Praise for Realm Guard

Mouse Guard Hacks and Expansions
1

As I look over the Realm Guard hack, I’m really impressed. It sets the bar high for hack quality. I can easily imagine such a product taking on a life of its own.

I’d like to know more about the expectations surrounding hacking Mouse Guard.

What can Patrick (or any mousehacker) expect in terms of publishing rights/opportunity?

What would be the ideal hacked form (if there is such a thing)?

(E.g., Published and printed book, Published .pdf, Free .pdf, Free txt?/html)

If a hack is really cool, what sort of support (from Luke?) should the author expect?
What reference(s) to Mouse Guard is(are) expected/required?

2

Glad you like it!

Well, I can only speak from the perspective of the Realm Guard hack but…

  1. I, personally, don’t want any rights, and I’m sure Saint&Sinner doesn’t, either. If people can use it and have fun with it, great!

… not to mention rights would be impossible to get. :slight_smile:

  1. For this, I wanted to keep it kinda quiet because of artist work/permissions (i.e., I don’t have 'em). Luke was the one who asked me to make it freely available and I was happy to do so. I’m thinking you’d have copyright issues with it being hardcopy published, but I dunno about copyright laws. PDF may be best. Luke’s better suited to answering that.

  2. Luke only asked me to include explicit mention in the intro that it was a MG hack and that it required the MG RPG book to play. Otherwise, he was fine with it (or he simply hasn’t had time to tear me a new one). :smiley:

3

Thank you very much. All the praise for the look of the hack goes to Rafe. Most of the praise for how the system works goes to this board, starting with Luke on down. This project would simply not be where it is with out the support and thoughtful help provided.

I’d like to know more about the expectations surrounding hacking Mouse Guard.

I can’t speak for Luke but I wanted to create something fun (with his blessing and approval) that promotes the core books.

What can Patrick (or any mousehacker) expect in terms of publishing rights/opportunity?

For this project no publishing rights or opportunities were sought or desired. What ever does not belong to Luke belongs to the Burning Wheel/Mouse Guard gaming community. It really wouldn’t have happened on its own anyway.

What would be the ideal hacked form (if there is such a thing)?
(E.g., Published and printed book, Published .pdf, Free .pdf, Free txt?/html)

Good question. I’d always thought that PDF direct to other fans would be the way to go but if there was a solid, financially viable ‘hack’ I could see talking to Luke about print publishing. Wasn’t that how Jihad got started?

If a hack is really cool, what sort of support (from Luke?) should the author expect?

I don’t ‘expect’ anything from Luke. I’m appreciative that he is so helpful (and blunt when we needed it) in our little projects. A lot of the best ideas in the hack are his anyway.

What reference(s) to Mouse Guard is(are) expected/required?

This is not official, but as I understand it we were just asked to clearly label the project as a ‘hack’ of Mouse Guard and say that play required the Mouse Guard RPG book (which it is and it does).

I kinda hope that people who have no interest in playing little mice see the fun waiting to happen in this game and grab our little project and run with it. Or make there own. If there was a way to put together a mini-source book with lots of ‘hacks’ it’d be pretty cool. There’s a lot more genres/stories waiting for a solid treatment.

The only problem with putting this together is the easier ones to ‘hack’ are real licensed properties (Middle Earth, Star Wars, Star Trek, etc) that you might have to be careful about how you made it available.

4

Rafe has gone out of his way to take this fledgling idea and expand it into something I could never have accomplished on my own. As I’ve said before, the best ideas in this hack are not mine at all (the most important system stuff are Luke’s and the design, layout and background material came from Rafe). For anyone who gets enjoyment from this hack please give a moment and thank them.

Thanks Rafe! B-)

5

Yes, thanks to all of you - this is a great idea.
Thank you for all of your hard work and thank you for taking the time to make it available to all of us.

Thank you!

6

It wouldn’t exist had it not been for your initial idea and that single post that laid it all out, more or less (I had that open every time I was writing up the PDF). I expanded on it and changed stuff, but I’m really only decent at editing and/or working from someone else’s idea, sad as that sounds. If someone puts something together enough for me to “get it,” I can do quite a bit. Anyhoo… collaborative effort and it looks pretty decent. I haven’t seen much feedback, so I’m assuming it looks about right.

I think I speak for us all when I say I can’t wait to hear how the GenCon Realm Guard game goes, Scott! See if someone can record it, either audio or video. That’d be awesome. Also, that’ll hopefully give us some more feedback on what works and what needs tweaking.

Not sure if anyone’s read Lloyd Alexander’s “Book of Three” series, but I’m thinking that’d be a pretty easy hack for MG, using Realm Guard as a template maybe since it’s kinda close in idea: You are the lords of the House of Don, of Prydain…

Could be cool.

7

Interesting. What would be the major conflict?

8

Could be any number of things. Could be set during the initial sailing of the Lady Don and the King of the Sun from the Summer Country to Prydain to defy Arawn’s supposed reign. I’m thinking that would be the most interesting and ripe with possibilities. Set after the series would be boring and during it would be like trying to play a SW game during Episodes IV-VI and not always be comparing it to the movies (imo).

9

The northern guard (name?) in George R R Martin’s series are also a possibility.

10

Very true! The Night’s Watch. I had to look it up as I couldn’t remember, either. :slight_smile:

11

Ah, good call. I was stuck in the during- and after-books phases, neither of which seemed particularly appealing.

Although, skirmishing with cauldron-born in a roleplaying game would be a blast.

12

I just printed it out and cannot wait to take a look.