This is part 3 in an ongoing series of play reports. Get started with part 1.

Hello, fellow Guard members! Last session, our patrol had successfully delivered their prisoner, Wulfrid, to seaside town of Port Sumac to face justice. Along the way, they learned that Wulfrid had been radicalized by an actress calling herself Honeymeade, whose troupe was traveling to the town of Dawnrock for the summer season. With this new information in hand, our players were ready to uncover the next layer of the conspiracy against the Mouse Guard. My players were looking forward to defending the good name of the Guard, and I was excited to run the first session which wasn’t planned by someone else. Also, this would be our first time using Mouse Guard’s conflict system, and I was eager to see how it would play out.

Before we could get started playing, however, there were a few things to take care of. First, since Mouse Guard suggests having each mission take place in a distinct season (spring, summer, fall), I had to come up with a reason for so much time passing between the patrol’s last mission and this one. I decided that since they were in Port Sumac — which is near the furthest eastern border of the Mouse Territories — and Honeymeade was heading to Dawnrock — which is close to the western border — the leaders of the Guard had given the patrol other missions to accomplish during the spring, and had tasked a group of mice closer to Dawnrock with investigating the acting troupe.

The patrol had then made their round-about way back to Lockhaven, where the higher ups had told them the actors weren’t in Dawnrock when the previous patrol had arrived, and the characters were duly dispatched to Dawnrock to investigate for themselves, and if Honeymeade did indeed turn out to be an insurgent, to capture her and return with her to Dawnrock. Whew!

The second thing to take care of before play could actually start was the prologue. Mouse Guard tries to push some of the burden of GMing onto the players by having one of them recap the previous session before the next one begins. Any player who does so can reap a mechanical benefit for their character. I love this system; it gives the players a reason to remember what happened during a session, and also lets them communicate to the GM what they remember happening. This tells me, as the GM, what the characters feel is important enough to remember, which helps me prioritize. Brilliant!

With the prologue done, I informed the patrol that as they had passed through Thistledown (a town between Guard HQ at Lockhaven and their destination), their characters had learned the troupe of actors was in fact in Dawnrock, but was preparing to leave the very next evening! Pressed for time, the patrol was moving as quickly as they could so as not to lose their quarry in the wilderness. Of course, that sense of urgency would be pretty boring without some kind of complication…

Pulling a “Scooby and the Gang”

The patrol was only a few hours away from Dawnrock and the acting troupe when they came across a worrying sight; a trio of mice, clearly injured, sitting on the side of the road. They told the patrol a bullfrog had attacked them as they were making their way through the marshy woods near Dawnrock, and had scattered their group. The three eldest had found their way back to the road, but the two youngest — one of them only a child — were still missing! Naturally, the characters wanted to track down the missing mice, but I told them if they did so, they wouldn’t arrive in Dawnrock in time to catch Honeymeade and her friends. They would have to choose; recover the lost mice and potentially lose their quarry, or leave the mice to their fate and reach the town before the actors left. This was the first time the characters were faced with a choice which impacted their beliefs, and they spent some time debating their next course of action.

If you don’t recall, beliefs are part of the system which Mouse Guard uses to encourage the players to role-play their characters. A character’s belief is their core ethos; the thing which defines who they are as a mouse. If a character plays to their belief, they get a mechanical reward in the game. If they play against that belief, they receive a better reward; the more dramatic the moment, the better the game, and thus, the more beneficial the reward for doing so.

Two of the characters held beliefs about defending the weak, and one of them had a belief concerning living up to the ideals of the Guard. But they all also had goals related to accomplishing their mission, and completing goals also has mechanical rewards, on-par with engaging a character’s belief. If there’s one thing this game does exceptionally well, it’s setting up conflicts like these!

Faced with this dilemma, I was sure the patrol would choose to rescue the mice, and then try to pick up Honeymeade’s trail after. Instead, they chose to split the patrol — two of them would head into the woods after the missing mice, and the remaining two would race to Dawnrock to find the actors. I was surprised and delighted; not only had the players confounded my expectations, they had also made things twice as difficult for themselves!

Feeling Froggy

Since the missing mice had been established as the more immediate concern, we handled that first. The two patrol mice, Jasper and Aengus, passed a hunting test to follow the trail of the frog and the mice through the marshes. After trailing the frog and its prey, the patrol members came upon the creature as it was trying to snatch up the young mice, who were held up in the hollow of a tree. It was time to start our first conflict!

