I’m rather new to this but excited about getting started. Can anyone help with understanding the scope of the scale of the territory? I haven’t crossed anything in the rpg book noting distance or scale of movements; how long does it take a patrol or any mouse/critter to travel a set distance? Inch equals miles?
Also I tried to down load all the beginning pdf’s but somehow I messed up the one concerning the “conditions” and or tokens, and I can’t locate the link to try again.
You will find that lots of things in Mouse Guard have been left somewhat vague and undefined. This is both a great strength and a great weakness. It gives you as the GM plenty of room for your own development and lots of opportunities to springboard the game off creative ideas from the players. However it also means that sometimes when you just want the definitive answer to a question, there isn’t one.
1 inch on the map to one mile on the ground is the standard scale. Extrapolating from human settlement patterns, about one days journey between settlements is a likely pattern. For the mice I would expect there to be some sort of shelter along the paths from one settlement to the next especially where they are further than a day’s journey apart. This might be nothing more than an overhanging rock or simple lean-to, just enough to provide shelter from the worst of the weather and predators.
Let the story be your guide. If you need it to take more or less time to get from one place to another then that is how long it takes. MG is about the struggle of the mice to survive in a world where they are the small and weak. It is not overly concerned with tracking every ounce of gear or every foot of movement.
Thanks for the info. Now I know why Luke was hesitant answering the question when I posted it to him via his email address; simply this was not addressed in pre-publications before the rpg book came out. Like I said before, I’m coming into this with no preconceptions leading up to the game. I didn’t realize this was a result from a previous comic book series, and with the price of them as collectors now I doubt I could afford them.
I’ve been paging through the old discussions and have been getting a pretty good idea of what the GMs/players have brought up due to unexplainable not addressed before the game book’s publication, and even then some things were not covered. Which I agree leaves them open to interpretation for each GM to input their own measures.
Since the authors did seem to take a certain detail towards creating such a wide selection of fields of study, and since there is one field called Cartography, one would think that some sort of feel of distance would have been researched in creating maps of scale. Either this was an oversight or perhaps intentional by design by the Cartographer in case a map fell into the wrong hands and used it against the mouse inhabitants themselves. Perhaps only the mouse guard and those tasked with actual travel throughout the territory were entrusted with the secrets of the actual scale/distances between here and there. After all that would be very important information to keep from other’s without a need to know.
Then again when a group traveling between areas would ask a local “how far is it from here to the next town?” The answers could vary in extremes like “depends on how much of a hurry your on, isn’t it?”, or “Now what would a poor looking, raggedy country mouse like you be wanting to travel there in the first place?” or “Well, let’s see, last week it was a lunch and a dinner along with a good little snack, but just the other day a group of merchants passing through mentioned that a storm set them back a week’s time but they didn’t seem to mind much as they had stayed at a kindly country’s mouse’s farm house and found there was no hurry since their stay was pleasant with lots of homemade beer and played card games to the wee hours.”
So I suppose scale/distance/time and such that humans seem to revolved their day around, may perhaps not mean all that much in mouse-time. After all, when you’re that small, what’s the hurry anyway?
Time doesn’t really play much of a factor in MG. Also, if you need something to take longer or go faster, just use the Speed of Plot concept; ie, they get there when it suits the story. If war is about to spill over, they arrive the night before. If a messenger is about to try to assassinate Gwendolyn, they burst in as he’s advancing. Etc.
Amazon has hard cover collections of the first two series, Fall and Winter 1152. PDFs of individual issues are also available from RPGNow.com. I believe there is also a soft cover reprint.
The comics address some issues, but still seem to leave almost as much unanswered.
The softcovers are not expensive…
I paid less for the softcover collection than I would have for the 4 issues it encompasses, and also got bonus material as well.
Thanks to all that posted to this, it really helped. I especially like Rafe’s Speed of Plot concept explanation. This would work well with the younger crowd with short attention spans and “wanting to get on with it!”
Other; I’m a little confused about the comics available. Are there soft and hard bound editions, and what do they cover issue wise? What wound an entire collection entail? How many issues were produced?