Review of Mice of Legend, a TTRPG adventure into a big world of small heroes
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Note #2: For this review, I checked out the guide and modules 1 and 2, since they had been released at this time. Other modules in the series are planned for later, but that content is not included in this review.
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Target audience for Mice of Legend
Mice of Legend is a campaign setting where characters will face challenges similar to to a typical TTRPG campaign but with a twist… as your characters are all transformed into tiny rodent versions of themselves!
The campaign includes encounters and mechanics that are OSR/D&D compatible, which is often recommended for about ages 8+ or 10+ depending on where you look. I would say that’s fairly on point. Character creation and tracking and mechanics will be similar to the existing systems. With the setting spin, it does change some of the tone for the encounters found throughout the game, but players will face challenges like battles, ambushes, and investigations.
This campaign can potentially give a good balance of having some more intense confrontations than a lot of TTRPGs made for younger players to satisfy those who are looking for some combat… while still keeping a bit of the whimsy that other players may want by running around as cute but tough little mice.
Setting for Mice of Legend
Mice of Legend is set in a land of small creatures! At least… it is after the start of your adventure.
You’ll begin as a regular, low level, adventuring party who is contracted to recover a magical relic from the mouse-realm. To enter this place, you must use a magical shrine to transform into mice and seek out the object of this quest!
The new land you enter is full of familiar, but different, places to explore, from towns and taverns to rat raider camps and enemy outposts. Monsters have been reskinned into various other creatures (like hill giants into weasels and dragons into cats), and new opponents, like owls and herons, have been added to fill in the dangers of the mouse world.
Mice of Legend contains several different modules that are being released one at a time, and, in total, it is planned that it will include 8 adventure modules, 100+ NPCs and over 60 side quests across the various maps that are provided with the game.
Your character in Mice of Legend
Your character in Mice of Legend starts as a regular adventurer! They could be a human rogue, an elven fighter, or a dwarven cleric at this point… before they are recruited for the mission.
Once they are transformed into mice, your characters will be mouse versions of themselves, retaining their stats and several physical characteristics of their original character forms. From a mechanical standpoint, character creation and playing the character will be similar to playing your original, non-mouse character, so if you’re familiar with the base system that you’re using, you shouldn’t have any problems with adjusting to your new form (even if your character has some concerns about this).
Mechanics and tools in Mice of Legend
Mice of Legend is a campaign setting, so it’s more about how to use an existing system versus having new rules to learn. This game is going to work best with OSR and D&D mechanics, but it can be outfitted as a story base for other systems.
Where mechanics may have some difference here is in the new creatures and items that are introduced to the game to add common predators to rodents, larger creatures that may be threats or allies to your characters’ new forms, and gear that is specific to your small stature.
For the GM, there are a lot of tools that assist with creating the story and leading the game. There’s plenty of NPCs, so you don’t have to create too many of your own (for me… making random characters is one of the hardest parts of the game at the spur of the moment), and the maps and encounter lists are GREAT at giving lots of well defined options for players to explore… while providing the GM with enough information to facilitate everything (creatures with stats, encounter tables, NPCs with stats, area descriptions, etc).
Overall thoughts on Mice of Legend
Overall, I thought Mice of Legened was a fun spin on a classic TTRPG quest, making it fresh and exciting. Our house is a fan of TTRPGs that involve little critters as the player characters, and this is one that would fit in for games that are a bit more like some of the TTRPGs we play with our grown up friends but that has that “Secrets of NIMH” kind of vibe too.
I really enjoyed the amount of NPC and encounter information that was provided, which made this feel like a totally filled in world. There’s tons of options to check out, making it a bit sandboxy to handle players’ curiousity, but everything’s also been planned out enough to where the GM shouldn’t need to come up with too much without assistance.
The illustrations throughout this have also been really fun to check out – there’s plenty of drawings full of action or scenery AND there’s even a fun comic at the end of the starter game guide (module 0) where the mouse party is trying to open an “impossible” door.
Find a copy of Mice of Legend
You can find Mice of Legend on DriveThruRPG. As of writing this, the following modules are available:
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