.

Ukss Contribution: It's undoubtedly redundant for Ukss to have both talking rats and talking mice, so I'll just use this particular contribution to flesh out the culture of the Awakened Rats. The specific thing that most impressed me was, in fact, the game's central premise. I really like the idea of a mouse (i.e. rat)-driven postal service. It's positively adorable just thinking about it.