Mouseguard At Last

A long time ago in a town far away ...

It was a hot summer. I was home-sitting for my supervisor. Carly came for her second visit to Victoria.

During the visit, Carly managed to find the rulebook for an role playing game, Mouseguard, a friendly game where you pretend to me part of a civilization of mice.

In pursuit of work after the PhD Carly find herself in Switzerland. And she is still the custodian of those rulebooks, so we gathered fellow nerds for a game this weekend ...

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enough

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The first four words made we want to try writing in some sort of suggested syntax. I am terrible at both prose and writing, so back to normal sentences. Those are challenging enough for me.

Carly and Michael came to visit me in Geneva. Their original plan was to stay with Steve, a common friend in Lausanne. Unfortunately Steve's apartment has been invaded by the lake, so they crashed at my place. I was very glad to play host, actually making use of my luxurious domicile. They arrived late on Friday, and after a short welcome and friendly chat we decided to call it an early night.

After a comfortable breakfast on Saturday morning we went about acquiring provisions for the game that afternoon. We prepared some tomato soup and let it sit in the slow cooker for the afternoon. We purchased much snacks and drinks, as one these are essential for a good RPG session. Around 2pm folks started arriving at my place: Steve, Jon, and Ant joined as fellow players, Vincent as our kind dungeon master.

Our mice were an interesting collection of characters: Mike played a paranoid guard veteran, Carly an idealistic gullible scout, Steve the bee-keping pacifist, Jon was our healer with a keen sense for herbs, and I a mouse supremacist carpenter (inspired by the game making me thing of the Maus comics and some encounters of my past). I am ashamed to admit that I don't recall Ant's character concept, please post a response below if you do!

This rag-tag group of mice was tasked with delivering some bees to a city about a weeks journey away. Once there we should secure honey and wax production as well as establish order in the city. After gathering supplies we set out for our journey, braving early spring weather. The first few days were pleasant travel and we made good progress, then the weather turned on us and we were caught in a late snow storm. We did what we could to protect the bees and weather the storm. It became obvious however that we needed to push on such that our precious bees would not freeze in the cold. The game provides very nice rock-paper-scissors style mechanics for role-playing through challenges: be these combat, environment, or social. There is also a emphasis on role-playing the actions your mice take in these confrontations. It was pretty fun braving the road beset by slush and ice, dealing with a caved in bridge, and a wild ferret on the other side. The ferret only ate half our bees. The rest the group managed to sneak past a gang of outlaws, while my mouse foolishly confronted them. Finally we delivered our cargo.

At the new city we organized a militia, which we lead to take those outlaws prisoner. Having captured the outlaws we did a good-mouse bad-mouse routine to get them to give up the hide-out of a local gang of rebels. With this new intelligence we plotted various ways to attack the rebels. A group of us was disguised as a group of merchants, transporting a load of ale. We had of course poisoned the ale hoping the rebels would attack us, take our stuff, and then get drunk. The sneakier group of mice shadowed us and followed the rebels as they made off with the ale. Sure enough, soon the rebels were merrily getting sloshed. We returned to town and raised the militia. When we arrived the rebels were weakened by the poison, and we managed to overpower them with some cunning military maneuvering.

Back in town we caroused with locals celebrating the victory and bringing peace and prosperity to the far ranges of the mouse kingdom. From here on our reputation can only grow! What a great day of fun and gaming. Thank you for DMing Vincent, and thanks to everyone who came out to play!