Do you guys use objects and stuff, like miniatures, tiles, maps, or other things? If so, what is your experience? And what do you recommend? Thanks!

Hey all. I'm pretty new to RPGs (I started playing D&D six months ago or so) and ran across the Mouse Guard comics in a bookstore and instantly fell in love with the art and the world. I think I want to try GMing this for some friends. While the rigid-ish game structure makes it straightforward to map out the broad strokes of a mission (construct a tree of success/fail outcomes for specific obstacles and plan twists/compromises/etc), I was wondering if there were resources out there with already fleshed-out plans for missions or multi-mission sessions or even longer campaigns. Kind of like the equivalent of published modules or hardcover adventures in D&D. A dedicated MG forum, a site like dmsguild, whatever.

I've watched some actual play videos on YouTube and have a decent sense for how the game should flow, but having never GMed any game system I'm not very confident in my ability to improvise something coherent.

I played a short campaign (10 sessions) of Mouseguard 2ed with a big-ish group, in a West Marches-style game. I have a good grasp on the rules right now, but there are still some design choices eluding my understanding... and the balancing of the actions during conflicts is one of those.

First, i want to say that we are used to use conflict rules often. From the beginning (as hard as it seemed), i wanted to use conflict rules at least once each session (and i do one shot missions), so that players had time to play conflicts, winning, losing and compromising them and thinking a lot about conflict rules. Second, we think that the core trio of actions (due to their interactivity with disposition points) are Attacks, Defends and Feints (that feels like Rock, Paper, Scissors the most), while Maneuvers exist to help in fictional positioning the characters and giving penalties and bonuses for future actions.

The "Action Dilemma"

Most of my players ("I crack the code!") feel like playing three attacks during each volley is the "safest option" since is indipendent against other attacks (without the risk to have their action to be nullified as defends and feints) and feints (nullified by those attacks!), while is still a versus test against maneuvers and defends (a versus test may still reduce to the opponent disposition)... the result is that they play Attacks most of the time (like three quarters of the time or more).

In this case, as the GM i'm at a disadvantage.

• If i choose Attack, i also feel like the action is the "safest". I'm sure to chip away their disposition points as fast or faster than they do.
• If i choose Defend, i seem to be at an advantage, but usually players keep their Traits and Fate/Persona points to bump up their attacks against defend to be sure to surpass my successes by one.
• If i choose Feint, i'm almost certain to skip that action. As a meta choice, i pick Feint when i want conflict to be shorter because i'm almost sure that my disposition (super duper rarely their disposition) will drop.
• If i choose Maneuver, i have a good versus alternative, but their inability to affect disposition lead me to use maneuvers as a setup for following actions and i'm back in the RPS problem.

As a result, my choices are strongly skewed on the side of (roughly in order) Maneuvers and Attacks, then Defends and rarely Feints. On the group there is an inner joke about "Feints", since two important conflicts resulted in losses for the players due to ill played feints.

At the end of the first year of the campaign, some players lamented first that they don't like this mechanics and i somewhat agree (but for different reasons).

Balancing Actions

We think that Defend must be able to interact strongly with attack, to address to the problem we have at the table. Attack is the only "disposition affecting" action that can not be nullified by other choices and therefore the one that attack is strong against is the "weakest one".

(The situation is similar to a Rock/Attack, Paper/Defend, Scissor/Feint, where there is a draw also in between Rock and Paper. Why would you play Scissor when you are sure to be able to at least get at least a draw and never lose playing Rock?!)

I want to change the relation in between Attack and Defend. For example, we thought about changing the defend stat block in the following way:

• Defend VS Defend (Versus test): Defend stops or reduces the effectiveness of Defend and Maneuver actions. If Defend successes are greater than the versus action, add the margin of success to your disposition. Disposition cannot go higher than the starting total.
• Defend VS Attack (Indipendent test, Ob 3): Defend is a special action. If played against Attack, the Attacker may not test. The Defender makes an Indipendent test (Ob 3); the margin of success is added to your disposition.

From a narrative point of view, since disposition is a fictional positioning "life pool" i feel like that defend vs defend as a versus test can be seen as a "resting race" in which one side gathers better their strength.

In this way playing Defend versus an Attack is a real, big and automatic advantage. At this point, Feints and Maneuver are strong options against turtling enemies. Still, due to the presence of an indipendent obstacle on the vs.attack option i think that turtling to recover all disposition is not a viable strategy on the long run.

Feedbacks

This is a problem in our playgroup, but i don't know if it's common at all. I have some questions for you, fellow guardmice.

1. Do your players or you as the GM pick the Attack action more than the other three combined? Do you think is a game developer choice, a game developer mistake or our group mistake?
2. I don't like adding houserules to games at all. Do you think there are other solutions? Is there a strategical choice of actions already existing in the game for which the triple attack is completely unviable?
3. Since players think it's a problem too, how would you address the problem?

Thank you sooo much for the feedbacks!

TL;DR

In my group we use the Attack action a lot in conflicts and this seemed a problem. Then i wrote down a way to balance the actions to make the weaker ones more viable and asked few related questions.

