Nerding Day: Big Ears, Small Mouse (Patreon)

When I was a child, hobby shops were not the comfortable, tastefully-decorated, family-friendly spaces they are today. Back in the bad old days, these spaces were overwhelmingly grimy and dimly-lit caverns, squalid domains ruled over by someone's balding uncle who always smelled vaguely of cheese. The shift towards the "come-one come-all, sip a latte and play some cute board games" format has been a net societal good. But no matter how gnarly it was, we always mourn the world of our youth, don't we? My generation didn't have brainrot! We didn't have phone! We stayed out until the lights came on and bought Rifts books from a man who always seemed to resent anyone being in his store until he finally shut it down and it became a pet spa!

Ahem. There are still places like this, bizarre little moldy patches of strangeness desperately clinging to the underside of a world that has long since rendered them unnecessary. One of my favorites is the Compleat Strategist in New York.

The real estate thaumaturgy that allows this place to exist in midtown Manhattan is utterly beyond me. In the racks and racks of roleplaying game manuals you can find all manner of weird shit — need a Vampire: The Masquerade sourcebook from 1996? They've had it sitting there for 30 years and you will pay the original MSRP for it. The last time I was there, I stumbled upon this:

I initially thought this was the work of some long-forgotten amateur pervert. But then I noticed that little "BESM" in the bottom left-hand corner. I knew it all too well. In the past, I've shared both fucked up Canadian lore and fucked up roleplaying game lore with you. And today, the day has finally come to explain some fucked up Canadian roleplaying game lore.

In 1996, chemistry student Mark C. MacKinnon founded Guardians of Order out of Guelph, Ontario, a city best known for having a pretty good veterinary school. Mark loved anime at a time when that meant driving out to buy VHS tapes from weird dudes at conventions held in legion halls and rec center gymnasiums. He published a game called Big Eyes, Small Mouth in 1997 and sold a hundred-odd copies at GenCon.

BESM began as little more than a pamphlet, then exploded into a 300 page psychotic attempt to create a roleplaying system that could cover every contingency in an entire medium. You'd be forgiven for assuming that a ruleset called "Tri-Stat" would only have three stats. In fact, the game asks players to calculate derived values from those three numbers, build their own attacks, and choose from dozens of skills. It might take more time to create a BESM character than a Rifts one, and all the while you'll be taking in the most "How to Draw Japanimation"-ass student art of all time.

After BESM, Mark somehow landed the Sailor Moon license and released a roleplaying game slash series guide at a time before obsessively-maintained fan wikis made any information about any media franchise trivial to find. It did pretty well, so he started buying up the rights to other series. Back then, the stuff that was getting stateside releases wasn't necessarily the best or most acclaimed, it was just whatever localizers happened to get their hands on.

As a result, GoO published some things that look really odd in retrospect. They made games based on Dominion Tank Police, a slapstick futuristic action miniseries with catgirls; Demon City Shinjuku, a now rarely-remembered 80 minute action videotape; and Tenchi Muyo, one of the archetypal "harem" anime series. The Tenchi Muyo book might have been the first place I saw an image of an anime titty, back when such things were precious rarities rather than unavoidable hazards of our digital landscape.

In 2000, GoO had seven employees and Mark was on top of the world. Five years later, it was down to just him. A year after that, George R.R. Martin shared the news that the company was out of business due to unpayable debts. Why George? Well, GoO didn't limit themselves to splurging on the rights for anime in their sicko phase: they also grabbed Game of Thrones, The Authority, and Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. Yes, the Jim Jarmusch movie. Sadly, we never got a Night on Earth RPG in which players deal psychic damage to a Catholic priest by confessing to the insemination of a pumpkin.

In addition to producing ill-advised licensed games, GoO also published a lot of supplements covering different genres and trends in anime. These included Cute and Fuzzy Cockfighting Seizure Monsters, a game which was also released under the title Cute and Fuzzy Seizure Monsters.

See, Mark wanted to stay true to his art, but also didn't think a game with "cockfighting" in its title would do well with kids. Such was his hubris that his solution was to simply pay to print two versions of the same book like some kind of mad Canadian King Solomon. I'm seeing shades of Kevin Siembieda here.

But unlike our old pal Kevin, Mark actually gave up the reins once in a while — he didn't write Big Ears, Small Mouse. Instead, it was written by a John W. Nowak, who as far as I can tell never wrote anything ever again and may in fact be dead. His opus is a game where you play as little woodland creatures going on a whimsical cartoon adventure. It's inspired by works like The Great Mouse Detective and Chip 'n' Dale: Rescue Rangers. I recently rewatched the former, and I'd forgotten about the part where a mouse dancer with her face fully beat tells a roomful of visibly drunk critters that she's down for whatever. Whatever.

As for Chip 'n' Dale, did you know there was a minor Russian cult dedicated to the character Gadget Hackwrench?

But hey, if we get sidetracked talking about religious organizations formed around funny animal characters, we'll be here all day. What's crucial to know is that BESMouse gives us the power to stat out any flavor of cartoon rodent, from tomboy mechanic to alluring dockside bar dancer. It is left as an exercise for the reader to determine how many points in the Appearance Attribute each should have according to the BESM rules.

