Birthplace and Traits

Mouse Guard Recruitment
#1

I don’t own the RPG book yet, but I’ve been “frequently browsing” the local bookstore. (Ah, I pity the guy who’ll have to buy that copy of the book… perhaps I’ll find myself guilty enough to get myself a second copy, LOL)

Anyway… like most of today’s gamers, one of the first things I did (after looking through the introduction and sample mechanics) was look at the “character generation rules”. (Yeah, I found it odd to go to the back of the book … but it made more sense after I “frequently browsed” some more).

One thing I noticed (being somewhat of a munchkin myself) was having the ability to “pump up” my trait by picking the “right” hometown. I was then surprised by the almost exclusive nature of the hometown traits list and the selection available as other choices as innate or nurture/nature.

Is this by design? Are the list of traits for each hometown actually limited to mosty one, sometimes two?

Or are we encouraged to invent other too-small-to-be-on-the-map hometowns with the trait we desire?

#2

There are a bunch of other communities shown on the map that are not on the character creation list. Most of them have a few lines of description (but no explicitly stated skills/traits) in the Territories section. And a handful of them are listed in there as specifically having no description now or ever, so that can be populated with no fear by canon obsessed GMs. There is also nothing stopping you from being a little looser with the skills and traits in any of the lists in the games you run/play.

I forget which one, but one of the towns is noted for medicine and science, but doesn’t have Healer on its skill list: If a player really wanted to play a doctor from that town, I could see myself allowing them them to take Healer for that skill. Or say somebody had a really good concept in which they were the child of the town sheriff somewhere: By the letter of the rules you can mostly only pick craft / merchant sort of specialties for your parents, but I’d certainly amend that for a good concept. Or say somebody had a really cool trait idea (somebody mentioned Albino in another thread) they would want to substitute for the city trait. Or they didn’t have parents so they picked up scavenging skills but have no parent contact. Basically, having a point in combat rather then basket weaving is not going to break a setting where a squirrel can snuff you with one paw swipe, so just keep the number of selections about the same and things will work out fine.

What it does for the narrative is the important thing.

#3

Cool. Acceptably Creative Character Concept is more important to me than semi-arbitrary rules also. It also helps that MG character creation is usually done together as a team … so I have less fears about having some player strong-arm the GM into granting “special exclusive generation rules”.

If everyone at the table is okay with the idea, roll with it!