Reskinning Winter's Daughter for Mausritter
After almost a decade without DMing, I recently got back into it and decided to run a game for a small group of 3 players. After agonizing a bit over which adventure to run, I decided upon OSE's Winter's Daughter, based on the high number of recommendations I saw for it. However, at the same time I also really wanted to DM Mausritter, because the idea of playing as mice in a dangerous world sounded much more interesting and evocative to me than playing as your classic adventurer archetypes. Not only that, but I also knew I'd be able to sell it more easily to my players, since one of them is a biologist, and another likes cute animals.
(I did consider running Stumpsville -- the module included in the Mausritter guide -- but Winter's Daughter is much more fleshed out, which gave me the confidence that I needed as a newbie DM. Having run both adventures now, I think that this was the best choice.)
I searched a little bit on the web about reskining Winter's Daughter for Mausritter, but I couldn't find any details, only people mentioning that they did it. So here is the conversion I used...
Creature conversion
For converting creatures, I considered that mice measure around 3.5" / 9cm, and tried to maintain a reasonable sense of scale. However, this served only as a basis, since even the Mausritter book takes some liberties (the official module "Honey in the Rafters" has bees that appear to have similar size to mice, even though they usually have around 1 or 2cm at most). So keep that in mind.
- Humans: mice, naturally.
- Horses: lizards (something like an Amazon lava lizard).
- Hounds: geckos (see tropical house gecko or common house gecko).
- Sheep: beetles (something from Byrrhoidea).
- Owls: small dragonflies (like scarlet dwarves).
- Cats: aphids (see greenbugs).
- Wolves: spiders (specifically, wolf spiders, which the Mausritter guide describes as "hunting in packs". While writing this post, I found out that they actually hunt alone, but I'd still keep them like this and sacrifice a little bit of biological correctness).
- Dolmenwood Goblins: leaf frog (see Phyllomedusinae).
- This is particularly interesting since Dolmenwood Goblins can "vary widely in shape", which lends itself quite well to the huge color and shape variety of leaf frogs (compare Phyllomedusa, Phasmahyla and Cruziohyla).
- Dolmenwood Troll: cane toad (see Rhinella marina).
- Reasonably 5 times larger than a leaf frog, which fits well with the "goblin mounted on troll" scene inside the mound. The problem is that cane toads are not that much larger than mice, which I hand-waved by saying that this is a big boi.
- Frost elves: the hardest one. I called them "fairies" and went full Tinkerbell: they were diminute humans with blue-ish skin that is cold to the touch. None have wings, except the Princess, who has butterfly wings due to being royalty.
Throughout the adventure
Outside the Mound
- Iron owls: dragonflies, also metallic, also with pentagrams in their eyes. Clinging to the tree trunks, static.
- Huge, warty toad: a ladybug.
- Tipsy goblin merchants: tipsy leaf frogs.
- Twiching Stag Skeleton: lizard skeleton. Since lizards are already used for horses, so I described it as a "wild lizard species, not the tamed kind that is mounted and bred by mice".
- Wormtongues: can be run as written, funnily enough.
The Burial Mound
- Vision of a beautiful woman: run as written, but mention that it's a beautiful mouse lady.
- Sound of hounds baying: sound of reptiles crawling (the original isn't that open-ended, but I think I prefer it this way? "Reptiles" can be lizards, geckos, snakes... puts the players more on edge, I think).
- Brass plaques: Brigford the Wise has a gecko at his side (instead of a hound), and Emaline is cradling a greenbug (instead of a cat).
- Statues with weapons:
- Battle axe is engraved with a lizard's head.
- Warhammer has a head shaped like a possum.
- Murals and reliefs: all depict Sir Chyde with geckos at side (instead of hounds), fighting an army of strange creatures.
- If the PCs know what humans look like, describe the enemy army as human-like.
- If the PCs have no idea what a human looks like (like mine did), describe the enemies as weird "naked rats with short snouts". If they investigate it a little bit more, tell them that different soldiers in the enemy army are drawn differently, like the artist was not very confident in what he was trying to depict. I think this is a fun way to solve the issue of "fairies and mice are much more different than fairies and humans" without changing fairies to mice, by also invoking the notion that medieval artists often illustrated exotic beings very poorly.
- Hanging portrait: depicts a mouse lady with golden-fur in the middle of the Whything Stones.
The Fairy Prison
- Fir trees: too large. Replaced them with Juniper, which can be much smaller and also found in wintery environments.
- Goblin shrooms: run as written, except the "purple skin" effect which I changed to "purple fur".
- Feasting table: luxurious foods like roast beetle, honeyed berries, fine wine, all kinds of cheese you've ever seen and some you've never seen...
- Princess Snowfall-at-Dusk: upon meeting her, PCs see a fairy lady, not a mouse one (as depicted on statues, painting and visions). Has golden flowing hair instead of golden fur.
Unresolved issues
Mouse Jesus: The adventure is based on the Dolmenwood setting, where one of the main factions (The Church of the One True God) is basically not!Christianity. Because of this, there are several crucifixes described in the module (the blindfold, the item in the Hall of Guardians, etc). During prep, I decided to keep those crucifix mentions as-is and rule that mice in this world have a "mouse Jesus" of sorts, which is also represented as a crucifix. During play, I could tell that players found this a bit strange, and immersion was a little bit broken. The confusion was resolved when one of them said "of course, the mice are Ratholics!".
If I ran this adventure again, I would think a little bit about replacing the crucifixes with a different symbol. I would not depart too much from Christianity, however, because of the whole theme of Sir Chyde being a crusader and so on.
Princess deceit: In the adventure, the Princess can appear as a vision to one of the players, asking their help to obtain Sir Chyde's ring. Upon entering the tomb, the players then find statues and paintings of this Princess. Crucially, none of these encounters with the princess makes it obvious that she is fae. If we reskin humans as mice and fae as Tinkerbells, however, we arrive at a problem!
My solution was to double down on the Princess deceit: she appears as a mouse in the visions to attract the PCs, and the statues/painting depict her as a mouse because Sir Chyde lied to the artists (he wanted depictions of her, but could not disclose her true nature). This matches the characters' motivations well, and added a new layer to the adventure that I think worked very well: when the PCs enter the Princess' chambers in the Marble Tower, it is the first time they are seeing her true form! It's a cool moment that does not exist in the original adventure.
Summary
Did it work? It sure did! My players had a blast, and I did as well: the adventure is indeed very well-built, with a mixture of exploration and roleplaying that appeased my group. With the changes above, disbelief is rarely suspended and things flow quite well from one scene to another.
The only issue is that "being a mouse" is not at the core of this module, unlike many of the Mausritter official adventures I've read. After the adventure ended, the players were discussing and agreed that they felt that being mice did not add anything to the table, and that they could have been anything else (catfolk, dogfolk, etc) without much of an impact. And that's true! Even so, they said that they still found it fun and cute to play as mice, and that they would like if future adventures were reskinned in this same way. I don't know if I'll take them up on that offer, but there it is. Thinking about it now, I'd love to DM "The Black Argentine giant tegu of Brandonsford"... Hm...
- Vini