BESM tried to be everything to everyone, covering space opera, teen comedy, horror, fantasy, giant robots, and Legend of the Overfiend. BESMouse stretches an already unwieldy system even further to accomplish something that nobody who wanted to stat out the fuckability of a Japanese schoolgirl was likely to be interested in. Grandpappy always said to do one thing and do it well, but fuck that guy. He probably isn't even familiar with the works of Steve Lafler!

Begone, weeb shit! Away with you, 3000 year old dragon titty babies! We have no need of you here. Today we heed the call of the Village People. We're going west. That's a promising direction for GoO's student illustrators. Back in the early 2000s, anime was still scorned by most North American art schools and teachers. Disney, though? That was real animation, so presumably the kids Mark tapped to do his illustrations were being trained in it.

Hey, not bad! It looks like what it's supposed to look like, as opposed to the anime-inspired art in BESM that gave off the vibe of a dog trying to imitate human speech. And yes, you can play as a talking dog in BESMouse. Not a furry, though. Just a normal dog who can communicate with mice, birds, and even ants! You can be Woody Allen in Antz!

Maybe you're wondering, "but Merritt, how does BESMouse allow for both dogs and ants to interact using the same ruleset, much less humans and ants?" I'm glad you asked! The answer, as is so often the case in the world of roleplaying, is through tedious and unnecessary math!

Got that? Five Pep Points are equal to one Health Point, and five Scratch Points are equal to one Damage Points. Do you see what they've done here? These lunatics have invented reverse Mega-Damage!

Good god. This kind of nonsense is why FishBlade was inevitable. These rules are for nobody except maybe perverts who need to do math in order to feel like they've earned their erotic Gadget roleplay. And our author has to futz with the rules in plenty of other ways to accommodate his Maya the Bee-ass shenanigans.

Listen to yourself, John. This is madness. And half the time, it doesn't even end up working. For example, a bee's suicide sting attack does 15 Scratch points.

Meanwhile, a Glock 19 mounted to a mouse hovercraft inflicts 30 Scratch damage.

In BESMouse rules as written, a 9mm round is extremely unlikely to kill a mouse. Conversely, it would take approximately 30 bee stings to kill a human being.

Was Mark MacKinnon drunk off the power of running a somewhat successful small Canadian publisher and just saying yes to everyone who asked to write a BESM supplement? Or did John have something on him, something so horrible that it would discredit him forever should it get out, like that he watched dubs instead of subs? I don't know. But I do know that Mark shipped a book with this in it.

Hey, quick question? Yeah, um, why does the guard dog look like that? This isn't Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. You cannot play as a dog who walks upright and wears a biker cap and has human-like hands with which to explore the taut, muscular body of another leatherclad dog. All of the other animals look like relatively normal children's cartoons, albeit off of the covers of Brazilian DVDs, such as:

Zippy Doo! A Bird Day

Jermy and Ant Punish Tomas

Eagles! A Bird Day 2

On the subject of eagles, John really likes eagles.

Not as much as that one artist likes dogs, of course. Sorry, I'm still thinking about him.

Let me be clear. I don't have anything against this. Hating on furries is so old and boring at this point that there could be grandfathers today who came up railing against "furfags" on 4chan. (Theoretically, of course, as no anon has ever been known to reproduce.) It's just tonal whiplash, is all. It'd be like getting midway through Stuart Little and having the jugged-up frog voiced by Charo from Thumbelina show up and smother him with her green tits, inflicting 30 Scratch damage (Grappling) and killing him instantly.

Hold up, let me check something.

Let me get this straight. They put four kinds of bats in here but zero frogs? John put in leeches, shrews, and naked mole rats and we gotta stat out titty frogs all on our lonesome? This piece of shit book doesn't belong in my home. I'm going to go get a cash refund, spend the money on malt liquor, and make drunken, threatening phone calls to my elected officials. This is your fault, John W. Nowak!

No cash refunds?! Those are the three worst words in the English language, after "no titty frogs." Fine.

Mrs. Toad has Appearance, obviously. And Art of Distraction (insanely charismatic and charming). She has three Flunkies (her frog sons), and Jumping (frog). I threw in Electronic Counter-Measures because I thought it might be useful in an espionage or military context. I'm also going to give her a modified version of the Defect Ageism, here rendered as Anti-Frog Discrimination, because apparently BESMouse fucking hates them!

But wait. It goes further. John C. Nowak refuses to accept the existence of amphibians at all.

What's the deal, John? Did a frog kill your father? Did a caecilian steal your wife? Or maybe, just maybe, your sexual universe was completely exploded in 1994 by the unparalleled erotic power of Mrs. Toad in Thumbelina and you never recovered. That's what this book was for you, wasn't it? Revenge.

Well, I figured it out, you mouse-obsessed son of a bitch.

Keep telling yourself that, pal — you're going away for a long time. Assuming you're not already dead, I mean. Sorry about all the stuff I said if you're dead.

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