More for my end of RPG Blog Carnival. (C’mon, people, let’s not make this all my work.)

Gawin and Ancreta, unlike any of the other characters I’m likely to be showcasing, weren’t created for my Exalted game, but for my experimental Mouse Guard one-off. In the original plan, one of the other players was going to take a turn behind the screen, and I was going to need a character, so I figured I’d provide the group a couple of options, and what I ended up with were these two.

The two of them were the son and daughter, respectively, of the mayor of the town of Honeycomb (first introduced to the group as on the wrong end of a nasty flood). Both were young enough to be trainee-age; both, likely due to their upbringing, had very strong senses of duty, if applied in different ways; and both, above all, had been imbued with their mother’s ideal that “A good leader doesn’t look for why she can’t do something, unless to find a way to work around that limitation”. For the rest of their descriptions, though, they were exercises in contrast.

Gawin was all about knowing things, and finding out things that he didn’t yet know; the group’s first meeting with him was a little while after he’d chosen the worst possible time (right before the roof gave out, to be exact) to go do a depth-measure on the rainwater that had already fallen. He tended to be quiet; to give answers, but usually when spoken to, and to ask questions almost as often as he gave answers. He wasn’t the type to wax eloquent about his disapproval of someone, but he could still get it across: at one point, one member of the group (actually the leader, though nobody had told Gawin) was talking about why all of the solutions the others were coming up with were unfeasible, and he rolled his eyes and muttered, “I feel sorry for your patrol leader”. (I think he ended up deciding that one of the other members of the group was in charge.)

Ancreta, on the other hand, did things. The group’s first introduction to her was through one of its members splitting off to go figure out what in the granary was going to need to be salvaging; he arrived, ducked as a seed flew past his ear, and took stock of the situation, finding a bucket brigade already organized, by a loud-voiced girl young enough to be his trainee who almost immediately recruited him into helping out. (She had apparently also been given partial training in bureaucratic manueverings, enough so that she was the one providing the dice for the attempt at devising a ration; of course, this could also be because she was the first one to start drawing one up.) If she knew what to do, she’d try to find a way to do it; if she didn’t know what to do, she’d hunt up someone who did (this happened quite a bit with regard to the group, though in a couple of cases she went to the group, they sounded like they had no idea either, so she decided to find someone else); if she knew what to do but didn’t know how to do the task, she’d find someone who did.

(And yeah, both of them did upstage their mother, but given that she was right in the path of the water and nearly drowned, then spent the rest of the time focused on medical triage, while Ancreta was above the elevations where the water really hit and Gawin was on a boat that managed to stay afloat despite taking him well away from where he should have been, it seemed reasonable.)

I never got to find out which one of the two of them the group would have picked to take on as a trainee; after a while, we just decided this was taking too long. But they turned out pretty well for not-quite-statted characters who hadn’t really had time for establishment beyond initial responses.