Powered by Moose and Squirrel (or PbMaS) is a system reference document created to help people make games inspired by TSR’s Bullwinkle and Rocky Roleplaying Party Game (long title!), originally published in 1988. That’s the year I graduated high school—I was mostly playing D&D and Battletech and Car Wars and Marvel Super Heroes back then, and had no idea that this was even a thing. Recently, however, the game has popped up in a few places in my Extremely Online™ RPG spaces, and I had to find out what it was all about.

Friends, this game is great.

We’re not here to talk about how great that game is, though. We’re here to take a scalpel and forceps and an MRI machine and some of those clicky-clacky things that look kind of like scissors but they’re more like really long clamps, and we’re going to pull the innards out of that beautiful beast and pin them to a museum display board for future generations to study.

(That’s a lot of text to read! What’s going on here, again?)

What’s going on here is that you can use this document to make your own comedic story-telling roleplaying games. Or whatever you like. That’s all.

There are two types of “Games” described in here: the “Narration Game”, and the “Everyone Plays a Character Game”. The first is lighter and requires less investment from players, but they’re both pretty simple and fun, and you can slide right from one into the other. Just add your own theme and go!

By the way, if we ever need to reference characters, Ramjet the Squirrel and Larry the Moose are the only moose and squirrel we’re going to talk about here. There are other, more famous squirrels and meese out there, of course, but they are under copyright until the year 2055. (Impotent fist shake at Disney!)