Mythic Bastionland - initial impressions, and making a Realm

A week or so ago I bought the Mythic Bastionland PDF, after a few people whose opinions I respect said good things about it. The publisher website <Mythic Bastionland Hardback Book (plus PDF)> gives a general overview:


My favourite knight errant RPG is Prince Valiant, which I think is an absolute masterpiece. And the game I've been playing the most recently is Torchbearer 2e, which is a member of the Burning Wheel family of games, but has quite a bit of classic D&D-ish stuff in it, including searching for loot, travelling across a map, and rules for building a stronghold, for economics, and so on.

My initial impression of Mythic Bastionland - given the RPGing experience that I'm bringing to it - is that it is a weird combo of those two RPGs. It has travel across a map - but much more hex crawl-y in resolution procedure than Torchbearer (but with much lighter weather rules!). It has quests and omens, which are generally a bit more surreal than the typically human situations that underlie Prince Valiant scenarios. It has more complex combat than either of those games, but simpler PC build (no skills, for instance).

The myths of the game unfold through Omens, that are triggered (sometimes randomly, sometimes automatically) by the PCs travelling across the map. Because each Myth has its 6 Omens, plus a picture and other details, placed on a single page, naturally the Omens are pretty brief. But they provide a solid starting point for presenting the players with interesting situations. Where I found the rulebook weakest was in describing some of the basic elements of play outside of the Omens: how to frame scenes (including the starting scene), and - related to that - how to establish unrevealed fiction for non-Omen contexts, which is pretty important for a hex crawl-y game.

And as another example, the rules talk about "sites" and the "treasure" they might contain:


But the rules have nothing more to say about when and why there would be the "need" to provide this sort of site-level treatment of a place of interest.

A lot of the referee advice is found in extensive examples of play and commentary on those, at the end of the book under the heading "Oddpocrypha". But this still left me unclear about a lot of this basic stuff.

Where the rules are clear is on the procedure for drawing the map of the "Realm", and so I decided to have a go at one.

People keep recommending this one to me as well.

It ended up taking me three or four hours, yesterday evening and this morning, to make my Realm.

I started with an old bit of hex paper (from memory, photocopied from the back of the Wilderness Survival Ground in the late 80s), and marked out my 12 hex x 12 hex area. Then, at every point where random procedures could be used, I used them. The rulebook sayss "As a general guide create clusters of d12 hexes of the same terrain type", so I started by rolling d12s until I got to 144 (I had to round my last roll of 9 down to 5).

I then rolled a d12 on the terrain table for each of my terrain clusters:


The result of this was a very wet Realm - here are my terrain clusters (with the numbers in brackets being the total number of hexes of each terrain type, and the other numbers the number of hexes in each cluster):


Judging from the map symbols on the example Realm map, I inferred that "valleys" correspond to rivers. I used Google and Wikipedia to educate myself on the difference between a bog and a marsh, and between a meadow and a plain. (I didn't need to worry about the crag/peak contrast, nor how glades differ from meadows!)

One third of the results on the random terrain table are wet - valleys, lakes or wetlands - but I was over 40%. And I was nearly one-quarter highlands (peaks and hills) despite my lack of crags. So I decided the Realm would include one tarn (Googling now, I see that "tarn" is defined as a small mountain lake; so maybe the Realm's mountain lake is not a tarn in the strictest sense!), and then rivers flowing from the highlands into a lake, with a river flowing out of that into another lake.

I started filling in the hexes from the top left, moving across and diagonally down the map, and filling in the bottom left last. It was easier than I thought to make all my clusters fit, but I don't know if this was just good luck, or is a likely feature of this sort of map-drawing scenario. (I don't know the maths that would help answer this question.)

Once I'd filled in my hex, and coloured in my terrain using pencils borrowed from my daughter, I placed my 4 "holdings" (settlements). The rules say that these are "typically castles, walled towns, fortresses, or towers" and so I place one of each: a castle nestled into a river loop; an island town; a tower in the hills; and a mountain fortress.

Here is the map of the Realm so far - this is the map players would get at the start of the game:



And here are the notes (which are pretty basic):

The next step is to add the stuff that is secret from the players until they discover it through play - and so is on the GM map but not the players' map. The rules say one barrier for every 6 hexes, so 24 in my case. And they are to be placed "logically", not randomly.

Here is how I placed those:


The rules also say 6 myths, and 3 to 4 each of dwellings, sanctums, monuments, hazards, curses and ruins (collectively "landmarks"). I rolled a d2 to answer the "3 or 4" question in each category of landmark, and rolled on the d6, d12 "table" (I use quote marks, because these random determinations are spread throughout the book in a fairly ingenious way) to get all the other details. Here is what I ended up with:


The comma-separated numbers are my d6, d12 rolls (there are two for sanctums - one for sanctum type, and one for its Seer - and two for ruins - one for ruin type, and one for its Myth). The L, B notation for Myths indicates their hex (Left number, Bottom number) - as per the rules, I placed these "in remote places". Before placing them, I had a read of the Omens and other details, and so placed The Wall in a gap that might once have needed defending, placed The Inferno in a mountainous area (but with the potential for warming the tarn), and placed The Mountain where it might stand tall and shade the Realm at dawn, placed the Troll in a good spot for its swamp and cave. The other two I thought were a bit more flexible, but I put The Hound near a forest, and The Cudgel in the south-east to make sure that area wouldn't be neglected.

The other landmarks I placed where they seemed to make some sense, but also trying to maintain a fairly even spread across the map.

Here is the full map of the Realm:

As I said, this took a while but not forever. It's probably not the Realm I'd create if left to my own devices - and has far more water in it than my beloved Greyhawk! - but I'm sure it's playable, and departing from one's defaults is the point of random rolls.

I'm hoping I met get to play this, maybe with my daughter and her friends.

Here are the rules for the "action procedure":


Some of this is familiar: soft moves (escalate) and hard moves (deliver on a threat); and "say 'yes' or roll the dice". But some of it is a bit unclear. How is risk established? This matters, because it's the key to whether or not to say "yes". And what is the best way to establish consequences? The rules don't have the sought of advice found in RPGs like (say) Apocalypse World and Ironsworn.

A lot of GM discretion/intuition is called for, and I would have liked the game rules to say a bit more about the general approach the GM should take. The game also doesn't help by calling the GM the "referee" - because these sorts of decisions go well beyond refereeing, and constitute important creative input by the GM into the game.


An EDIT to this:

The rules, in the context of failed actions while exploring hexes, state that


One thing that is unambiguous about these rules is their embrace of a "fail forward" rather than "nothing happens" approach to the results of failed rolls.