One thing I love about Mouse Guard, especially living in Wisconsin, is that surroundings can be a great source of mission ideas. In particular, I visited the Shalom Nature Center in West Bend, WI and they have some foxes there and a “facts” sign intrigued me and gave me some great ideas for missions. It said that foxes are the single biggest destroyers of the mouse population. A single fox can kill and eat up to 100 (ONE HUNDRED!) mice in a day (A DAY!). If the fox is full, it will bury the leftover mouse carcasses to eat at a later date.
I’m sure there are some great mission ideas in that information. Enjoy!
For a truly demoralizing event leading up to an encounter with a fox, the Guard mice are delivering some much-needed medicine to a small town near the scent-border. When they arrive, they find it completely wiped out, and discover a ‘mass grave’ nearby.
Then, for a bit of a moral conundrum, have them find out that a vixen has been chased/forced across a weak point in the scent-barrier and has recently birthed a litter in her den which is hidden near by.
I actually ran this for a couple of my friends last night. You can check out the details here. The looks on their faces when I described the devastated village of Silverbrook was spot on what I was going for. They had expected to find lots of sick mice. When they found nobody and ruined buildings they knew the game had been changed on them. :eek: