Mouse Guard Play Report — Session 1

Special Delivery

Hello fellow role players! It’s been a while since my last series of play reports, but the dry spell is over! Last week I began running Mouse Guard for one of my groups, and wow, what a game. We all had a great time, and I’m happy to report my players were much more engaged with both the game and the fiction than they’ve been for other systems. Something about Mouse Guard has just “clicked” with this group, and I can’t wait to take them on further adventures through the Mouse Territories.

If you’re not familiar with the game, Mouse Guard is based on the comic of the same name by David Petersen, and was written by Petersen and Luke Crane (of Burning Wheel and Torchbearer fame). The setting is rich and interesting; falling somewhere between Redwall and Game of Thrones; and the systems of the game are designed to promote roleplaying and teamwork, and to also evoke the bloody-yet-whimsical fantasy which Petersen has created. I was excited to run the game because it takes the lessons and ethos of Burning Wheel and Torchbearer, and streamlines them into a much more accessible package. My players were excited to play cute mice with swords.

Now, this isn’t going to be a review of the game — I like it, and my players found it enjoyable. If you’re looking for a more in-depth introduction or review of the system, I highly recommend you check out Eric Vulgaris’s excellent streams; Under the Fallen Maple and Whiskers and Whiskey; or the recent Rollplay one-shot. Eric in particular is a great source of information about the game, and makes regular appearances in reddit threads.

With all of these resources available to me, I decided to cheat on the prep a bit. I’ve written before about how little prep I tend to do, and since Adam Koebel had been so nice as to publish his mission, I just took that and concerned myself with learning the rules. This resulted in a bit more “on-the-rails” session than I normally do, but more on that later. Let’s meet our patrol!

• Jasper, the cautious veteran. Jasper’s been around the guard for a while, and has managed to survive — primarily because he’s convinced danger lurks around every corner, and one must always be on the look out. He’s the most mouse-like of the patrol.
• Aengus, the good-natured fighter. Aengus is from Lockhaven, the fortress of the Mouse Guard, and has immersed himself in their history and ideals. He believes in defending the weak, but is mostly on the look out for his next party.
• Quinn, the stalwart idealist. Where Aengus has immersed himself in the ideals of the Guard, Quinn has fully embraced them. To her, the Guard is the one thing keeping the predators at bay, and wants only the best for mousekind as a whole. She seeks to always embody those lofty ideals.
• Finn, the even-tempered healer. Finn is the patrol’s realist; the natural order of life is messy, and mice get hurt. He’s embraced his natural gifts as a healer, and is just as quick to treat a fallen enemy as he is a friend or fellow guardmouse. However, Finn also recognizes that for all mice to survive, some might have to be left behind.

The Mission, Should You Choose to Accept It

Mouse Guard differs from many other RPGs in that it is very structured. Rather than having free-flowing adventures, a session of Mouse Guard centers around a mission (not unlike Dogs in the Vineyard), which is then broken into a series of “turns;” different phases where either the GM or the Players take narrative control.

As I mentioned, instead of coming up with my own mission, I decided to just use the one Adam Koebel had drawn up for the Rollplay one-shot. The upside to this was that I didn’t really have to do any prep at all. The downside was since my group and I were so engrossed in both the game and learning the rules, I ended up railroading things a bit more than I normally would have.

The mission itself was fairly straightforward; Gwendolyn, the matriarch of the Mouse Guard; tasked Jasper’s patrol with escorting a prisoner, Wulfrid, to face justice in the far-off settlement of Port Sumac. Gwendolyn stressed to the players the need for the prisoner to arrive alive and, if possible, unharmed. She then dismissed the junior patrol members, and gave Jasper instructions to interrogate Wulfrid — he was an insurgent, and had been arrested for inciting violence against the Guard. Gwendolyn, knowing Wulfrid was just a bit player in a larger organization, wanted Jasper to find out who was pulling the malcontent’s strings.

With the mission established, the players each created goals for their characters, which they would attempt to accomplish over the course of the mission. Goals are a corner in the triangle of systems Mouse Guard uses to encourage players to role play. Unlike games like Dungeons & Dragons, where role playing is encouraged but not mechanically rewarded*, Mouse Guard asks players to create Beliefs, Instincts and Goals for their characters, and then rewards them in-game for playing to (or against) those things. The rewards are a form of currency players can earn to do better on later rolls. Beliefs and Instincts are created during character creation, where-as goals are created at the beginning of each mission or session.

With the setup out of the way, it was time for our mice to start their long journey.

The Quick Hits

In my past play reports, I’ve gone into detail about what happened during a session, but for this report I’m just going to do a quick overview and get into some things which worked and didn’t. I’ll return to my standard style in reports for future sessions.