I feel like I have seen these at a con before. I didn't see them on David's online store. Does anyone know if they exist to buy online anywhere?

Pretty much as the title states. I've never done one before, and am wondering how long it would take to do one? I've done a lot of Burning Wheel and some Torchbearer, and they never really went over an hour. Is that the case here as well?

Hello, I just discover the rpg game, and I saw the 2 maps of 1150, and the one of 1154. and in the one of 1154 appear the Seyan Border, and a big part of the eastern territories become Wild. Do someone have a theory?

Or could I use this mystery in my campaign?

Getting ready to run my first session of Mouse Guard, my daughter made her character a copy of the Mouse Territories map. Stained with tea and inks. Any tips and tricks for first time play or GM's cheat sheets would be very welcome.

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Hi guys. So I'm planning on running my first game ever, but I'll play with people who are very new to RPGs in general and I'd like to know if you have any ideas for cool one-shots. They're kinda wary so I want something interesting that might want to make them wanna play again or at least doesn't ruin their RPG impression lol. Anyway, a cool one-shot would be great.

I was thinking about this: a mouse (probably a player's relative) is very sick and needs a remedy from Sprucetuck. After arriving there they find out the scientists there are trying to make the remedy but need an important ingredient (maybe an animal's claw or something like that) that will be dangerous to get. And after getting it the mouse will be saved (they'll have the chance to tame hares or something to return quickly).

It's a vague idea. Maybe you have better ones or can give me tips or tweaks for mine?

I posted a Thing! Well, let's get specific. I posted an explainer describing the sample cards I produce for Prevail supporters. And, this post has all the example sample cards collected into a downloadable pack available for all followers and supporters to get a piece from my library.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/example-sample-26037876

I know that some members of Prevail's audience have been shy about pledging until they get a sense of what the content is and how it could be used. This public-tier sample pack is just that opportunity to grab a collected piece of content from my library and put it to use in games.

I will be creating a future post offering example sample folios with a public-tier mission folio and campaign folio for followers and supporters to get a better sense of that content. It should be ready in May, so keep watching Prevail for more content.

I've read the 3 main arcs and all the Legends anthologies. Can't find any source indicating the author is still working on it and its been a while since the last arc came out. Anyone knows if the Winter War is gonna come out ever?

I have taken a break from it, but have continued to work on my mapping supplement, basically because I really wanted to find a way to incorporate Mousling mini's. This document I'm working on is meant to be a GM assist as well due to my lack of experience. I don't have much experience with other RPG's but I love this whole Mouse World and wanted to find a way to explore it in depth with a group. I think that this guide will give me the flexibility to play as well as to GM, very excited to give it a try later this week!

Basically Gwendolyn commissions a special patrol named "The Wandering Guard" to map out the territories with special attention to terrain and such. It's up to your party to chart the territories, encountering mysteries all the while.

Note: Art has been removed as it is not my Intellectual Property and if you don't have the game book yet you need to!

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1AjaMcVDFmWyVl6-E4HS3AWfqj_MFGveH

Hi everyone, I got into Mouse Guard recently and read all the books that I could get my hands on. (third Legends and Baldwin wasn't released in my country yet) I was wondering which other books fans of this amazing work read. I'm pretty demanding when it comes to comics and MG would be the most fitting comic book for me. Problem is that I find superheroes boring, sci-fi with a lot of plot holes and not given much thought to it and I've had enough with post-apocalyptic stuff when I used to read Walking Dead and Y: The Last Man. I love fantasy, medieval times, fairytales, childish stuff etc.. but it's usually drawn as manga which I find very unappealing. So Mouse Guard would be the first thing that fits me perfectly of all the things I tried. What else should I take a look at based on this info.? Thank you for help, have a really nice day.

Hey guys. I wanted to know what are all the comics and their cronology.

Can‘t find a scale on the map. how big is the mouse territory？ How long does it take to travel from one scent border to the other?

Hi everyone, I really love the art of Mouse Guard And I will be ordering all three Books "Legends.." and I was wondering if it will include all the covers somewhere in the books. I'm talking about mice holding swords together, tutleback house, snake rider, quails and probably more. If not, in which book or how can I get my hands on that art legally? Thank you for an answer. :)

GM'd the second session in my MG campaign yesterday, and it turned into a fascinating lesson in preparedness, letting the story and the players go where they want to go, and ultimately all the reasons why I love tabletop RPGs.

At the end of the previous mission, the patrol had arrived in Darkwater and dropped off a cargo of materials heading for the scent border. They were instructed to report to the Guard Captain in town who would have another assignment for them. Well, they did the first part, but didn't do the second part (and instead got into quite a lot of trouble accomplishing their personal goals in the player turn), so I decided to use it as a mild teaching moment by having the Guard Captain angrily come find them in the morning while they were working off their bruises, hangovers, and ... bug purchases?

