This past weekend while picking up my free comics, I grabbed the Mouse Guard: Fall 1152 collection. This is a great fantasy comic series about elite mice who protect a tiny kingdom from threats both external (crabs, snakes, and other large creatures) and internal (traitorous officials.) I had owned several of the individual issues before and noted how RPGish the comic was, but upon reading the whole collection I was struck by the setting. The kingdom in which Mouse Guard takes place is a network of smaller kingdoms, each with their own governments but overseen by one central government. In between the cities, there are monsters (well, animals) that merchants and travellers must brave to go from place to place, and certain skilled warriors go on adventures in this setting. Sound familiar? Yes, it seems as though the world of Mouse Guard is an ideal Points of Light setting!
Well, in some ways great minds think alike, as CBR reports that there is going to be a Mouse Guard RPG released at Gen Con this year. Game design is going to be handled by Luke Crane, the creator of the widely-praised Burning Wheel RPG. (Luke also purportedly runs some of the best RPG demo sessions ever.)
This implies to me that the Mouse Guard RPG will either run on Burning Wheel or be its own indie-ish system, and not D&D. I’ll be picking up the book for sure, both for ideas and for the art.
What is Burning Wheel, both setting and system wise?
I haven’t played or read it, but the Wikipedia entry is good, and the Burning Wheel official site I linked above should help.
Mouse Guard is definitely one of the best comics out there, but I only have two of the individual issues. Is Fall 1152 a new story or a collection of all the existing stories?
Fall 1152 is a collection of the first arc. It should say on the cover to the individual issues what arc it’s from (the Winter 1152 is now in progress.)
So from that Points of Light Setting link, I take it that such is going to be the standard campaign setting for 4th edition D&D games? While a Points of Light setting seems like it is easy for a DM to create stuff for the PCs to do, it doesn’t allow for the nation-state style of campaign that my friends and I have played in numerous times. I guess I’m just wondering why the Design & Development team thought that they needed a standard “style” of campaign, when I had never before considered that to be an issue.
The idea is that “Points of Light” tended to be the default style of D&D anyway, and establishing it and building the default game around it makes it easier for new players and new DMs. (It also fits nicely with some of the new sub-systems, like skill challenges and quests.)
However, we won’t know until the book comes out how integrated that all is into the core rules. I’m eager to find out, since the next campaign I’m planning is pretty far from standard.
Heck yes, we’re blowing standard completely out of the water with this one…
It isn’t supposed to be mechanically integrated at all.
The main reasoning behind the Points of Light standard design (aside from giving new DMs a baseline to start at) is that it’s easy to add fluff and setting material, but much harder to remove it.
So if you take the “bare-bones” style PoL D&D, and want to put it into a world of nation-states, it will be easy to do, as there’s nothing that’s already there to get in your way.
But if the base style for 4e was, say, Greyhawk, there’s a lot of baggage there. Things will need to be altered, stripped, and players will need to be told what is and isn’t there.