Ok, I’ve finally managed to browse through Mouse Guard RPG – not read it completely, but enough to make some notes about it. The production values of the physical book are high – Full-color hardcover book with solid typography all the way through. The layout is given a lot of room, which is nice after the cluttered Burning Empires. Art is of course top-notch, not a surprise since it’s from the Mouse Guard comic. The rule system seems quite good (well, it’s Burning Wheel and then some), but so-far, nothing in it really makes me go “Ooh, I want to steal that for my homebrews”, which usually would be a marker that the game has reached its goals for me. That doesn’t mean the game is bad (good things I spotted were, for example: more or less formalized plot-twisting, animals getting and edge with their basic natures, seasonal changes), just that they don’t really inspire me.

That is also a bit of a problem with the whole book. It’s good. I can easily see the appeal and it works out just about as I imagine it would. And there are cute mice and villainous weasels. It’s very loyal to the comic and you could easily represent the events of the comics with it. All in all, it does what it promises very well. And yet, I feel somewhat cheated when I’m reading a 320 page RPG book that doesn’t stray from its purpose. I’m odd like that.

I’ve used the “RPG books are like cook books for me” -metaphor before when talking about games with friends. I originally stole it from some conversation thread on some forum, but it’s so true in describing what I get from RPG books these days. They contain recipes, ideas and inspiration. “Ooh, coriander chicken, sounds good, I’ll try something like that next time I’m inviting my friends to eat some chicken-based food. I’m not really keen on the idea the recipe has on the rice, so maybe pasta would be better” When you’re starting to play games, you follow the instructions by the letter, but once you know your own (and your group’s) tastes, you just cherry-pick things from new material and use the ideas to spice up the stuff you know that works.

And in this respect, Mouse Guard feels like a 320 page book about a wedding cake. After reading the book, you can do a wedding cake with it, and you know a lot more about wedding cakes and their history. But you already knew how to make a cake, and the recipe itself is quite normal. Also, you now know how to do the groom and bride from sugar, and sure, you could use that in your future cakes, but do you really want to the next time you’ll bake a cake for your birthday? Mouse Guard is that book for me. I could probably use it to host a great game about Mice with Swords, but if I wanted to do something else with the rules, using the game as a basis seems a bit more trouble than it’s worth. And no, playing Rabbits with Axes isn’t “something else” in this context

I have to compare the book to Burning Empires again – both are very narrow in scope, but at least with BE, changing the color of the game doesn’t feel so awkward. The innovations in that game are quite re-usable and they are on a higher level than just mechanical – the structural stuff is really something that draws me in (which is funny, as MG’s structural stuff just seems bland and uninteresting to incorporate into a game other than MG) there, as are the basic ideas of the world.

I’ll probably read Mouse Guard RPG through properly once, and then give final judgement to it. At the moment it seems like it’s a great game that I probably could never GM as it feels very uncustomizable. But then again, if I ever want to do something that has to do with little animals with a human side and a human society, I’ll use this game for it, for sure.

Summary: Great book, just not for me.