Breaking, Hacking, Burning!

This weekend I had some free time and was nosing around the internet as one does, and I came across a post on the Burning Wheel forums that Luke Crane made a few years back when Mouse Guard was first released that laid out some guidelines for hacking the system.  Mouse Guard is, to this point at least, my all-time favorite roleplaying system, but I've never really thought about hacking it.  Not only that, but Scott Acker and Patrick Riegert did an amazing job with their Realm Guard LotR hack that they did a few years back.  Still, I've been wanting to get into game design a bit, and the idea of trying my hand at my own hack is intriguing.  At the very least, Mouse Guard is probably the first system that I've gotten involved with to the point that I would actually feel fairly comfortable working with it.

I started to try and figure out ideas for what would work as far as a setting.  As Luke outlines in the opening of the post, a proper Mouse Guard hack requires three things to function - team-based adventuring, an over-arching force of nature, and dramatic adventuring that emphasizes on fighting for your beliefs.  Without these things, the system just doesn't hold up and you'd be closer to creating a new game instead of a system hack.  Therefore, the setting and the player characters would need to be characters that would believably need to unite for a common goal, but one with enough grey area involved that there isn't one "right" way to approach the overall conflict.

I've been heavily into the #FolkloreThursday hashtag on Twitter lately, and seeing all those tweets of fantastic creatures has really pulled me a lot in that direction as of late in terms of inspiration.  There are more varied stories of fantastic creatures and beasts than I ever would have imagined.  I've been toying a lot with the idea of trying to make a game that focuses on those types of woodland creatures, but the trouble in doing that with Mouse Guard comes down to what would unite these creatures to fight in unison?  Most of the mythic beings in the Norse and Scandinavian tales that have really peaked my interest are more meddlesome and chiefly are concerned with toying with humans.  This isn't really something I'm looking for in terms of my hack.  Still, I definitely want to go the fey route.  An early idea that I had when first mulling this over was to go with ents, with players acting as sort of woodland shepherds looking over the wilds.  While the premise seems to fit in where I want to take things, I can't really wrap my head around many credible threats for ents as PCs.  One of the main things that makes Mouse Guard work so well is the idea of the number of things that present real threats to the characters, be it weather or run-of-the-mill forest animals that would dine on mice.  With PCs the size and strength of ents, a lot of that is lost.

The Hidden People by Cory Godbey

Then I remembered a book that I purchased a few years back, artist Cory Godbey's excellent sketchbook The Hidden People.  This is a sketchbook that Godbey put together following a trip to Europe and was heavily inspired by the European creature myths.  Fittingly, I first heard of Godbey and saw his work in one of the Legends of the Guard comics.  In The Hidden People, the first chapter shows sketches of The Tree People, a group of humanoid creatures with twigs growing out of their heads that are born from acorns.  There are a few different sizes and varying builds, which plays into another issue I was having with the ents that I'll discuss in a bit.  I immediately began thinking over ideas that could play into a fantasy roleplaying setting, and I believe I now have my inspiration for this hack.

While I'll likely use the sketches as inspiration more so than an actual source material, there are a number of ideas that I'm planning on pulling in order to start building my game.  For one thing, the concept behind the tree people (who will definitely have to be renamed for the system) is perfect in that they are born of the wilds and are largely tied to to the (un)natural world around them.  Just as importantly, they contrast with the ents that I was considering originally in that they are much smaller, and therefore much more easily threatened.  Godbey also uses a few different models for the treefolk, which lends itself more to the Mouse Guard idea of The Territories.  The idea that these creatures can inhabit different parts of a forest and be born of different natural materials (trees, soil, rock, and what have you) gives a bit more customization in terms of player character options, and also allows for a territory system that's a bit closer to the standard game.

So now that I have some better idea of what the characters would be, now comes the tough part: what are they fighting for, and what would cause conflict?  I have some initial idea, in large part inspired by Princess Mononoke.  I'm a Studio Ghibli fanatic, and this is undoubtedly one of their best films.  For those who haven't seen the movie, a lot of it has to do with seeing to the well-being of the wilds, and the demonic corruption of the woodland beasts themselves.  Going off of this idea, the treefolk are the caretakers of the woods, similar to the role the ents play in LotR.  The difference here, though, is that rather than simply trying to grow the forest and make sure it's not destroyed by man or orc, there is a corrupting dark magic that the treefolk are battling against.  This allows for some opportunity for more unique NPCs, as in addition to simple beasts like wolves and bears, there can now be those that are corrupted by the darkness and provide a greater threat to the PCs.  Furthermore, and probably more important in a system sense, it gives a possible conflict for player beliefs.  Is there a way to cure the beasts, or is it wiser to destroy them?  Does the dark influence serve some kind of divisive good, similar to the way fungus helps decompose and renew a forest floor?

Circling back around to Luke's advice for hacking Mouse Guard, I've now largely answered two of the three primary focuses of the system: reasons for team-based adventuring, and something for the PCs to fight for that's maybe not as cut and dry as it would seem at first glance.  This only leaves the nature question to address.  While I'm toying with the idea of having different Nature descriptors depending on what type of treefolk a player chooses and where they come from, I think in general the nature of the PCs could come down to three descriptors: Hiding, Growing, and Renewing.  I may tweak these slightly before settling on the final descriptors, but I'd ideally like to shoot for this overall effect.  In Mouse Guard, if a mouse's nature rating gets too low, they lose what made them mice and can no longer live among mouse society; conversely, if it gets too high, they become too mouse-like and can no longer serve in the Guard.  I like the idea, given the creatures are born of seeds, that the nature descriptors could also somewhat apply to trees.  Perhaps if the nature rating gets to high, the treefolk just become trees instead, similar to the end of the old David the Gnome cartoon, where gnomes who are too old leave their friends and family and die, turning into trees.  Also, if you've never seen the series finale of David the Gnome, it was one of the most depressing episodes of a children's cartoon series ever.

So this is where I've landed, and as I tinker a bit more I'll try to share more of my process.  I'm hoping to have at least a draft for playtesting by the end of the year, but we'll see how ambitious I am.

As always, feel free to let me know your thoughts in the comments.