Mythic Bastionland - initial impressions, and making a Realm

SteveC said:

I really like the take on the genre, the knight characters you play, and the quest driven nature of the game as it's laid out. If someone put a game of this in front of me, I'd jump in at a moment's notice.

A friend of mine has an amazing birthday celebration that's become a full-sized gaming week. I've run something at it most years, and this will be the game I'm trying out this year. It has really basic mechanics, but the stories that come out of the quests just look amazing. We'll see if that's true.

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As I posted upthread, my favourite knight errant game is Prince Valiant. So for me, this game has to clear a high bar. On paper, I think it does - I suspect that (for me) Prince Valiant's resolution mechanics are more satisfactory in a lot of contexts (it's a very flexible dice pool system, a little bit like the Burning Wheel family of games), but I think the travel/questing mechanics in Mythic Bastionland are really interesting, and like you say the Myths seem to have a lot of colour, and the game is pretty good on how to integrate this into the setting and the travelling/questing mechanics.

The conception of the setting, and the mechanics for handling that - passage of time, domains, etc - all seem pretty good.

So I'm also hoping to be able to give it a try and find out.

SteveC said:

People have been talking a lot about "D&D Killers" as in "is this the game the next D&D killer?" And I think, in a broad sense, there won't be one any time soon. It's not viable, really, in any way. What there are, for me anyway, are games that kill my interest in playing D&D. This game is one of them.

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As I'm writing this, I suppose it might come off as dismissive of D&D, and as D&D is the biggest yum around, there's no way I intend to yuck it. I'm playing a 5E game tonight, for instance, but if I could come up with a good VTT implementation, I think this would fit my online group exceptionally well.

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Others posting in this thread can speak for themselves, but for me this is a non-issue. I can't remember if the last session of D&D that I played was 4e D&D or AD&D, but either way I'm pretty sure it was pre-pandemic. I've never played 5e D&D and don't expect that I ever will - if my daughters, who have played it a bit, wanted me to play with them I would make sure it was something else (eg Mythic Bastionland!) - and typing this has reminded me that actually the last D&D I played was a brief session of Moldvay Basic, using the Haunted Keep sample dungeon, for one of my daughters.

The games that Mythic Bastionland is competing with for my attention are Torchbearer 2e, Burning Wheel, Prince Valiant, and Classic Traveller for campaign-type play; Agon 2e, In A Wicked Age, Cthulhu Dark, Wuthering Heights and Cortex+ Heroic (either supers or my fantasy hack) for one-shot-y type play; and Apocalypse World, Dungeon World and Sorcerer, for systems I'd like to get to the table but haven't managed to yet.

AbdulAlhazred said:

I don't think 'Conceptual Horizon' or anything like that is involved. A game text is a text containing the instructions for how to play a game. You read it, you do what it says, you are playing that game. If you get to a certain point and there's no instructions covering what you do in situation X, then that's a gap! Now, MECHANICALLY most games have open-ended mechanics that cover things like "how do I roll dice and what do they mean in any arbitrary situation", but a lot of games have very large lacunae in terms of things like "how do we decide what situation comes up next?" Or "who gets to choose what comes up next, and by what process?" or any of a variety of other things like that.

I think, from the discussion, @pemerton's concern revolves around the sorts of issues I give as examples. Now, something like B/X D&D is pretty complete here, at least if you are in a dungeon. It sounds like MB OTOH doesn't really tell you what to do when, say, a player just declares his PC is going to do something that isn't clearly related to a Myth or other defined game element. Like what if Sir Mike says "I bring Lady Lenore some flowers." (maybe this is a bad example, as I haven't read the rules, but I think you get the idea).

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I think that what I'm trying to identify with the phrase 'conceptual horizon' is very much involved, at least generally in how people read and interpret RPGs. People come to a new RPG book with all manner of previous experience and that experience informs their reading of the text. It is regular and predictable that in some cases the prior experience of the reader - their preferred style, their understanding of what an RPG is and does, their conception of their players, and all manner of things can get in the way of grokking a new rule set. That reader's purpose for reading is also part of this package. One way to read an RPG is to read to find out how it works. Another is to read to find out how well it conforms to some previously held opinions about RPGs. Many gamers to some extent read in the latter fashion. An additional complication is the extent to which some readers think that simply reading the rules conveys then the same understanding as playing those rules. I'll grant that with experience and understanding the former becomes more and more possible, but that doesn't prevent people dropping hot takes from the seats of ill-informed armchairs.
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To what extent this might apply to common readings of MB I have no idea, which is why I plan to read it again with a more critical eye.

