As any one suggested a herbalist skill, it seems an obvious one for a medieval setting? There might be some cross over between healers and scientist too.
A successful Ob test would result in the herbalist finding the herbs/fungi he was looking for, and to keep it simple and within the existing game mechanics they could have a temporary effect on traits, they could boost/reduce or even give someone a trait they didn’t have for a brief period.
So for example if a skilled herbalist found the right mushroom by eating it he could make himself temporally fearless. The more skilled the herbalist the more powerful the effect.
And it would by easy for the GM to police if something was being abused he could make it harder to find, and also to make sure they were only used as a last resort (you don’t want to turn the mouseguard into junkies) you could say every up has a down. So using our example of the fearless trait if a player who took the mushrooms to help them complete a particularly difficult mission, then the next session they would have to put up with the opposite trait in this case being fearful.
Obviously this would work better on some traits than others and I wouldn’t suggest eating a plant to make you temporally small or tall, but for most of them it seems to works well.
Also because I like the idea of mounts and I thought the Hares looked great. What about bats, could the mice train them as flying night mounts? Bat wrangler would be a really cool skill.
Herbalism: Its an interesting concept, though you can probably also cover a lot of this ground already with Scientist (to do the mixing) and/or some appropriate Wises to cover knowledge of specific herbs and formulas. That would let you do your thing but still leave you ready when a non-herbal issue comes up. Hmmm… I could see some sort of trait were you have a bonus to your field of study, but that means you occasionally miss things outside of your favored field.
Bat Mounts: I’m not sure if bats would be physically capable of holding a mouse, gear, and flight harness aloft and flying for any length of time. Any bat experts around? How much can they carry? A potentially bigger issue though is that they didn’t really come off as particularly agreeable creatures in the comics. Even barring these, any flying mounts could run the risk of pushing the feel more into fantasy, rather then the era-realistic-but-with-mice feel it pretty much has now…
That being said, if you had sufficiently large, agreeable bats in the right setting my experimental Hare rules would probably work for bats without much adjustment… Or at least they would work as well as they would work for Hares (which is questionable).
yeah bats are not big fans of the mice if we go by the canon in the comics. And you would really have to convince a bat to allow you to even ride it. A Bat-wise I think would be enough if you really wanted to go in that direction skill wise.
