We want you to hack this game. We want to hack this game!
There are a few things this game requires in order to run:
• Team-based adventure
• An implacable, over-arching force (of nature)
• Dramatic adventure that focuses on fighting for what you believe in
If your idea doesn’t have those three elements, it’s not going to work as a hack of Mouse Guard.
When hacking, these elements are most important:
• Premise – What’s this about? What do characters do in this setting?
• Missions – What kind of missions do the characters go on?
• Conflicts – Does the setting require new conflicts? How do they work?
• Weapons – What are the weapons for the conflicts?
• Overarching Conflict – If your setting isn’t about outdoor survivalism, what’s the overarching conflict? What’s the implacable force?
• Territories – What are the Territories for this setting?
• Denizens – What creatures or NPCs populate the setting?
• Skills – Your setting’s going to need new skills!
• Abilities – Come up with new obstacles for Circles and Resources for your game.
• Traits – What are the traits for your setting? These are easy to come up with!
• Recruitment – This is the biggie. Recreate the Recruitment section so that it fits your setting! Rename the steps, but keep the same number of steps and the same point totals.
Hacks we want to see: Star Mouse (Star Wars), Mouse Punk (Cyberpunk), Mouse Run or Shadow Mouse (Shadowrun) and Twilight Mouse (Twilight 2000).
And then my daughter wanted to watch Dora the Explorer…
Mouse Guard has almost everything needed to do Dora or Diego… the only thing is scaling up two scales, and allowing some animals to have Will and Health like mice (children always do); animals must keep nature as the highest attribute, but one of the two may be equal. Instead of mice, the PC’s are young children and talking animals. Treat them all as guardsmice… littler children as tenderfeet, and “tweens” as leaders…
It even follows the adventure format…
Events 1-4 occur on the way to or at the 4 “checkpoints” (the last of which is the goal), and there are 1-2 twists for failed rolls.
3 clues, each with a distraction, plus an additional distraction… and then the reveal… The GM has to play Blue as an NPC… again, scaled up, tho’ Salt and Pepper are mouse sized, and paprika is small mouse sized.
Kids TV is a veritable banquet of ideas for Mouseguard Stories, as most of it is built on 3-5 plot turns & twists.
• Premise – Men on a mission in dangerous territory.
• Missions – Black-ops search and rescue/destroy mission.
• Conflicts – No new conflicts are necessary, I think.
• Weapons – Knife, grenade, pistol, rifle, minigun, bow, and improvised weapon.
• Overarching Conflict – A silent, unseen hunter, bent on bloody murder.
• Territories – South American jungle.
• Denizens – South Americans, mostly military, and animals (like pigs).
• Skills – Nature (Soldier) is probably too broad. Tactics, Close Combat, Firearms, Tracking? Renaming, really…
• Traits – Too Many Pencils, Bad Jokes, Afraid of No Man, Ugly Motherfucker, etc.
So, obviously, you really only have one overarching foe. Scripting him’s even pretty easy: Nature(Predator) 10 or something outrageous. The interesting bit would be figuring out what Nature(Predator) entails…
NOOOOO. Do not change the core mechanics with your hack. You will break the game and you will not have fun. There’s no reason you can’t do insanity with the present conditions and traits.
We’re actually saying the same thing. My apologies for being unclear.
What I meant to say is you could break down the existing modifiers and re-skin them based on their levels of severity. Not that you should change the modifiers themselves but rather use them as a guide.