Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io… Under the Garden

A search and rescue adventure by Renasdoodles, level 1
For Mausritter
  A bit outside my usual interests this time. Under the Garden is a bucolic little kidnapping adventure written for Mausritter, although I am haunted by the note in the module that it can be used in other “sword and whiskers” games if the players are all playing mice. How vast of a genre are we talking about here? Are there edition wars? Dueling Discord communities? Do a bunch of hirsute grognards congregate in some village of Cornwall for the “Vermingaming Convention”, while Americans wear fake mouse ears in Kansas City for “Redwall Con”? I blanche at the thought.
  Anyway this is a 5-page adventure where you are a bunch of mice rescuing other mice who were kidnapped by rats to feed to a magical snake who the rats worship as a god. Yes, that is the plot that suggested itself, fully-formed, in all of our minds about two seconds after hearing the premise of Mausritter. But what matters for these things are the details. How developed is the mystery? How interesting is the setting and are the NPCs? How good is the map?
  Uh oh. Not very. Not at all. 404 file not found.
  It’s going to be short to list what I liked again. The boxed text is close to maxing out, but keeps itself to just three sentences in reasonably charming passages. Formatting is crisp and clear, looks nice. The list of NPCs gives all of them character and “things to play with”, although their personalities are a little trite. Finally and most admirably, the adventure offers multiple cases where the party can fail without completely wiping out, and seems to realize that there’s a good chance that canny players will go off the rails and be clever with solutions that might have partial successes.
  Thus what can be improved first is to give us more details that would support those players leaving the rails…all the adventure does now is say “let them”. I’m going to harp on this again but that’s where a physical map of the geography in which the adventure takes place really comes in handy, having that particular picture is worth a lot more than a thousand words when it comes to wandering time. The bulleted list of clues to be found in every scene isn’t a bad idea, but the actual descriptions of the physical spaces make delivery awkward. Having more quirks and interest to the characters of both the mouse-village and the rat-town, as well as to the NPCs, would be nice. What we have here is basically what you’d exactly expect from a standard mouse TTRPG level-1 adventure. And now I feel silly for the words I type.
  The best use case for Under the Garden is to use the adorable cover illustration multiple times in all your many long years of mouse-based-gaming. I suppose it’s also nice to have the Platonic Ideal of the Generic Mousegame Adventure. It’s been written, guys, we can feel free to advance further. I suggest instead a campaign based on the novel Salamandastron. Eulalia, good sirs.
  Final Rating? */***** But just pleasant enough to make me feel mean about it.

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