Shout it from the mountain tops: I finally get to play the Mouse Guard Roleplaying Game.

Despite owning the books, I have yet to try Luke Crane‘s table-top RPG masterpiece Burning Wheel. The RPGs I have experience with are robust enough that I can approach them like I would Legos: I take the parts that look cool, I snap them together as I go, poof a fun experience is built. But Burning Wheel is designed with a mode of play in mind; its player-driven reward system is a delicate thing. It promises the world, but interact with one bit in the wrong way and gears threaten to come to a grinding halt.

Thankfully, Crane took the world of David Peterson‘s Mouse Guard and created a game that amounts to “Burning Wheel 101”. The Mouse Guard Roleplaying Game retains Burning Wheel’s core philosophy of rewarding players for propelling the game forward but uses the lens of heroic-mouse-adventures to pare down much of the complexity. Mouse Guard is the ladder to hold onto while one dips themselves gently into Luke Crane’s mad genius.

What We Fight For

Here’s why I’m itching to play Mouse Guard when other games like D&D have proven extremely fun at our table.

The players take on the roles of guardmice in the Mouse Guard, an organization sworn to protect the welfare of mouse-kind. It’s their job to brave blaze trails, gather and distribute news, and protect the forested Territories from threats within and without. Make no mistake, it’s a medieval-ish fantasy setting: the mice swing halberds, tame bees, and have castles built into rocks and trees. But much of the fantastic in Mouse Guard comes from the players being so tiny. Something as mundane as a freshly fallen tree may block a brook and threaten to drown a whole city. A shrike in a briar is a brutal winged menace. (No joke, they’re called “butcher birds“.) An owl bears a startling resemblance to a dragon when you weigh an ounce and a half.

While it’s a low fantasy setting, Mouse Guard’s ability to take the familiar and turn it fantastical and otherworldly is clever and refreshing.

And look at that mouse fighting that owl. Jesus.

It Revolves on This

I won’t get too much into the system in this post, I want to do that after getting a chance to play it.

Mouse Guard has one foot squarely in “traditional games” and the other in “story games”. Each session starts with a GM Turn, where the GM takes an authoritative role and the players have an adventure. The session ends with a Player Turn, where the players get to shape the narrative by spending points they gained during the play.

Play is fueled by the beliefs, instincts, traits, and relationships that the players define at character creation. (They also evolve during play.) In true Burning Wheel fashion, the players are rewarded for playing out their beliefs, especially when it’s not advantageous. Add in a robust abstract conflict resolution that can cover a fight with a milk snake to a debate between mouse politicians, and you have a game that makes me froth at the mouth.

Strike!