I finally got to run my first Mouse Guard game for a couple friends last night, mixing the Deliver the Mail scenario with one proposed in the The Danger of Foxes thread. Their characters were Connor and Nixxie who had been raised on heroic tales of the Mouse Guard.
Connor is an older mouse, but is still fairly new to the Guard as he had fought along side during, and then joined the Guard after, the recent war with the weasels. He lost most of his family when Woodruff’s Grove was overrun, and has a serious sore spot when it comes to defending the helpless, or dealing with weasels. Connor’s enemy is his brother-in-law, who feels that Connor was somehow at fault for the town (and wife) being lost to the weasels. (It’s not a rational thing, but the mouse lost his wife when the town was lost, so you can’t exactly expect him to be rational about it.) He’s quite the heavily armed & armored Guardmouse, packing a bow & quiver, sword, and light armor.
Nixxie is a newly-cloaked Guardmouse. She was raised on heroic tales of the Mouse Guard’s exploits, and dreamed of nothing more than joining the Guard when she was old enough. She was so impatient to join that she ran away to join the Guard a full year before her parents were trying to make her wait. In fact, she was so impatient that she actually ran away near the end of Fall, and ended up lost in the woods, wintering in an abandoned squirrel nest. (“I can’t even look an an acorn without getting indigestion.”) Lucky enough to survive, she was found making her way to Lockhaven far too early that spring, and spent two extra seasons apprenticed to an artisan (trying to teach her patience) before she became a tenderpaw. It was her time as a tenderpaw that finally tempered her (still evident) enthusiasm, as she discovered that the Guard seems to spend an inordinate amount of their time wet, something she dislikes quite thoroughly. Nixxie carries a sword and sling.
I started the GM’s turn off with their early spring trek from Lockhaven to deliver mail, pick up medicine along the way, and take it to Silverbrook, a small settlement I situated on the ‘road’ between Elmoss and Barkstone which had been hit by a plague right before winter began (leaving the road there completely impassible). On the road between Dorigift and Elmoss they ran into the raven problem described in the ‘Deliver the Mail’ scenario from the book, losing the mail bag, but fortunately not most of the mail itself. (The raven’s goal was to get the ‘shiny’, the mice’s goal was to save the mail. The raven won the conflict, but with less than half of its disposition left, forcing a compromise.) Having reached Elmoss (as far as the medicine was able to be taken before winter closed things down), they picked up the medicine and made for Silverbrook. Once there, they found the town a shambles, buildings knocked over, and not a mouse to be seen. One successful Scouting check later, they managed to find the survivors, hiding deep in a particularly thick patch of thorny bushes. They learned that a fox had somehow made it across the scent border, and had caught the village unawares. And that’s where the player’s turn started.
One of the characters, ‘Nixxie’, spent her single check to help distribute the medicine, and in the process learned that most of the missing mice actually hadn’t been killed by the plague, but rather by the fox, which had arrived just days earlier. Unfortunately, many mice had been killed, including most of the men and the elderly who had made a desperate sacrifice to save their families. The other character, Connor, led the pair on a scouting mission to find the fox’s den, and did so handily, discovering the den full of newborn kits while both parents were out hunting. There was some discussion on the trip back to the thicket on how to deal with the threat, and Connor came up with an ingenious (read ‘insane’) idea. Grab one of the kits, and hoist it up into a tree, thereby occupying the fox parents long enough to evacuate the surviving mice.
Unfortunately, even a newborn kit is too heavy for a pair of mice to hoist up a tree, so they needed to convince the terrified villagers to supply some additional mousepower for the task. Connor’s second check went to an Orator-centric conflict in which he attempts to rally the mice and get some volunteers. This conflict lasted quite a while, with the first round of actions going Connor: Attack, Attack, Attack (“We need to do this, and we need to do it now!”); Survivors: Defend, Defend, Defend (“Are you insane?! There’s a fox out there!”). During the conflict, Connor spent a Persona to tap his nature, bringing in an impressive pile of dice, and barely rolling a success. (With a margin of 1. Ouch.) After 6 rounds of cards, Connor’s arguments finally won over a small band of volunteers, and the plan was set into motion. (I don’t think Connor’s player has quite realized the utility of the Maneuver and Feint actions yet, though Nixxie’s player has.)
That began the final conflict. The mice’s goal was to keep the foxes occupied so the survivors could evacuate to safety. The foxes’ goal was to rescue their kits quickly. This was hard-fought, with bad disposition rolls for both sides (4 for the foxes, 5 for the mice). The foxes won that conflict, but with only a single disposition left. The mice had misjudged how high they needed to hoist the kit, and so it was rescued quickly. The major compromise was that the ruse had allowed the mice to evacuate, but that in their haste they didn’t think to disguise their trail. How to deal with the actual threat of the foxes may well come up in the future.
Things were a bit rough at various points (because I forgot about the conflict cheat-sheet until after the end of the session). I was using Nature + an applicable skill for disposition rather than Nature + Health or Will. Both players forgot about their weapons, although I don’t think it would have changed things too much if they had remembered them. They both loved the sketched-in mouse silhouettes on the character sheet, and by the end of the session they had done everything but color in their mice. There are a few things I miss on the smaller 8x8 character sheets from the boxed set, mainly the ‘Skills by Conflict/Action’ chart, and the Maneuver details. I’m going to start keeping a copy of that side of the full-size sheet handy for future games.
I expect I’ll have a third player for next week, who will either be the group’s assigned Patrol Leader who returned to Lockhaven just after Connor & Nixxie were sent out on their mission of mercy, or a fresh Tenderpaw for the team, left sick in Silverbrook when her mentor ran back to send word of the plague.