Anthropomorphic animals are everywhere in fiction and art. From children's cartoons to furries, from the Stone Age to the distant future, the stories cut through a wide spectrum of genres. And talking mice make up the bulk of them.
Big Ears Small Mouse is Guardians of Order's entry into this genre, aiming particularly at cartoon mice. It's also their first foray into American animation, instead of their anime bread and butter.
But this isn't Toon-type animals, throwing slapstick gags and explosives at each other with no lasting effects. (Though that's possible with the introduction of the "Slapstick" Attribute.) BESMouse takes a more Disney frame of reference, with whole communities of clothes-wearing animals existing outside the notice of humans, and yet under their feet. A single cat presents a huge challenge, but one that can be bypassed with an Easter basket and a helium balloon.
I love this book. It's fun to read, and it's laugh-out-loud funny in parts. "Cats who are Pets may even have humans as Servants." It also makes me want to play.
It doesn't limit itself to mice, either. The default animals for BESMouse are mice and ants, but they don't stop there. BESMouse includes templates for a whole range of birds, reptiles, insects and mammals. A quick glance at the character options shows flies, rabbits, songbirds, snakes, shrews -- the list goes on. The size differences are represented by taking the Diminutive Defect and varying levels of Awkward Size. This means characters can be both very small and very large at the same time, so the interplay between the two Attributes is very carefully described. The net effect is to make BESMouse the Tri-Stat standard for creating animals.
The Tri-Stat System is still scaled for humans. Damage, then, is extremely lethal to creatures of mouse size or smaller. If they're created with standard BESM rules, a cat is capable of killing a human being fairly quickly. Welcome back to AD&D.
BESMouse gets around this by introducing Scratch Points, which are Health Points x 5, and scaling all weapons, etc., to that level. An average human has 200 Scratch Points, but a mouse is likely to do only a very few Scratch Points with a successful attack. It appears to work rather well.
Everything else has been scaled as well. In particular the "Stuff" chapter lists human artifacts converted for small animal use. It's a short chapter meant as an idea springboard for players and GMs. Some of the gadgets are ingenious, such as an inline roller skate with gyroscopic stabilizers. It's fast transport for two!
Three sample settings are included, five if you count the setting used for character creation examples and add in the sample adventure. They run the gamut from ants and mice in the wild, through mice hidden under the humans' feet, to anthropomorphic civilizations. While it's not quite a "something for everyone" collection, it's a solid range of campaign types.
If BESMouse suffers anywhere, it's from poor editing. It needed at least one more pass before printing. The rules for Tangle and Stun are missing. The Stun example is still there and easy to reverse engineer, but it's also apparently wrong. Standard damage is normally divided by five for mice, but it's been divided by four here. Are the Stun rules supposed to be different? We have no way of knowing.
There are also some jarring grammar errors, again something one last edit would have helped. This one isn't so bad: "[O]ne should never assume that ants are unsentimentality." One word is off a little. Worse is in the description of Scurriers: "[E]veryone from the surrounding area knows and respects Mary be disruptive." A couple of words got dropped there somehow.
The Appendix is a great list of source material grouped into Literature, Film and Television. (The Literature section doesn't list Charlotte's Web, a personal favorite, but I can't really count that as a problem.) It looks tacked onto the sample adventure, though. You turn the page and there it is, no header, no title, no introductory art, nothing. These set off all the regular chapters. The Appendix has only a change to the page number footer as a visual clue.
That's small potatoes, though. BESMouse is one of the best sourcebooks on the market for any system. If you have Big Eyes Small Mouth, buy this book, if only for the animal rules. If you like cartoon mice but hate Disney with a passion, buy this book for a Wind in the Willows or E. B. White-inspired game. If you can't stand the idea of animals as PCs no matter what the situation -- well, tastes vary. Me, I think it's time for a BESMouse Hidden Invasion game.
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