Hi guys,
last week I finally received the MG rulebook… I’m only halfway through it but I’m loving it (I have a ton of questions, but I’ll post them later). Anyway, a very simple background question came to my mind while reading: how do mice count years? What happened in that “year 0”? Oddly enough, this never occured to me reading the comics (but I’ve only read the fall 1152 issues).
I don’t think there’s anything “official” yet concerning the background history of Mouse Guard. I’m pretty sure that Luke Crane and David Petersen collaborated a TON, which is why there’s a lot of stuff in the roleplaying game book that you won’t see in the Fall 1152 series. I think there’s only a few things in the Winter series that were not explicitly mentioned in the RPG.
Knowing that Luke probably doesn’t intend to add expansions or supplements to the game, I’m almost sure that the intention is for the players and GMs to just “make your own story”. That’s pretty much the heart of Mouse Guard – make it your own personal game, don’t worry too much about staying to an “official history”. The game should be about your player’s heroes … not about Gwendolyn or other “big NPCs” at all.
I believe Luke said explicitly that there would be supplements, but I can’t point you to the exact thread.
As for the date, I believe it was chosen just to call to mind that time in European history that describes the level and style of technology and culture. I’m sure it has some significance to the mice, but I don’t think it’s ever spelled out what that is.
I’d suspect Year 0 was something related to the founding of the Territories, either the formation of the Guard, the founding of Lockhaven, or the first laying-down of the Scent Barrier.
Jake was right: the year is just to evoke a time period in the reader’s mind. It may or may not conform to OUR years.
And while I have SOME origin stuff in mind (some of which is found in the RPG) the year zero stuff hadn’t occured to me.
I like zabieru’s ideas. I need to map out the stories I have in mind in time line format to see if it matches up to the right years…if not, (I suspect it may go back BEFORE zero…)I’ll have to create an event that started a re-numbering.
I like zabieru’s ideas. I need to map out the stories I have in mind in time line format to see if it matches up to the right years…if not, (I suspect it may go back BEFORE zero…)I’ll have to create an event that started a re-numbering.
The founding of territories is a cool idea for a Year 1 and, David, if I may said that, there is no difficulties to create a event that may re-numbered the years… In our world the Gregorian calendar is a convention that born from another calendar called Julian… If my memory is not affected by the 5 liters of Pepsi I was consuming right now, one Roman Emperor just force every one in the empire to use a new calendar, destroying all others date counters around… The fact was one of the month was named after him, JULY and everyone under the Roman world must to learn the new calendar…
So, let pretend Midnight´s dream was inspired by the very existence of a united and corrupted mouse empire of old that shatters and give birth to the territories? I this kind of event is easy to everyone destroy the old calendar and start a new one for every reason necessary to forget the past…
I trust in your mind, Mr. Petersen, if this kind of detail pops in future series, but this is a humble suggestion for one of many possible ways to micemasters, errr, gamemasters around the world would explain the year count. Like you and Luke said in the book, don´t worry about Canon, just have fun with the universe you want to create for your players.