During my last session, my guardmice were roughing it in the wilderness of the Territories when I surprised them with an unexpected visitor who darted through their camp and up a nearby tree: a squirrel.
Imagine my embarrassment when one of the guard attempted to ascertain the aspects of its Nature and, though “squirrel” is listed on page 225 and its silhouette appears nearby, there is no entry for them in the Denizens of the Mouse Territories chapter, I had nothing to say.
I guess squirrel was accidentally included or its entry accidentally omitted. Either way, what should I tell my guardmouse about a squirrel’s Nature?
I’d actually have them mostly the same as mouse nature. Perhaps replace “running” with “jumping”, to have them jumping from tree to tree. Maybe “taunting” instead of “hiding”, too.
Yep. I found those. And there are chipmunks in there, too–cousins to squirrels and all that. But a regular, ol’ squirrel which lives in a tree, yet doesn’t “fly” is what I had menace their camp. I think the aspects of their Nature should be fine as mentioned above: Climbing, Taunting (instead of Hiding), Jumping (instead of Escaping), and Foraging.
Now I just need to know what rank a squirrel’s Nature is. Is there a rule of thumb for choosing an animal’s rank?
According to the infallible Wikipedia, squirrels–or “tree squirrels”–are in the same family as chipmunks, whistle pigs, flying squirrels, and ground squirrels, but are a separate subfamily; Sciurinae vs. Xerinae, respectively.
I was thinking a rank of 5 for squirrel Nature would be acceptable. Is that too high or too low do you think?
Since luke wrote the book, and he thinks that what you’re describing is a ground squirrel, then it probably means that the work’s already done for you, and instead of trying to re-invent the squirrel based on wikipedia entries, you should just mark up your RPG book to replace “ground squirrel” with “regular” squirrel.
It’s just, there is a separate silhouette on the page for “squirrel” and for “ground squirrel”. It has them both listed there, too. But previously in the chapter there is an entry for ground squirrels, but not for just plain squirrels.
