A Miraculous Mousy Metamorphosis

By Paul Hoeffler
The Alchemical Press
OSRIC
Levels 1-3

Navigating through the sprawling wilderness, your party enters the quaint hamlet of Braeford, a community perpetually besieged by marauding rat raiders. Your mission unfolds amidst this perilous backdrop, promising a blend of adventure, danger, and unexpected discoveries.

This 30 page adventure has the party fighting orcs, kobolds, and other humanoids in a couple of missions given to them by the town guard. The sites are boring and staid and the text to get there is loooonng and without much flavour. 

I don’t want to hear it. It could have been good. There was that adventure back in Dungeon that was good. Or maybe had potential? I forget. Anyway, it shrunk you down. “Rely on your ingenuity!” this one says. Ha! Nothing like that. This is a mouseworld adventure. You get turned in to mice. The rest of this is just the boring version of D&D. Instead of humans there are mice people. Instead of orcs and kobolds there are rats. Instead of gnolls there are black rats. Your size does not matter AT ALL. Everything is scaled to you. The only thing that DOES seem to matter is the occasional hawk or owl. That’s the only evidence that this is not bog standard D&D. And “giant hawk” and/or “giant owl” are, I think, monsters that have appeared. Again, this is just normal old D&D. Everything is scaled down and a search/replace has been done to replace orc with rat. NOTHING else matters related to a mouse-sized world or a being a mouse. If you take B2 and replace “human, elf, dwarf” with “mouse” and all of the monster names with some derivation of “rat” then you understand what this adventure is. Window dressing. Nothing more.

And, at that, it’s pretty poor. Three thing happen. When you reach town one, after transforming, it is raided at night by “rats.” After that you get encouraged to go ferret (ha!) them out at their lair. Which is seven rooms. Then you go to an overrun fortress with eleven rooms with rats. End of adventure. Nothing interesting happens in any part of this. Oh, it’s a room with two rats. Oh, it the literal tripwire pit trao. Oh, it’s a room with rats, rat women and rat children. It’s a room with one rat. Oh, it’s a room with some rats in it. Of, it’s a room with a rat and some prisoner mice.It’s the rat shaman room, and then the rat leaders room and then the double rat treasury. It’s just a room with a fucking rat, man. You stab it and move on. The other stuff is like this also. And there’s no real order of battle, just stab them and move on. Oh! Oh! The initial town raid? You know, the rats raid the town of mice in the middle of the night. The DM is given three options.  A sentry can shot the alarm, or the party can lead the defences, or some soldiers can come to help the party. That’s it. The section takes up a third or half a page and there is NOTHING to it. Just that they attack. No details beyond what I typed. No vignettes No situations. 

Worry not though! The text is long and the only formatting is an occasional section break or the bolded monster in a room. It takes THREE LINES to tell us one room has light in it. THREE FUCKING LINES. Conversational and padded out.  “If you camp for the night then there will be a higher than average probability of a random encounter (twice as likely)” Jesus Christ man. “Like most of the town he is a follower of the goddess Berwyn” It’s just meaningless trivia, padded out FOR. EVER. I was thinking about this. Where do people learn this? It has to be that they are emulating all of the previous adventures they have seen. The endless text blobs or WoTC and Paizo and Chaosim. That’s what people think an adventure is so that’s what they write. Would that I could just snap my fingers and make all of these things go away. But, of course, a good adventure is only a side effect, the big boys are looking for sales. A good adventure is just a nice coincidence. 

The very first door in the adventure, that hides EVERYTHING else behind it, is a problem. You must succeed in a lockpick, break it down roll or spell it open. And if nothing fails? I guess you’re stuck there forever Now, obviously, thats not going to happen, the DM is going to fudge something. But then WHY?! Why put it in there? It is meaningless. 

There is absolutely nothing to see here. 

This is $10 at DriveThru. The preview is six pages. You’re going to have to intuit, from pages four through six, how the formatting and padding goes.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/497328/module-m1-a-miraculous-mousy-metamorphosis?1892600

I’m gonna go listen to Dua Lippa on repeat to get through this.