Mouse Guard has two ways of handling situations which require rolling; simple rolls and conflicts. The first method is to simply roll a single test, either independently or against another roll, and determine if the patrol is successful or not. This is how 90% of situations are resolved in the game, but for the more dramatic and impactful events, you use the conflict system.

Conflicts play out a bit like rock-paper-scissors. First, each side stats their intent, and determines their disposition (basically hit points for a conflict). Then, the sides each select three actions (Attack, Defend, Feint, Maneuver), and reveal them. Each action interacts with the other three in a specific way, and when the actions are revealed, each side rolls as directed. The winning roll either causes the other side to lose some disposition, or gives the winner some kind of advantage on the next action. The system, like the other systems in the game, is meant to encourage teamwork and group play. Only one character makes the roll for an action, but the other characters can help, provided they have the appropriate skill. Once one side loses all of their disposition, the conflict is over, and depending on how badly the loser was beaten, the winner either gets everything they want, or has to make a compromise of some sort.

The system plays much more elegantly than I’ve described it here, and my players were soon fairly adept at strategizing and trying to predict how their foe would act next.

The conflict with the frog proved to be an excellent tutorial for the system; the frog wasn’t too powerful, and thus didn’t have much disposition to work with. However, since there were only two patrol mice to face it, the characters were handicapped, which meant things were tougher than they could have been had the entire patrol been there. This would be a bit of a problem for the other two mice, as well, when they encountered the actors in Dawnrock.

The fight with the frog proved to be just as dramatic as I had hoped; the patrol put up a great fight, but they didn’t roll as well as they could. In the end, the frog beat them, and managed to gobble up one of the young mice before fleeing into the marshes. Beaten and dejected, Jasper and Aengus made their way back to the other mice waiting on the road, with the shocked and despairing child in their arms. Queue the sad violin music.

Talking in Circles

With the bullfrog dealt with, it was time to move the action to Dawnrock, as Quinn and Finn arrived to search for the actors. After describing the town, I had the two mice make a circles (an abstract skill representing how well connected a character is) test to try and locate the troupe, which they passed fairly easily. Learning that Honeymeade and her troupe were packing their carts up on the edge of town, the two patrol members headed out to confront them, and were greeted by the troupe’s lead actor, Willow, and about a half dozen actors. Willow, who’s motivations might have been as simple as wanting to look out for one of her own, wasn’t about to just hand over Honeymeade (and may have even been Honeymeade) to the Guard, and so, another conflict ensued.

When Mouse Guard talks about conflicts, it means any kind of conflict; a fight, a chase, an argument, or even a journey through harsh terrain. Anything dramatic can (and probably should) be handled using disposition and the four actions, and this sort of interaction was a great excuse for the two players who hadn’t participated in the fight with the frog to get their feet wet.

Willow rolled poorly for her disposition, and I decided that meant she wasn’t sure how much she wanted to stick her neck out for Honeymeade. Of course, Quinn and Finn also rolled poorly, but that just meant they’d probably have to give a compromise in the end. Unlike Jasper and Aengus’s encounter with the frog, however, this conflict went well for the patrol, with the two mice out-rolling their opponent at nearly every turn. After a few attempts at misdirection, Willow found herself backed into a corner, angrily trying to shout down the guards and get them to leave her and the troupe be. Seeing that the game was up, Honeymeade came forward, hoping to spare her friends any further trouble.

And that is where we ended the session, with Jasper and Aengus just making their way into town with the mice from the road, and Quinn and Finn having caught up with their quarry. The players all said they enjoyed the conflict system, especially after the second one, and I was pleased it had come off so well, despite some mistakes I made.

Building Conflict

The conflict system in Mouse Guard really is nice; it’s certainly the most approachable of the dramatic systems from any of Luke’s games (Torchbearer and Burning Wheel being the other two). That doesn’t mean there isn’t a learning curve, though. After the session, I realized I had done some things incorrectly in setting up and running both conflicts. For the fight with the bullfrog, I had the characters roll using an incorrect stat to generate their disposition, which might have left them with less (or more) points than they should have had. I also failed to factor in their weapons, which could have given them bonus dice to use for certain actions. For the encounter with Willow, I was letting one of the mice (Quinn) roll a skill that she wasn’t actually playing out; she was trying to manipulate Willow into giving Honeymeade up, but was role-playing a more persuasive tone. The distinction is important in Mouse Guard, as those are separate skills.

In the end, neither of these things was a huge problem, and I’ve made notes to handle them better next time. That’s good, because the patrol is going to need all of their wits with them to accomplish their mission, and find out what Honeymeade knows!

Until then, keep your ear to the ground, Guard mouse.