Mouse Guard: Deliver the Mail

This is an account of my first Mouse Guard session ever:

The morning of, Bridget suggested that since Samaira (one of our regular players) would be coming over that evening, perhaps I could run a little Mouse Guard.

I was very excited, and dug up all the materials I’ve printed up, including a map of the Mouse Territories as well as some pregenerated characters straight from the rulebook. I decided that the Delivering the Mail mission was the easiest to run.

That night, once Gabe was down, I gave the character sheets over to Bridget and Samaira and let them choose which of the four characters they wanted to play. Bridget chose Baron, the halberd-wielding patrol mouse with a heart of gold, whose only goal was to protect his patrol mate, while Samaira chose Quentin, the archer and cartographer, whose whole goal was to make sure the mail was delivered safely. Their mission was to deliver mail to different towns in the territories successfully.

I was really worried at first, as the two of them looked over the character sheets and I could see them becoming overwhelmed. Me having never run the game before, was almost tempted just to pull up stakes and suggest we play some Yahtzee or something. But we pressed on, and continued.

A successful assisted Scouting check led the mice through mouse territories just fine, dropping off mail to the different villages along the way to Gilpledge. In the last night of their journey, however, as they searched for some place to camp out, they stumbled upon an old hollow tree log where a raven had made its nest. It spotted their bag of mail, and decided it needed the bag for its own.

This was the first time any of us had tried any conflict in MG, so none of us were sure how it would turn out. After some lousy rolling on all sides, the raven ended up with a disposition of only 3, while the players disposition was only 2. Ouch. It was going to be a quick fight.

It took a little getting used to the order of events in a conflict, with the scripted actions and the like, but before you knew it, they were playing like pros, coming up with clever ways to distract the raven and keep it from getting to the bag. In the last round, Quentin chose a Maneuver, while the Raven chose a Feint, knocking down the rest of the mices’ disposition, but with Samaira’s excellent Maneuver, she was able to remove a trait from the raven, which she chose the Flying trait.

The mice had lost, but the raven had a broken wing. It was time for compromise.

Bridget, with some quick thinking, said, “Wait, what’s the raven’s goal in this fight?” I told them what the book said, “Steal the mail bag and fly away.” Bridget suggested that the raven grabs the bag, but all the mail spills out on the ground. He didn’t really care about the contents, so much as the shiny buckle on the bag, so he hobbled off to tend to his wing and bask in the glory of his fancy new bag.

It wasn’t too bad a loss for the heroes, as Quentin scooped up the mail and turned his Guard Cloak into a makeshift bag.

The next morning, they awoke to some cold spring rain, so Baron used his Construction skill to build an umbrella out of leaves and sticks. I allowed them a +1 success to their Health rolls to keep from getting sick from the rain, which Quentin succeeded at, and Baron failed at. He came down with a bit of the sniffles as they finally made it to town.

And that was the end of the session for the night. It was short and sweet, and went really well for our first time out of the gate.