Review - The Flooded Greenhouse
I Swoon For Toads That Swallow Characters
The Flooded Greenhouse is a tri-fold adventure in English and Spanish for Mausritter by David M. Alfaro. Mice will explore the titular flooded greenhouse and see what dangers are inside.
Whats It About?
This is a classic-format Mausritter location-based adventure in the style of Honey in the Rafters or The Estate adventures. This greenhouse, which apparently was a safe place prior to the flooding, is now in trouble as the mice who live there have been fled to flower pots hanging from the ceiling. In the water, a group of beetles is causing trouble and worshipping a giant toad. In the categories of Mausritter adventures that have been discussed recently over on Between Two Cairns, this one is set in the regular human world, with humans presumably unaware of the magic that goes on among the tiny creatures. There's a few hooks to draw players into this place and give them goals, but then what happens from there is wide open and will be decided by the player actions, the random encounters, and how they work with or fight against the factions here.
How About the Ideas?
Solid. The Flooded Greenhouse is an excellent way to bring a jungle/swamp type location into Mausritter in a way that logically still incorporates a lot of human-scale objects for them to interact with. The mice up in the hanging flower pots is genius. Difficult to get up there, and a precarious situation you'll want to help them with.
To repeat the header, I Swoon For Toads That Eat People. I absolutely love the toad "god" and its ability to swallow mice whole but still give them a chance to fight back out. And the beetles now worshipping the toad make for an excellent faction.
Plus there's a grumpy spider kinda off on her own as a faction. Great roleplay potential!
One thing I particularly love is the Mausritter-specific items and conditions that are added. There's a spider-related condition that makes an item unusable when it's covered in webs. I think that's a really clever way to interact with the Mausritter inventory, as the item can just be covered up by that condition to show it's unusable. Among the items, you've got clever use of human things, like a medicine bottle that serves as a waterproof container for mice, or just fun magic, like a pearl of dew that can blind nearby creatures.
What About the Execution?
I suspect this format of adventure isn't for everybody, as it gives you very little information and relies a lot on the Referee to fill things out once it gets going.
But I personally love it. Having run Honey in the Rafters multiple times and written and run my own similarly formatted adventure, I know there's more than enough here for 3-4 hours of Mausritter in this place.
There's just enough challenges, just enough faction play, just enough places to explore, to make for a really fun time once factions start interacting, random encounters start causing problems, and the players start having to make choices.
I think this is near-perfect execution of this adventure format.
The one minor nit to pick is that some of the headers didn't get translated from Spanish, but that's a pretty small issue in the scheme of things.
Art?
It's incredible! You've seen the cover image above, look at some of the NPC images and map the below. This is a case where, with the limited text, the details about the characters provided in their portraits and the details of the space provided in the map give you a lot more to go on in fleshing out the adventure.
Summary!
No excuse not to grab this. It's a top-class Mausritter adventure, completely free, but absolutely worth chipping in some money for.
This is part of my new and improved series of reviews where I'll be focusing each week on something that was recently released for free on Itch.io. I'll be making a point to pay the creators for what I review (when they accept payments), and you can help support that by chipping in a few bucks on Ko-Fi. Thanks for reading!