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Mini-review, Maze Rats

Maze Rats

Published by Questing Beast Games, Ben Milton's Maze Rats is a tight little old school RPG that uses new rules to emulate old-style play. Originally developed as variant rules for Into the Odd, Maze Rats creates a classless 2d6 based system that is fairly familiar to players of D&D style games, but strips it down to minimalistic systems. Combat in Maze Rats is brutal, advancement is limited, and play is very straightforward. This isn't surprising since Milton has used this set of rules to run games for elementary school students.

Within this very small set of rules, Milton manages to squeeze in some fantastically useful random tables, GMing advice, and a system of freeform semi-Vancian magic that means that characters are granted randomly-generated spells each time they prepare spells, which is both simple and potentially very weird.

Maze Rats presents a set of rules that would be easy to run, but in a way that still requires the person running the game to know a bit about how to run a game. Overall, though, I find this one of the better compact old-school games, and one of the most willing to depart from the original rules to which so many old-school designers seem tied to.
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