ATTENTION: You can now follow Legends of the City on Twitter (@Kexizzoc) and receive regular updates when the Story continues!

This is a story, and a game. It is autobiographical, but entirely fantastic. It is a story of two mice as they learn and love in the streets, cellars, and quiet places of Paris.

In 2006, graphic novelist David Peterson began the Mouse Guard series, set in a world where “mice struggle to live safely and prosper amongst harsh conditions and a host of predators”. In a world where almost everything is bigger than they, the Mouse Guard fights for the common good and the continued survival of mice everywhere.

In 2008, an official Mouse Guard Role–Playing Game was created by game designer Luke Crane, and a little less than a year ago this strange and unique system was brought to wider public attention in a Penny Arcade comic, coupled with a remarkably appropriate newspost about the value of seeing projects through to their completion. This project is my salute to all of these individuals who have made this project possible. I do not own the rights to Mouse Guard or the game.

Though, calling the Mouse Guard RPG a game is something of a disservice. What David and Luke created was more of a storytelling system, a piece of technology by which characters might be invented and pitted against meaningful challenges in a fun and logical context. I will endeavor to take this technology to what I see as its natural conclusion, and share my own Mouse Guard story with the world, in the form of a continually updated blog.

For the next 3 months, I will be living in the city of Paris, which is where this chronicle of the Mouse Guard will take place. In David Peterson’s stories, there are no humans; the mice dwell in the wild alongside other wilder animals. I thought it would not be stretching canon too far to conclude that the Mouse Territories he writes of may exist far away from lands of human settlement (there are, after all, large portions of the world where mice could live and die never seeing a human soul) and that, by extension, there are other mouse communities with identical traditions, which must additionally contend with the trials and tribulations of life among the Giants. The City is a dangerous place for the mice who live there, and it is against such dangers that the Guard must contend.

This project will be three things:

– A story. This will be a regularly-updated writing project, so the reader is invited to tune in at their leisure. The narrative will be told from the perspective of the mice, and will hopefully involve lots of fun characters and adventures. It’s difficult to say right now, because it is also…

-A game. The fate of our characters will be determined by random luck, literally rolls of the dice. We’ll be making and playing these characters according to the official rules of the Mouse Guard game, and leaving them to their fates, however they should fall. The interplay of random chance will, I hope, make for an interesting tale. And in the meantime, enjoy the photos, artwork, and descriptions, because this is also…

-A blog. Inspiration and raw material for the story will be drawn from my travels, the things I see, hear, smell, taste, and feel– retold and reimagined from the perspective of a mouse. I hope this will challenge me to look at the world a different way, not to mention challenge you, the reader, to determine which parts of the story are drawn from my own human experience. Paris itself will be transcripted as faithfully as possible, albeit not in the way a human might notice it, making this a frustrating, but hopefully unique, travel blog.

So stay posted for updates, and remember, always ‘ware the magic cheese.