As I write this, Mouse Guard: Winter 1152 occupies the #9 slot on The New York Times‘ list of best-selling hardcover graphic books, where it has now spent the past four weeks. The comic portrays the adventures of “mice with swords”—what Variety called “a mix of Lord of the Rings and Stuart Little.” The Mouse Guard books don’t present a very detailed or intricate plot, or even terribly complex characters (though the Winter series has certainly done more on that account than the preceding Fall series); still, it has attracted a devoted following because it evokes, in its setting and in David Petersen’s gorgeous art, such a captivating world.

Petersen could easily have fallen into silliness with a story about talking mice, but Mouse Guard succeeds precisely because of the unflinching earnestness with which it approaches that setting. It takes itself seriously. Other animals appear with the kind of realistic precision that seems plucked straight from a field manual, and even the upright mice, wielding swords, do not look like cartoons.

In an interview, David Petersen described how Mouse Guard emerged from his experience with the wild places he grew up with in Michigan. “This is the environment that I grew up in, and so, I think I just absorbed that. That’s the kind of adventure that I tried to put into Mouse Guard. Mouse Guard is also kind of like my love letter to Michigan.” That love of place bleeds through every page of the comic. I quickly fell in love with it, because I could recognize the effort here to re-enchant the local landscape—something that has preoccupied me with much the same ambitions as David Abram or James William Gibson.

Many reviewers find the obvious comparisons between Mouse Guard and The Lord of the Rings, and while they rarely pursue this beyond the trappings of medieval adventure, I find the comparison even more appropriate in this regard. Many have remarked on Tolkien’s influences and goals; his romanticism and deep-seated skepticism about modernity in general, and his ambition to create a new, English mythology, one that repudiated industrialism as “the One Ring” that would invariably corrupt those who tried to master it on the one hand, while on the other celebrating things like the elves’ deep connection to the natural world, or the hobbits’ simple, rustic values, or the inner lives and perspectives of trees that the ents provide. In Defending Middle Earth, Patrick Curry explicitly discusses Tolkien’s ambition to bring about a “resacralizing of nature.”

Like Tolkien’s ents, Mouse Guard relies heavily on the opportunity it presents to show us the world from a different perspective. In this case, rather than the long view of trees, the world seen from a vantage point so close to the ground. Things we might not give a second thought to pose grave dangers for mice—and opportunities for adventure for the brave Mouse Guard. You can hardly help but think that here, we have new stories of “the little people.”

Of course, “the little people” don’t necessarily share a mouse’s size. Graham Harvey relates an incident wherein he asked someone in Newfoundland about his beliefs about “rock people.” This person offered a gift to some rocks, asking them not to take offense, and then returned, now using the term “little people,” a phrase originally from the British Isles but recognized and adopted by English-speaking Algonkian people. “While some would mistake this for a description (of the kind that led to Victorian and Edwardian fantasies about the diminutive size of faeries), it is better understood as a traditionally polite avoidance of naming. It either avoids inviting the presence of the un-welcome or it avoids distracting those who would rather not be bothered by our conversation.” (p. 124)

Calvin Luther Martin writes movingly and poetically about the skin of the earth. “As soon as they disappear from our sight across the membrane, say the mythtellers, ‘the animals take off their feather cloaks or skins. There they appear to one another, and converse with one another, just as we do here among ourselves. They too, in other words, are people.’” (p. 40) Perhaps because I read Soul Hunters immediately after The Way of the Human Being, I noticed how Rane Willerslev approached the very same belief from a different angle. Where Martin’s poetic descriptions move and inspire, Willerslev’s combination of pragmatic field work with the incredible insights of Tim Ingold provides the kind of eye-opening experience that allows us to finally appreciate the importance of the former. Willerslev makes the point reiterated by phenomonelogical philosophers that, to a certain extent, what we might call our “humanness” involves not just our biological reality—living inside our own bodies—but also the lived experience of those bodies from the inside. Other animals, of course, don’t experience the biological realities of the human body, but they do experience their own bodies from the inside. Our perception of the animal objectifies it: it exists as an object in our vision. But beyond our vision, it exists only in its own perception of itself; it has slipped beyond the skin of the world, where it slips off its fur or feathers and has its own life, just like ours. Willerslev makes the point that we can’t dismiss animism with the simplistic charge of anthropomorphism, because it concerns itself with the things that make different animals different as much as the things that make us the same. And in the stories, even in this “human” form (for lack of a better term), they retain details that identify them as other-than-human: they leave hoof-prints, or have an elk’s musk, or speak only with elk calls.