So, after the patrol started out from Lockhaven, they:

• Came across a fellow guard patrol trying to clear some fallen brush off of a path (mice are small, so what is inconvenient for a person is a catastrophe for them), and elected to help them clear the path. Jasper intimidated Wulfrid into obedience, and the characters then helped clear the way by passing their test.
• Attempted to find their way to Darkwater, the port where they planned to get a boat to Port Sumac. Since this mission takes place in early spring, before the paths had been cleared and repaired, they had to make a moderately difficult test to find the best path. They failed this test.
• Ended up going down the wrong path as a result of the failed test, and had to bed down for the night. During the evening, Wulfrid escaped while Quinn was on watch, and the group had to pass another test to catch him. Luckily, they did so easily, and were on their way the following morning, but not until after Quinn had tried to weasel out of the responsibility for the prisoner’s escape. So much for her ideals!
• Arrived at Darkwater, where the patrol was surprised to see the mice there had adopted currency during the winter, and were charging a toll to enter. Once again, Jasper fought back her innate desire to shrink from confrontation, and cowed the gate guards into letting them in. With that test passed, we entered into the “Player Turn” of the game.

During these encounters, I made a few mistakes which meant they ended being easier than they were designed to be. Namely, I read the rules concerning Nature incorrectly, which gave Jasper a huge advantage when trying to do things he didn’t have the skill to do.

Nature, Checks and Traits

Now, what do I mean by that? Well, in Mouse Guard, each character has something called Nature. Nature represents how mouse-like that character is. A high Nature means that a character is very much like the mice in the real world; they shy away from danger and don’t generally pick up swords to go fight things. Having a low Nature means the opposite; the mouse is brave and outgoing. The game stresses that characters need to strike a balance, never letting their Nature get too low or too high. Going to either extreme results in the character becoming unplayable.

It enforces this mechanically by allowing characters to use their Nature in place of skills they don’t possess. In Jasper’s case, it meant he could call upon his Nature to intimidate other characters. Because that’s not what mice normally do, the game calls this acting against your Nature. When a character does that, their Nature decreases temporarily whether or not they succeed. When using Nature to do something a mouse would do, like hiding, their Nature only decreases if they fail. Where I screwed up was in letting Jasper use his Nature, but then failing to decrease, or “tax” , it after the tests. This meant Japser always had a very high Nature, and thus, had no incentive to use the other systems when doing things he wasn’t skilled at. This in turn had an effect on the rest of the game’s economy; namely using Traits to earn Checks.

Along with Beliefs, Goals, and Instincts, characters in Mouse Guard have Traits, which are exactly what they sound like. For instance, Aengus is a Defender, and Finn is Compassionate. Characters can use these Traits either to help them (by occasionally getting help with a roll), or to hinder themselves (by giving extra successes to the GM). Why would a character do this? Because using Traits against themselves earns them Checks, which are what characters use during the Player Turn to do things like recover from conditions incurred during play (being injured, sick, etc.); go out and forage for food; or have a meeting with the mayor. Checks are important; characters only get one check for free, and once everyone has used their checks, the Player Turn is over, and the GM Turn starts again. During the GM Turn, characters can only engage with the obstacles the GM puts before them, and thus usually can’t advance goals or recover from injury or whatever.

So how did Jasper’s Nature break this economy? Simple — because the group was doing so well, they never felt the need to use their traits against themselves to earn Checks. Part of this is my fault; I didn’t stress enough how little they could do during the Player Turn without checks, but even if I had, they weren’t getting injured or anything — they were just moving from one obstacle to the next.

Welcome to Darkwater

Once the patrol arrived in Darkwater, the GM Turn ended, and the characters all went about doing something. Aengus went looking for a party but ended up drinking alone and getting angry about it. Quinn went to the jail where Wulfrid was being held to talk him into telling her why he hated the Guard so much. Jasper decided to have a conversation with the town mayor about “currency,” (instead of working towards her goal to discover Wulfrid’s cohorts!), and Finn spent all night haggling with ferrymen to get a boat to Port Sumac. We ended there, with the Player Turn done, and the GM Turn ready to begin next time. Two of the players had suffered Conditions, which would have mechanical implications for the next session, and only one of them had worked towards their goal.

Final Thoughts

We really enjoyed Mouse Guard. I’ve played a few systems with this group, and none of them have gotten everyone engaged in the same way. The system encourages role playing and teamwork in a way few other systems do, and the source material keeps things light-hearted and fun, even when the stakes are high and things look grim. It’s also a fairly accessible and forgiving system, which is important, since Luke Crane’s other games often border on inscrutable.

I personally learned a few good lessons during this first session, especially in terms of balancing how to “fail forward.” For one, I need to use failures to inflict Conditions on the characters more often, I think, as opposed to always setting up new obstacles to overcome. And of course, I need to use Nature properly. But in the end, we all had a great time, and are excited to see how this mission ends!

Until next time, keep your ears up and your nose to the ground!

*I know D&D says to award Inspiration for role playing, but Inspiration is a lazy system, and since they don’t tell you “when a player does X, give Inspiration,” I don’t consider it a mechanical reward.