How can we play different types of animals?

Question

Mouse Guard only lets you create mice as player characters, but we want to tell a story about all manner of woodland creatures living, working, and fighting together. How can we do that with the Mouse Guard rules?

Answer 1

There are a couple of problems you'll have to solve.

Woodland creatures can often work alongside the Mouse Guard for long periods of time. They're not "unintelligent beasts"; they can hold very informative conversations with mice who can speak their language. They're just not part of a specialized society like the mice are. However, playing one as if they were a player character will run into a couple of problems very quickly, namely Nature and the Natural Order.

Part of living outside a specialized society means you do everything with your Nature, there's nothing else to work with. Making tests only with your Nature rather than being a mouse who splits up tests among other things will mean your Nature can advance fairly rapidly - or, if you have bad luck, get taxed fairly rapidly. And a lot of wild creatures have a fairly high Nature, so you'll outshine the patrolmice at almost everything.

The Natural Order is the determinant of who can do what to who. Who can kill who, who can hurt who. If you're playing a fox or a badger working alongside a mouse, as they do in some stories, then you're basically Superman. Mice can't hurt or kill you unless they go to war or exercise mouse science.

The Easy Solution: Run The Other Mouse's Mount

If you want to play other woodland creatures some of the time, one possible way to do it is run a mounted patrol. Rules for mounts are found in the "New Rules and New Missions" booklet that came in your boxset, or can be purchased separately. Basically, a mouse can make use of a mount in conflict to take advantage of its Nature and weapons, though the mouse is still the one making the rolls. This sidesteps the problems with Nature and the Natural Order for a standalone animal.

If you want to pursue this, I'd recommend taking a page from several RPGs which have player characters with a prominent other voice in their lives, and each taking responsibility for playing another mouse's mount during roleplay scenes. This potentially gets you into more scenes when the patrol splits up as it inevitably does, and makes it less likely for the mouse and their mount to turn into a single set of desires, as can often happen when you're run by a single brain.

The Hard Solution: The Integrated Society

But in a lot of stories, mice and other woodland creatures are actually living in a society together. Usually, since many creatures gain a more anthropoid nature in such stories, the size difference between, say, mouse and badger is more like the difference between large and small player races in a D&D game, where nobody's obviously out-physicaled by anyone else.

In that case, since you'll be running an integrated society, you can probably create fully-skilled Guard members of any peaceable species the same way you create mouse Guard. However, what makes this hard is what you'll have to do with those two problems.

For a New Natural Order I'd use the same rough range as in Torchbearer: collapse the first six rungs of the Natural Order pairwise into 3, and you can capture at evens, kill at one higher, drive off at two higher. That should keep most of the creatures you'd want to play about where they ought to be story-wise in an admittedly more fanciful integrated society.

For New Nature? Well, nobody but the mice have Mouse Nature, do they? They've got something else. If you want to pick up Torchbearer to see Nature questions for different sorts of creatures, that might be helpful. Something to keep in mind when you're building the Nature questions is that the Mouse Nature questions emphasize the conflict that parts of the integrated society have with Mouse Nature. Mice have to remain steadfast in the face of weasels, owls, and wolves instead of Escaping; they have to stand their ground when confronted instead of Hiding; they have to help each other in the here and now instead of Foraging and saving for winter.

Second Edition Updates

Mouse Guard isn't a game with a lot of supplementary material. The "New Rules and New Missions" booklet is the only official one I'm aware of, and it hasn't changed between boxed sets. No extra guidance about playing other animals or shaking up the natural order was added to the second edition rules.