Okay,
What animals can converse/understand and talk to the mice?
A mouse needs the lore mouse skill in order to talk/communicate to the different animals in the territories. But is there a list of animals that are smart enough to trade/ talk/work with the mice?
From the Comics Hares and Bats and Owls do talk/communicate. But Snakes maybe not.
Where is the guideline?
Which animals are smart enough to converse or even recognise the mice?
Jystdave
I think that is up to you and your players to imagine. Think about the nature of the animal, what it’s idiom might be, and how comprehensible that might be to mice.
For example in my take on things, hares are foul-mouthed, contemptuous, and obsessed with convoluted kin relationships and duties that make no sense to outsiders. Ferrets are hyper, not too bright, and utterly convinced of their own cleverness. Nobody ever thinks of talking to a beetle…
I’ve done it a couple ways:
Important NPC critters can talk (weasels, owls, etc), but they’re all weird and foreign-sounding
All God’s creatures can talk, perfectly fluently, like any good anthropomorphic comic.
I liked the first version better. Dunno what the canon says about that though. Don’t bats talk or whisper or something in Winter?
Well I don’t want to shower this thread with too many spoilers; but in “Mouse Guard Black Axe #1” Em is spoken to/speaks to both her crow and a female duck but in a “language” Celanawe cannot understand.
Example: “Caw caw caw!” “Quack quack!”
You get the picture.
Anyway, I think that after some time you can allow your players to begin to understand the languages of other creatures if they are keen to try. For example, a lore mouse may be highly interested in studying the speeches and patterns of some animals he is studying or lives around. Although a carpenter or baker could care less about what a whistlepig has to say!
But then again, maybe you could have a sort of Tarzan of the Jungle scenario, where a mouse child was raised by hares, sparrows, chipmunk, etc. and can only understand it’s surrogate family. And if introduced back into Mouse society is alien to the new way of life/language.
Heh, could also be neat to see a story of a baby mouse “adopted” and raised by a devious up-and-coming weasel that wanted to use the mouse as a spy. Muwhahaha!