“Maybe by some strange logic, some unfamiliar reality that’s difficult for us to comprehend,” Calvin Luther Martin suggests, “beaver could turn around and produce ‘kettles, axes, swords, knives’ and so forth—maybe the fellow wasn’t joking after all. When one takes into account the skin of the world and the Common Self, where beaver people are the reality behind the facade of sixty-pound rodents called Castor canadensis, perhaps these things add up.” And what of Mouse Guard? What of Lockhaven, the headquarters of the Mouse Guard—that mouse castle carved into the rock, hidden by ivy, with its hive of bees? Certainly, I’ve never seen a mouse hole carved into the shape of a medieval castle, but what do we really mean by a word like “castle” anyway? If we did not have our experience, our tradition, telling us that this shape indicates home and fortification, would we recognize it, or would it seem to us like a meaningless jumble of stones? So, what does a mouse hole look like to a mouse? It might seem like a permission for poetic license—depict a mouse hole like a castle because it means to a mouse much of what a castle might mean to us—but I think this image depicts something deeper than that. “The fellow wasn’t joking after all.” The human experience doesn’t just mean our particular biology, but the experience of living in your own body; and likewise, a “castle” doesn’t just mean the particular shape, but the feelings we attach to that shape. I say, rather than poetic license, drawing Lockhaven as a castle, and depicting mice standing upright, speaking, wielding swords and practicing crafts, gives us a more accurate depiction of the world from their perspective than the alternative.

I have heard people say that traditional stories “hide” deeper truths, but the more I’ve studied them, the more I’ve rejected the word “hide.” They tell those truths as simply and plainly as possible. To make it any simpler or any plainer would make it no longer true. I’ve heard many people refer to the anthropomorphized mice of Mouse Guard, but I have no interest in an exercise in simplistic anthropomorphism. I love Mouse Guard because it challenges us to see the world from an other-than-human perspective.

David Petersen achieves all of this brilliantly—by never saying a word about it. His comics don’t concern themselves with this kind of philosophy; they handle it in a far superior way, by showing it, rather than telling it. You get it in the context of an action-packed adventure story, rather than a dry lecture like mine. A bioregional adventure, a love letter to your local watersheds and coasts, all seen from an other-than-human perspective, re-enchanting the land with the stories of adventure and daring that take place just out of sight, just beyond your notice, right here, right now.

And all of that would give us adequate cause for celebration and excitement, and we could congratulate David Petersen for his genius for offering us one more way, one more story, that helps heal that wound and reunite family and land. Except that David Petersen then worked with Luke Crane, the designer of an independent roleplaying game called Burning Wheel. Luke took what he knew about designing games and applied them to David’s setting, and produced the Mouse Guard RPG. It has received a long list of honors this year, including the Origins Game of the Year, and for good reason. Luke has long had a well-deserved celebrity status in the independent roleplaying game scene, and he brought all of that talent to bear on Mouse Guard. As a result, we not only have David Petersen’s work—we have it as an open invitation to join him, and begin jamming our own, new tales about these “little people.”

In a lot of ways, Burning Wheel plays like a traditional roleplaying game. You have a GM who brings the adversity to the table, you have your skills that modify your dice rolls, you roll your dice and compare them to a target the GM sets, and based on that you either succeed or fail. But Burning Wheel does some things with that basic setup that I’d always wanted to do to it, back when I still liked that basic setup. For instance, in a traditional roleplaying game like Dungeons & Dragons, you gain experience, and when you have enough experience to cross a particular threshold, you “level up.” Enough video games have adopted this model (especially MMORPG’s like World of Warcraft) that I suppose most of you have some familiarity with this. So, after wading through goblin gore, I get smarter, or I learn how to do library research. In Burning Wheel, you accumulate check marks each time you use a skill, so they advance because you use them. And even more importantly, in Mouse Guard, you need both successes and failures. After all, you learn most from your failures, but you practice with your successes. You need both to get better.

You have traits that add personality to your character, and you can use those traits to make things easier for yourself, or to make things harder for yourself. For instance, Saxon, the red-cloaked firebrand in the comic, has the Fearless trait in his write-up in the RPG. If you play Saxon, you can use that trait to get an extra die when you act fearlessly. You can also use it to make things harder for yourself, say, when you recklessly charge into battle at the worst possible moment.

