The Blog Glatisant

Maze Rats is now available!

My endlessly-revised RPG is complete, and live on DriveThruRPG! Go there to download it now!

Maze Rats is a RPG and sandbox toolkit for old-school-style adventuring. It contains a single, compact page of rules, a one-page character creation guide, a hand-drawn character sheet, and eight pages of 66-item random tables, rollable with 2d6. Each page contains 9-12 tables, covering everything from spell and monster generation, through NPCs, treasures, cities, wildernesses, and dungeons. If you run (or have always wanted to run) open sandbox adventures, Maze Rats offers everything you need in a compact, easily-referenced format. Also included is two pages of advice for preparing and running open-world games in the OSR style.

The game system itself is 2d6 based. Character are extremely quick to generate, making it great for convention games, one-shots, or introducing new players. The game is highly lethal, and assumes a style of play where caution is essential to long-term survival. It is technically classless, but the leveling options allow players to specialize in fighting, thievery or wizardry or some mixture of the three. Magic is simple and chaotic, with new randomly-generated spells filling the magic-user’s head each night. Everything about the game is designed to be as clean, fast, and intuitive as possible, while driving players towards creative solutions rather than brute force (though brute force is always an option).

11 Comments

  1. Zack Kline

    Hello,

    I just purchased Maze Rats from DriveThru RPG, as I’m super intrigued by the concept, and hope that I’ll be able to have many fun adventures with it.

    Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be published in a format I can use. I’m totally blind, and can read most PDFs from DTRPG without a problem. This seems to have been scanned, rather than created in a more traditional fashion, so all I can get out of it is the title on the first page. I presume the book was specially formatted, perhaps on account of all the tables.

    I’d really appreciate any sort of plain text version which could be created. This sounds like a great product, and I’m surprised to find it unusable. This hasn’t happened with many RPG titles before.

    Thanks for your consideration,
    Zack.

    • Ben

      Sent you an email, Zack.

  2. Irvin M.

    Hi!, first of all i would like to thank you very much for sharing this amazing RPG, i really like it for his simplicity and I’m about to run for the first time ever a game for my little sister (10 years old) and my nephew (7 years old), i was looking for something like this for a while now, so its awesome that you share it with everyone.

    Im also sharing it on my little blog pretty soon, and sharing it with my buddies on my store.

    So to show my gratitude i make a little logo for the game, hope you like it and would be awesome if you can use it for the game. If you don’t, its ok!.

    http://imgur.com/a/tIqiC

    Regards from Mexico!

    PD:Excuse my English its a little bad.

  3. Alex Wilson

    Just found Maze Rats today, and love it. The magic system and random tables are something I will get use of in other games too for sure, but I’m hoping I can bring Maze Rats to the table for my group!

  4. Abraham Gray

    I sent you a dollar. I don’t know if it will get played, but it is a good read, and that’s worth something. If I play, I’ll send more. I like the spell effects tables because they stimulate the imagination: What does a Moss Cauldron spell do? Who knows?! Is it just a bowl of moss? Do I need moss to create a cauldron? Perhaps an animated moss grows rapidly from a cauldron and covers everything in its path, including the PCs if they’re not careful. Moss breaks down rock, imagine what it will do to flesh!

    If I were to play, I might introduce a partial success like Dungeon World, though I see why you wanted either a pass-fail system so as to encourage creative puzzle solving without dice rolls, or at least to get an advantage. With a +2 bonus (without advantage), the odds of success are only 41%. Yeah I’ll try to find an iron clad means of bypassing that cave troll.

    Thank you for sharing this game.

  5. Ben Z

    Hello, fellow Ben! I tried Maze Rats for the first time last week, and was impressed. Posted a review on my blog! Thanks for the work you put into this.

    • Ben

      Just read the review! Thanks for writing it. I rarely get to hear reports of what people’s experience of the game was like, so that was fun. Are you on G+?

      • Ben Z

        Technically, haha. (I have a profile, but never really used it and haven’t touched it in 5 years.) I’m on there as Ben Zerbe, though, for whatever that’s worth. Thanks for the share!

      • Ben Z

        Technically, haha. (I have a profile, but never really used it and haven’t touched it in 5 years.) I’m on there as Ben Zerbe, though, for whatever that’s worth.
        Thanks for the share!

  6. Pimpleton Joans

    I’m reporting a minor typo in Maze Rats v4.3. In the section Building The World where it says “…interesting compilations” I’m guessing you meant “complications”.

  7. Bryan M

    I’m super stoked about this game. I’m going to run my kids through it this weekend. Are you planning on making this a POD on LuLu by any chance?

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