Mythic Bastionland - initial impressions, and making a Realm

[pemerton]

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.

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.

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.

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.