So I just watched Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole. It wasn’t great, though the animation was really pretty. They did have some interesting ideas about owls enslaving other owls based on belief of racial superiority. Which I thought would make a pretty good Mouse Guard game.
It’s the Territories straight of the books. Only, people have started disappearing from the out laying towns. Players investigate and find mice raiders capturing mice as slaves. This could build up to the players discovering a mice army ready to invade, complete with slave soldiers born into the service and unshakable in their devotion to the cause!
Or something like that. Questions!
A: What do you think of this?
B: Where would the story go if you were running the game?
You could have it that a well-connected, resourceful, “0 nature” mouse stumbled upon something important. He started recruiting people to his cause and enslaving those who refused.
What was that which he found?
Perhaps a city within a cave, sealed off in a mudslide, aeons ago. A city that holds secrets of the scent border or perhaps forgotten science and lore. Maybe secrets of a tradition of armor-smithing mice, with a craft so refined that no ordinary armor could compare.
Maybe it is ominous and a race of giant fire ants resides in there - perhaps he is using the slave to unleash something he shouldn’t. Maybe the mudslide was not the reason the city crumbled.
Think Indiana Jones meets Mouse Guard.
Make it even better: Not only there are secrets in there, there are also veins of a different metal: easy to mine and mold and when mixed with other ingredients into an alloy, extremely resistant - perhaps the secret behind the armors and weapons of this place.
Or maybe a special kind of underground moss grows in there and it makes mice stronger but has the side-effect of megalomania and delusions of grandeur. Think steroids growing on stones.
Or, heck have insanely crazy ideas - it is a potassium vein or something like that and, with the techniques and materials, the mice enslaver leader has power to siege any town. Think explosives.
Perhaps this greedy, crazy mice leader is looking to wage war and subjugate all those that defy him. Think of it as: Enslave mice -> make them work to increase his power -> Go all “Alexander”.
If the players manage to stop him and free the slaves before the war starts, they risk losing the secrets of the place. If they stop him after the war breaks out, they risk losing towns all together.
Cool for story, but big. Real big. It is a huge something going on without your players even lifting a finger. More reminiscent of Burning Empires. Edit: Not that this is bad, but make sure the players are all dialed in since there’s no World Burning step, no Infection, etc, where the mechanics create the buy-in.
For story… I go to Battlestar Galactica, or Chapterhouse: Dune (Edit: Honored Matres! That’s the thing I forgot). The children of the territories have come home to chew bubblegum & kick ass (and they are all out of bubblegum).
These are children of Lockhaven, exiles or something, or inheritors of a different/rival philosophy, who are battle tested and brutalized, returning to impose a new order on the Guard & fulfill everything/more that the false Black Axe was bitching about.
I like that! They were they were the group that lost out when the territories were being formed. The Guard wanted (and got) how it is now, the slavers wanted tyranny and dictatorship. Mawhaha. And without a scent border to keep them safe they would be battle tested and brutalized.
It may be a little heavy handed, but you could have Midnight leading the wild mice. His exile across the scent border was left open ended at the the end of Fall, and his arrival could be the catalyst that final brings the wild mice in to the territories.
I like it, but I don’t think my players know the comics well enough for it to have impact. On the other hand, I’m totally going to have one of their enemies become a slaver.
In our world steam power was invented already during the times of ancient greeks but it was never considered more than a plaything. Therefore it was never tried as a work power and never developed and disappeared from knowledge and was reinvented and developed to something useful after medievial times. Maybe in the mouse world steam was invented during a similar time but instead of it being considered a play thing and never developed it actually was developed but the evolution of steam power was halted when the city with the best scientists and the resources for it was cut of, killed and forgotten under a big landslide (or similar, a little like Pompeii). Other mice knew about it but didn’t have enough knowledge and resources gathered at the same place and gave it up and it was forgotten. In this forgotten city the crazy mouse finds the remnants of this and enough things and writings to take up development. If he only had a work force…
