Six Feats Under's Mouse Guard campaign has been lifted from its hiatus to be given a proper ending, and these last episodes are all different enough I think it's worth talking about what's under their hood. I don't think it's a spoiler to say nothing yet to come is played in the Mouse Guard RPG, we did almost everything you can do in those rules and they didn't fit our specific needs at the end.

You can find my notes here if you want to follow along. You could even use this to run your own Skullduggery session and see how it shakes out for you, I guess. The descriptions of the PCs (and NPCs originally built as PCs to choose from) even work as a summary of the top-level narrative to this point. We looked at a few games before settling on Skullduggery, and I'm not sure it was the ideal choice, but it worked out. We needed a frame for intrigue, reversals, twists of fate, and PCs to be able to pick their moments. Skullduggery works for that. I think the biggest problem was I included the combat rules in our custom 'just in case', not expecting them to be used. I didn't even read over them leading up to the game. Of course, the very first rolls were a combat. I'm fairly certain we didn't follow the actual procedure for attacking and defending.

The reason we did this instead of the usual end-of-season montage is two-fold. One, those episodes are about giving our mice extra adventures, and any more stuff between the two patrol finales and the Winter War would be out of place. Two, the game and its source material are part of an animal adventure genre with unexamined issues. This campaign has a lurking outsider, biologically driven to pillage and devour. It's rough shit if you look at that allegory as used for people. So let's take a moment to see how true that is for our weasels. Let's show their leadership pulled in different directions, with different goals and drives. I don't know if we did any better than our predecessors, but we had these conversations in the group and this game is one of the results.

It's also a chance to look at weasel culture. This is not, on my end, a fully-fleshed out society. Ask David Petersen if there's more that hasn't made it in the books yet. Ask Ikks about elements she thought up we didn't have time to spotlight (there's plenty, they're great). But my strategy was always to make gestures and leave blanks to be filled in later, either in future scenes or in the mind of the listener. We've seen a wider design of arms and armor in the tunnels than in the territories. Maybe the weasels have scavenged from many societies, or maybe the tunnels guard their secrets from one another to the degree they each have their own traditions and processes. The tunnels are all named for signs of the Weasel Zodiac, which implies they have their own starwatchers, their own calendar, and that there's a time each year for Iron, for Bone, for Ash, etc. I don't know what that means, maybe you have some ideas.

In prep for this session we realized we had accidentally made a Macbeth in Savash. A supernatural vision of power moved them to seize it bloodily, laying the groundwork for their own destruction. That's why the NPC I thought most likely to die is named Banquo.