Why would you want to do that? Well, unlike a traditional RPG where the GM also brings the story, Mouse Guard really doesn’t work unless you all come to the table hoping to discover the story there. If the GM comes with a story in mind, it will show, and the game will fall flat. The game actually has two phases: the GM’s Turn, and the Player’s Turn. On his turn, the GM pushes the patrol, but he comes with very little in mind. Instead, he has twists. Throughout the book, Luke uses the story from the first comic as an example. Lieam makes a scouting roll to find the grain peddler. If he succeeds, then Lieam finds the grain peddler. The comic follows the storyline in which Lieam fails, so the GM introduces a twist. Lieam finds an overturned grain cart—instead, a snake has eaten the grain peddler, and the patrol will now have to deal with her. Just like in so many good stories, failures propel the story forward by introducing twists and complications.

When the GM finishes, the Player’s Turn begins. Each player gets one check by default, which frankly, won’t allow them to accomplish much. To complete their mission, fulfill their goals, or even just recover from the conditions accrued during the GM’s Turn, they’ll need more checks, and they get those by using those traits against themselves. By acting in character, even when it works against them, players get the rewards they need to do more later on.

Most importantly, we define characters according to their Beliefs. Your character advances by playing into that belief—whether by acting to uphold it, or acting against it. The GM needs to push against those beliefs in play, so the story emerges very much from the characters at the table. Amongst traditional roleplayers, you’ll often hear talk about “munchkins” or “min-maxers,” and usually with contempt. These people study the rules of the system and try to maximize the effectiveness of their character. Usually, this means absurd combinations that violate the story (hence the contempt). But what do we call someone who has mastered the rules of chess and knows how to use them most effectively, except “a good chess player”? In what other game do we have contempt for those who have mastered it and play it well? The very fact that we might use the term “munchkin” points to the fact that in these traditional RPGs, the roleplaying and the game have become two separate, divergent activities, so becoming very good at one means ignoring the other. We stop roleplaying to play the game, or we stop playing the game to roleplay. Burning Wheel in general, including Mouse Guard, turns roleplaying into a game. To maximize your effectiveness in this system means playing your character to the hilt.

For example, since you need both successes and failures to advance your skills, you have two general options. If you do what you can to succeed on your rolls in the GM’s Turn, then you’ll only have one check for the Player’s Turn during which to get your failure. On the other hand, if you decide to stack things against yourself to fail in the GM’s Turn, you get your failures, twists complicate the story, and you rack up plenty of checks to use in the Player’s Turn to get your successes. So, your optimum strategy involves highlighting the flaws of your character in roleplay, compete fiercely for the opportunity to fail, and then in the second half of the game, make a heroic resurgence to save the day. That strategy propels the story down a very satisfying adventure story’s arc, and requires you to keep an intense focus on playing your character. The game adds something to our roleplay that freeform roleplay maybe wouldn’t give us on its own.

It didn’t take much for me to drift the setting to Cook Forest, one of the last remaining old growth forests in the eastern U.S. The mice, though, call it by its old name: the Black Forest, also evoking its Old World cousin, and the fairy tales associated with it. I ran a patrol at home, and one with the Myth Weavers (see episodes 11, 12, 13, 14 and 15). Our first mission with the face-to-face patrol really illustrated some of what this game can achieve, when the patrol stumbled into the hunting grounds of a northern shrike. This unassuming little bird hunts mice and other rodents, and it hunts more than it needs to eat at the moment. The rest it impales on thorns or sharp twigs, to eat later. The patrol saw a dying moue impaled on the thorns above, and found themselves ambushed by this little bird. I don’t think anyone at that table will ever forget the hunting habits of the northern shrike. Reading it in a field manual gives you one kind of knowledge, but a story gives you a way to relate to that knowledge.

It appeared in the right place and the right season. In fact, place and season play such important parts the game actually address them in the rules. Mouse Guard characters can specialize in Weather Watching as one of the important contributions they might make.

Like the comic, the game focuses on seeing the world from an other-than-human perspective. The very practice of roleplaying means an intense exercise in sustained empathy, in putting ourselves in someone else’s place and trying to see and experience the world as they do. Every time we play Mouse Guard, we spend a few hours seeing our landscape from the perspective of “the little people.” We spend our time jamming new stories, exploring the stories in the landscape together, trying to find the tales of adventure and heroism that take place just beyond our sight, just beyond the skin of the world.

I really can’t think of a better way to spend an evening, can you?