Frontiering in Mouse Guard

A topic that comes up quite a bit among the Mouse Guard RPG community is the idea of setting up a new settlement during the game as an ongoing campaign.  People seem to want to run these kinds of campaigns, but tend to find it a bit daunting and aren't sure where to start.  Part of the beauty in design of Mouse Guard is that with the seasons and the turn structure, the game is fairly encapsulated, and that lends itself really well to building campaigns in chunks.  I think part of the issue for most people in approaching these types of campaigns comes down to pacing and trying to do too much in a single session.

I've found that the main starting point for this kind of campaign is answering out three main questions:

• Where is the new new settlement being set up geographically?
• Who will be populating the new settlement?
• Why is setting up a new settlement a better choice than living in an existing territory?

If you start thinking about these questions during your planning and discussions with your players, it will guide a lot of the early play sessions and give a lot of focus, which tends to be where GMs and players get hung up.  A key part of running a successful campaign setting up a new town is to keep in mind the duties of the Guard.  You or your players may want to set off into the woods looking for great beasts to slay, but the new settlement having a place to sleep or a source of food is usually much more paramount to their safety.  Protecting mice doesn't always mean killing things, and in many cases it leads to much more interesting and far-reaching choices for players.  Getting that buy-in from everyone is key.

A map of The Territories

If you start geographically, it can help give shape to the new settlement before the game starts running.  The planning of the initial missions shouldn't be that different than if you were filling out one of the lesser known territories.  In the campaign I ran with my home group, I wanted to make sure that the new settlement bordered a body of water for trading purposes and also for potential threats for future campaigns, so I chose the southeastern peninsula to border the same lake as Burl, Grasslake, and Lonepine.  Where you plan on putting the new settlement can tell you a lot of what predators the mice will have to deal with, and what resources might be available based on the landscape.  A settlement along the shoreline might grow rice, for example, while one on the edges of the Wild Country might harvest a lot of nuts from the nearby trees.

The who and why for a new territory tend to be linked, so figuring out one will likely give you an idea for the other.  Historically, there are two types of peoples who would voyage into unknown lands to build a life for themselves: those looking for fame and glory or those seeking to flee persecution.  If the mice starting your new settlement are frontiersmice, it's likely that they are going after some resource or trade route, which would give you a good idea of what skills those mice will have. More importantly, it'll give you an idea as to which skills they don't have.  Figuring out where the holes in a settlement's skilled labor are provides easy mission ideas, as it gives legitimate reasons or opportunities for the patrol to be involved in the new settlement.

Conversely, if the mice are fleeing some kind of persecution or conflict with another territory, that means they likely lack many of the skills needed for setting up a settlement on their own, and  that can up the danger factor in the ensuing missions.  Just as useful, it gives you a built-in relationship with another existing territory.  In our game, the mice setting up the new settlement were headed up by the daughter of the head of Grasslake, who had been cast out over conflicts with the patriarchial government in her hometown.  She was a capable enough mouse, but many of the mice that left with her were other female housemice who lacked many of the skills needed to survive in the wild.  This meant that the patrol had a large role to fill in protecting and help building up the settlement, and also allowed for many future sessions related to the conflict with Grasslake.

As I mentioned earlier, for me the key in these types of campaigns is looking at the building up of a settlement from a procedural standpoint.  There's a tendency from players and GMs to go the more traditional RPG route of monster encounters, but for Mouse Guard being ill-suited to withstand a flood can be a much greater danger than a wandering animal.  It also, from a mechanical standpoint, provides much more opportunity for skill development.  A new settlement needs houses for the mice living there - Carpenter, Stonemason, Scientist, Glazier, etc. all can be used for great obstacles during the GM Turn.  Mice also need to eat - Hunter is a knee-jerk skill to use, but buried in the Seasons chapter is this little gem: "Planting a field of seeds for later harvesting is an Ob 6 Harvester test."  The goal of the patrol should be helping the settlement achieve sustainability. After all, the Guard is always needed elsewhere, and there's no telling how long the patrol will be able to stick around.

In this sense, you can spread something like maintaining a steady food source across multiple obstacles and sessions.  Our town was in a marshy area, so there were small fish to catch for the short term.  We secured a rice shipment, and planted rice for more of a long-term food source, and then one of our later missions was to build a mill to convert the rice into rice flour for additional food, and paper for trade.  Taking on this line of thinking can help build a lot more color to your game, and can help your players get more of a connection to the settlement as they go, because they can see a true progression.

If you're thinking about running a campaign like this, keep some of these things in mind when designing your missions.  Mouse Guard to me is the perfect setting to run this sort of game, as everything is a real danger, from unknowingly building a town close to a fox's den or trying to negotiate a trade agreement with a nearby settlement that has resources you need.  If you think of everything that you really need to start a town, you can run missions in the same settlement for years. 

Let me know some of your stories of running your own settlement building missions, and let me know if you have any other suggestions for GMs looking to do so.