Rather than rehash the complicated story once again, I’ll just link to the post I wrote on The Fifth World Design Diary: “The Pedagogy of Playing Mouse Guard.” I’ve gotten really excited about Mouse Guard. I’ve even convinced my face-to-face group to give it a try. So, we’ve started a campaign called, “Tales of the Black Forest.” I’ve tried a couple of new things with this.
First, I’ve moved the setting from the “Mouse Territories” of David Petersen’s comics to Cook Forest—one of the last remaining old-growth forests in the eastern United States, and my home. Before Anthony Cook saved it and gave it a name, people called it “the Black Forest,” because the old-growth white pines blocked out the sun. I’ve stood there on a hot summer day; the trees and the shade make it feel breezy and cool. I think that name, “the Black Forest,” also helps evoke that medieval tone, by reminding you of the Black Forest in Germany, and all the fairy tales associated with it.
Second, I’ve undertaken a weird format, with two patrols in a single campaign. I wrote about that in a “Table Chatter” piece on the Obsidian Portal campaign site, so I won’t repeat what I had to say there, here. The Myth Weavers will play one patrol, and my face-to-face group will play another; so you, dear listener, will get to hear one half of the campaign.
Third, and most immediately relevant, I’ve tried to adapt Willem’s “Pedagogy of Play” (I, II, III, IV) ideas to Mouse Guard. The crunchiness and complexity of the Burning Wheel mechanics, even watered down, pose a much bigger challenge for this approach than something as simple, elegant and streamlined as Polaris.
We didn’t get through my whole process in one shot this time. In this episode, we get about half-way through. In the next episode, we’ll finish the process. I plan to record an episode with Giuli—the only other person who will play in both patrols—and Willem to talk about how it went in those episodes, how it went at our face-to-face table, and evaluate whether we’d call this a success, and what else someone might do to create characters (and setting) for a Mouse Guard game while teaching the game.
I don’t think I can distribute the lists of names, skills and traits I sent to our players for this, for copyright reasons. I did include, beyond the names presented in the Mouse Guard book, the table of Old English name elements from the Story Games Names Project. With 2d20, you can generate a pretty good, random, Anglo-Saxon name. I have drifted the tone a bit to the Anglo-Saxon end, with more Old English words and names, and a date of 867 instead of 1152 (that has a significance which may—or may not—come up in the game).
[...] The Myth Weavers The Inter-Bioregional Rewilding Story Band « Episode #11: The Pedagogy of Playing Mouse Guard, pt. 1 [...]
Hey guys, just got done listening to this, and I had a few questions/comments.
First off, I dig the exercises in the beginning. Cool stuff, I may have to steal that.
Second, two questions regarding your character creation methods.
1) Why did you choose a different setting? What did you hope to gain from the different setting?
2) With your slightly modified character creation system, was it possible for a character to start with a 2nd or 3rd level Trait? It didn’t seem like it, but I couldn’t tell without looking at those PDF’s you sent out. Is it possible for someone to pick a trait twice or even three times in the process?
Keep up the good work, guys!
Kevin Weiser
http://www.thewalkingeye.com
Hi, Kevin!
I recently started listening to your podcast–I actually listened to your Mouse Guard chargen twice before we wrapped up part 2 here, and picked up a few pointers from that that I used for part 2 and our face-to-face group.
1.) You may notice in a few places we reference something called “rewilding.” We originally met in that context, first deploring the intertwined ecological and social devastation of the modern world, and tracing the roots of that to our estrangement from native relationships with Family and Land. Oral tradition–stories that come from the land, stories that you discover rather than make up–played a huge part in that. But we don’t really have that anymore; the mass-produced pablum of corporate media doesn’t create bonds of Family and Land, it strains them. Mike Sugarbaker captures a piece of this when he talks about “DIY” story. As rewilding folk who consider native story an essential part of restoring our humanity, most of us passed through some phase of grieving for this key we’d lost and could never get back, only to finally face a wonderful epiphany that this seemingly innocent, nerdy pastime we once enjoyed and considered no more than a guilty pleasure held within it the building blocks to regenerate oral tradition.
Sorry if that gets sermon-y, but you need to understand where we come from with this. Yes, we want to have fun; but we also want to experiment with the ways that stories build relationships, with how we might regenerate oral tradition, and how we can use stories like these to become more native to the place we live. We discussed some of this in episode #5, and I talked about some of this in the beginning of part one.
Mouse Guard already has a lot of that native story in it. David Petersen has described it as a love letter to the wilds of Michigan. But I don’t come from Michigan, so I moved it to “the Black Forest,” the old name for Pennslvania’s Cook Forest. So I can weave in local stories and history. In the game, I can work out “the Cataclysm”—the deforestation of the region—from an other-than-human perspective, and try to really dig in and deal with the issues of living in this land. So we’ll have fun, no doubt; I already have had a lot of fun. But setting it in my backyard means that when I prepare an adventure, I spend time looking up the behaviors and habits of plants, animals, and weather in my home, and I wind up with a story that strengthens my relationship with the land I live in. It enchants the place with these epics of “the wee folk,” it makes me aware of an other-than-human perspective, a more-than-human landscape. It presents me with an exercise of seeing my own world through different eyes. There you have the kind of thing I look for in a game.
2.) A much easier question! Yes, this process has everything from the Recruitment chapter, just slightly re-arranged, and with some extra things added in. You can take the same trait multiple times, and end up with higher level traits. No one did, but they could’ve.
[...] together to discuss “the Pedagogy of Playing Mouse Guard,” both how it went in the past two episodes, and in our face-to-face game. Willem started this “pedagogy of play” ball [...]
Wow, you certainly answered my questions! Thanks! That’s pretty cool, and it provides a nice contrast to our own Actual Play recordings. We endeavor to be absolutely by-the-book. We hope to give those who are about to start playing a good baseline of how the game is “supposed” to be played. Though, sometimes when we interview the designer, we find out we got it wrong, but hey, that’s out there to!
So we do it straight, and you guys show how it can be drifted and twisted to suit a variety of gaming needs. I dig it.
Keep it up guys!
[...] Mouse Guard patrol we created in episodes 11 & 12 goes on its first mission. As spring breaks in the year 867, Matriarch Leofcwen gives the [...]