Fenris-77 said:

It's worth getting just to read and revel in the art.

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Yeah the book is just so friggin' inspirational. Holy crud the art, the themes, the ambience and atmosphere that the book evokes.

Distracted DM said:

Fenris-77 said:

It's worth getting just to read and revel in the art.

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Yeah the book is just so friggin' inspirational. Holy crud the art, the themes, the ambience and atmosphere that the book evokes.

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I don't want to be too big a party pooper in my own thread!, but am moved to post a response to this.

I like the overall book design - the way the rules are laid out two-column style under generally informative headings, the way the Knights and Myths are set out in their two-page spreads, etc. I think there is a bit of information that is spread out and could be together - some stuff about holdings, for instance (some under Creating a Realm, some under People and the Realm, some under Domains); some stuff about NPCs (similarly), some stuff about exploration (most under that heading, but some in the Creating a Realm and Sites stuff). But that's the consequence, I guess, of the resolute commitment to the effective layout.

I'm not super-moved by the art. It does it's job, and combines the mediaeval with the more modern grotesque pretty well. (I say without being any sort of critic or qualified describer of art!) But it has no effect on my interest in the game.

What is compelling for me is: (1) the ideas expressed by the Myths, and the way these are bundled into Omens - it's clever stuff, personally in my view at least on a par with and maybe cleverer than the Fronts/Threats material in Apocalypse World, and maybe up there with In A Wicked Age. (I can't make a conclusive judgement about that because I've played IAWA and so know how well the Oracles work to instigate play; I don't yet have actual play experience of Mythic Bastionland.)

And (2), the way game promises to bring those elements into play - the combination of travel (which fits with knight errantry) and NPCs (in the Omens, the Seers, the locals with their folklore) and player interpretation (""When the group feels that a Myth has been resolved, reaching a conclusion of any type"), which reminds me of Signs of the Gods in Agon 2e.

So I agree that this is an aesthetically compelling and inspiring work, albeit for a different reason!

No, there's no excuses here, you are a HUGE party pooper sir. A pooper of parties, and you should feel bad.

Slowly making my way through the book and blown away by how dense it is. Thanks to the author's assumption the reader knows how to handle a lot on their own, it can cram a ton of info into each page.

Jahydin said:

Slowly making my way through the book and blown away by how dense it is. Thanks to the author's assumption the reader knows how to handle a lot on their own, it can cram a ton of info into each page.

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Have you read the two pages yet on Dominion/Domains and Authority? Together with the Time rules, they create a more playable domain system than any version of classic D&D ever managed to do!

And I think on balance they might be better than Torchbearer 2e's, although for me that would be such a big call I'm hesitant to make it. (Again, my reason for reservation here is the lack of actual play experience to give me a sense of how time works in the game. I have that sense for TB2e.)

Jahydin said:

Slowly making my way through the book and blown away by how dense it is. Thanks to the author's assumption the reader knows how to handle a lot on their own, it can cram a ton of info into each page.

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I also think the way that NPC roles are handled is really strong. The integration of rules and setting is extremely tight, and in my view extremely clever.

And not just for its promise to support play, but also for the way it reinforces the themes of the setting and the game.

pemerton said:

Have you read the two pages yet on Dominion/Domains and Authority? Together with the Time rules, they create a more playable domain system than any version of classic D&D ever managed to do!

And I think on balance they might be better than Torchbearer 2e's, although for me that would be such a big call I'm hesitant to make it. (Again, my reason for reservation here is the lack of actual play experience to give me a sense of how time works in the game. I have that sense for TB2e.)

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I love Torchbearer in all its iterations, but Luke and Thor aren't above overcomplication in places.

Fenris-77 said:

No, there's no excuses here, you are a HUGE party pooper sir. A pooper of parties, and you should feel bad.

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See my previous two posts. I'm not kidding when I say that I think the rules in this book are compelling and inspirational.

In this paragraph, I'm contrasting with Errant because I bought it at the same time, having seen both games mentioned together, or at least close to together, in the context of OSR games that do interesting things. And for me the contrast is super-huge. Errant doesn't inspire me at all. It opens by telling me its another OSR game. Whereas Mythic Bastionland opens by telling me the game will be driven by Myths, and then presents all these weird and creative Myths, and has a setting that I think they will work in, and rules to make it all work (subject to the gaps I've already mentioned). Chalk and cheese.