Mythic Bastionland - initial impressions, and making a Realm

[zakael19]

There was some good discussion of how prepping and running the Myths could use a little more bones then the book gives in a Discord I lurk in. Folks eventually linked to this blog post with some solid thoughts.

To quote a line that seems to resonate with your reading of the rules: "Overall, I think the game errs too much on the side of brevity, leaving implicit some things that should be made clearer, and putting that work onto the DM."

 

[pemerton]

Very cool, @pemerton!

Thanks! The last time I filled in a hex map it was for my Torchbearer 2e game, and was just transcribing from my GH maps so that I could make on more features (settlements, mostly) that I didn't want to write directly onto my original maps: Torchbearer 2e - actual play of this AWESOME system! (+)

So this is the first original FRPG hex map I've created since, probably, the late 1980s! It was more fun and less painful than I had anticipated, maybe in part because I'm more patient in my old(er) age! And learning about the Myths that I rolled up was interesting too.

I'm a bit surprised how much the process of drawing my map makes me inclined to want to use it to run a game. There is both (i) a feeling of investment, but also (ii) the activation, by the process, of my imagination: I can "see" knights moving through this realm having strange Myth-generated experiences.

 

[pemerton]

There was some good discussion of how prepping and running the Myths could use a little more bones then the book gives in a Discord I lurk in. Folks eventually linked to this blog post with some solid thoughts.

To quote a line that seems to resonate with your reading of the rules: "Overall, I think the game errs too much on the side of brevity, leaving implicit some things that should be made clearer, and putting that work onto the DM."

Thanks for the link to that blog!

I agree with the blogger that there are some gaps in the rules, but actually don't think the Myths are in that category. I think there's enough in the Omens to get me going as a GM: I've only read the Omens for probably a dozen or so Myths (the ones I rolled up, plus a few others when I was reading the rules), but they remind me of things like the Oracles in In A Wicked Age, or some aspects of the more supernatural Prince Valiant episodes in The Episode Book (albeit more abbreviated). And also a bit of Islands in Agon 2e, which are similarly abbreviated in their presentation.

I think the approach that the author of the blog takes risks moving the game in a slightly railroad-y direction. I've especially got this in mind:

Knights increase in Glory every time they “resolve” a Myth, so understanding how to do that is big concern to the players. The book offers very little guidance. Page 6:

When the group feels that a Myth has been resolved, reaching a conclusion of any type, all Knights who played a part in that Myth gain 1 Glory.​

In practice, this can mean that no one knows how to progress towards the conclusion or resolution (D&D’s default resolution, kill everything, rarely works in MB). I think this is a big problem, but I don’t think it’s unsolvable.​

And then, in the worked example of The Shadow Myth, the blogger writes

The Shadow seems to be a Myth about dealing with grief: not pushing it away, nor wallowing in it, nor profiting from it, but honouring the dead. To resolve the Myth, therefore, the PCs need to come to terms with grief and loss.​

And to me, this looks like the GM making the decisions that the rulebook instructs the table as a whole to make, namely, have the PC knights resolved the Myth? To me - influenced by RPGs like In A Wicked Age, Agon, Prince Valiant, Burning Wheel, etc - it seems that a big part of the point of play is for the players to make their own sense of a Myth, and form their own view as to whether they have resolved it, or it still remains unresolved.

So this wasn't an area where I felt the rulebook had gaps. The gaps I felt were in relation to non-Myth based prep and framing; not the prep of the map, but the prep that will underpin the framing of the non-Myth related scenes that the game seems to envisage.

 

[pemerton]

Another thought on this game - which obviously I've become temporarily obsessed by! - that also relates to some of the issues in the blog that @zakael19 linked to, and my own thoughts about "gaps".

I've seen this game described as an OSR game. I'm not involved in the OSR space at all, and so my sense of "what's OSR" is pretty basic. But I think of B/X D&D and dungeon-crawl-y AD&D - which I do know fairly well - and Lamentations of the Flame Princess, and even a game like Errant which I bought at the same time as Mythic Bastionland, but which - after a quick skim of the rules - I can be pretty confident I will never read fully, or play. In this sort of game, "beating the dungeon* and PC advancement are pretty central elements

And I don't see either of these in Mythic Bastionland. There is the hex crawl aspect; but as soon as I see "When the group feels that a Myth has been resolved, reaching a conclusion of any type" then I feel we've moved completely out of beating the dungeon territory and have shifted our concern to some sort of shared aesthetic/creative appreciation and engagement of situation that is like some of those other RPGs I've mentioned not far upthread: Burning Wheel, Agon 2e, Prince Valiant, etc.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Here are the rules for the "action procedure":

When the players take action the Referee works down this list:​

1. Intent: What are you trying to do?​

2. Leverage: What makes it possible?​

3. Cost: Would it use a resource, cause Virtue Loss, or have a side-effect?​

4. Risk: What's at risk? No risk, no roll. Otherwise make a Save or a Luck Roll.​

5. Impact: Show the consequences, honour the established risk, and move forward.​

​

Success​

When the players succeed at a significant action the Referee does one of the following:​

• Advance: Move in a good direction.​

• Disrupt: Lessen a threat.​

• Resolve: Put a problem to rest.​

​

Failure​

When the players fail at a risky action they might still complete the action, but always suffer negative consequences:​

• Threaten: Create a new problem.​

• Escalate: Make a problem worse.​

• Execute: Deliver on a threat.​

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

Even if they fail the Save, the goal might still be achievable, but now faces an obstacle, a hostile encounter, or an additional cost.​

​

While the cause and consequence of failure can be personal, they also represent the whims of nature, bad weather, shifting land.​

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.

I would expect that you could consider impact similar to BitD effect. You could think of leverage as similar to position. intent and cost seem reasonably straightforward, and risk is generally negotiated in most games I'm familiar with, so you could do that. I think, in that sense, once you establish a flow at the table it will be fairly equivalent to playing something like Dungeon World. Albeit DW sounds like it is clearer on equivalent points, and spells things out pretty clearly.

 

[pemerton]

I would expect that you could consider impact similar to BitD effect. You could think of leverage as similar to position. intent and cost seem reasonably straightforward, and risk is generally negotiated in most games I'm familiar with, so you could do that. I think, in that sense, once you establish a flow at the table it will be fairly equivalent to playing something like Dungeon World. Albeit DW sounds like it is clearer on equivalent points, and spells things out pretty clearly.

In BitD, don't position and effect affect the size of the dice pool?

In Mythic Bastionland, there is no difficulty adjustment - it's like the most basic form of RQ in that respect (roll stat or under on d20).