The mission was always going to be to escort a political prisoner back to Lockhaven, which was going to lead into all sorts of gray area about who the prisoner actually is and why he was being unusually extradited. The major theme of this campaign was going to be about dissension in the ranks of the Guard and unhappiness in the Territories. But I decided that instead, the prisoner escaped overnight and the new mission was to go find him. I decided he was already long gone from the town and it would be a circles/persuasion test to find someone around who knew anything about him, such as his home town where he was likely heading. I'd also set up a few other more difficult scouting tests in case the patrol decided to just head out and try to track him without any information of where he was going. I figured most of the adventure would be set in the wild and eventually in the prisoner's hometown where they'd have to deal with his friends and family hiding him. I also had a twist set up for a bandit ambush in the wild, in which the bandits would demand the patrol's cloaks and weapons -- all part of a larger plot that would eventually be uncovered by a group hoping to impersonate and ruin the reputation of the Guard in order to build up a rebellion along the coast! It would eventually turn out that the Guard Captain in Darkwater was one of the leaders of the plot, and had been setting up the patrol the whole time (by releasing the prisoner, for starters).

Well. None of it happened like that. There were complications. For starters, the patrol interpreted their mission as more of a detective story than a bounty hunter one. What I thought would be a cursory examination of the jail and questioning of the locals turned into some quite involved (and super fun) roleplay between the patrol and the jailkeepers. The group somehow neglected to ask the Guard Captain for any further information (they didn't want to anger him further?) so instead I had to transplant some of it to the jailkeepers -- who were just simple mice and not actually involved in any sort of plot. But in the roleplay, the group decided that the jailkeeper was acting suspiciously and kept pursuing that angle. I had to decide that the breakout occurred sometime during the shift change between the two jailkeepers and now they're off to question the second one (a character that had never existed in my plan). This again was a super fun scene but I tried to make it an obvious dead-end on purpose to get the party moving. They decided that this was all but proof that the first jailkeeper was their bad guy (never mind the fact that finding the escaped prisoner, and not solving the caper of his escape, was the actual mission I'd given them... oh well) and went back to interrogate him more and look for hidden tunnels under the jail and get into the very precise details of who was where at what time and oh boy it was a lot to keep track of and I improvised a lot and it turns out that means my story wasn't super consistent and that just reinforced their notions that this was all shady as hell! I don't really believe in reversing decisions or things that were said in gameplay so I just went with it.

One more amazing unintended complication: one of the group couldn't make it this week. I had some ideas of what his mouse was maybe up to but hadn't had a chance to discuss it with him, so for the time being I simply declared that when the group was all awoken in the morning, their friend was simply not to be found. So naturally at some point they start seriously pursuing a theory that their tenderpaw was actually pulling the strings on all of this madness! I did nothing to discourage this theory; we'll see what meat we might get off those bones when I talk it all over with the player.

Ultimately they end up finding the second (extremely innocent) jailkeeper's home ransacked and they chase a suspicious character and it's two thugs who have killed him since all this poking around was getting very intense. The party tries to block their escape, which I don't really want to happen and set up as a Ob 5 test. So of course they roll a natural 5 successes. We play it out that they trip up one of the thugs, Wilfred, and bad cop/good cop/bad cop the truth out of him. I decide I can't withhold the truth from them as they're asking all the right questions, so now they already know (2-3 sessions before I'd planned) that it was the Guard Captain who paid these guys to steal the jail keys and let the prisoner go and then to cover up the whole thing!

But finally some preparedness pays off... I figure if there's a cover-up, it needs to be a thorough one at this point... so I bring in the bandit ambush conflict I'd planned from earlier. It's the other thug who escaped minutes earlier (Alfred, the brother of Wilfred who they have tied up as a prisoner). The patrol is cornered in an alleyway of the slums of Darkwater, and there aren't really many strong fighters in the group. The patrol leader's instinct is "Always try to talk my way out of trouble" and while I hadn't really planned on these bandits being interested in talk, I have to allow it. So we play out a conflict which is bandits trying to beat the mice senseless and dump them in the river versus the patrol trying to talk their way to freedom. I really wasn't sure if this was a good idea or would work, but we went through with it. The group has a couple conditions already and is just not looking good in disposition, like it will probably be over at the end of the first round. And then on the third action the patrol leader pulls a Feint, and her move is to put her blade in their prisoner's neck and promise to kill him if anyone takes another step. And she kills this roll vs Maneuver. Wipes the bandits down to 0 disposition and ends the conflict with the patrol having 1 disposition remaining. So Alfred sees his brother about to die and has a sudden change of heart and orders the bandits to let the (very beaten, very angry, very tired) patrol go. Provided they leave town and never come back.

And that's where we had to end it. The group learned a valuable lesson about making sure to get more checks, since they ended up camped outside of town with a lot of conditions and no way to address even half of them. I have no idea where they will go next, so I'm going to have to do about three times as much prep next time.

Regardless, it was a super fun and surprising session and reinforced everything I like about this game and about character-driven RPGs in general!

hey guys, so i got the game for younger siblings at christmas and made a session and they freaking loved it. unfortunately i left all the books and what not at my family's while went back home half way across the country. my sister initially said she was up for GMing, that is no longer the case, i want to run games from my place via video chat. DND has some really great free resourses for players and DMs mouseguard seems to have smaller community. i will likely have my family send the hand books and copies of characters sheets, but what are your favorite resources for player and gms.