Mythic Bastionland - initial impressions, and making a Realm

[pemerton]

For me, the brilliance of Mythic Bastionland is how the Myths and Omens work. It solves the issue of random encounters being...well, "random," disconnected, and distracting from the "main" story. I'd seen some blog discussions of the concept of "encounter tables with memory" before, but I've never seen the concept implemented in a game before MB. Has it been done elsewhere?

Torchbearer 2e uses random events that index things that matter to the PCs, like friends and family. It's a different approach from Mythic Bastionland, but is definitely something that is shaping how I think about the latter.

EDIT: Just read @zakael19's reply mentioning AW, DW etc. I fully agree with that too.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Upthread, before I'd actually played Mythic Bastionland, I made these posts about it:



After having played it, I made these posts (on another active thread):

In this post I want to say a bit about how these "before" and "after" thoughts fit together.

It was the players' need for information that drove the gamist play. This information is obtained by searching hexes - that's the hex crawl aspect - and by talking to NPCs (including Seers). Probably the best-known information-driven gamist play is CoC mystery-solving. Mythic Bastionland isn't clue-driven in the same way, or at least wasn't in my game. The Wilderness event table throws up Omens without the players needing to do anything special to find/generate them.

Interpreting the Omens is, as I posted upthread, a bit like the Signs of the Gods in Agon 2e. But the pre-authored structures - the map structures, which include definite locations for Dwellings, Holding, Seers, Monuments etc (all important for recovery), and also the Omen sequences (set out in the book for each Myth) - put constraints the players have to work out and work within. Which is what creates the parameters for gamism.

The difference from classic D&D is that the goal is not acquiring treasure. And the difference from CoC is that the goal is not solving a mystery. At least for the Myth that ended up being the focus in my session - The Mountain - the culmination of the information was making a choice about how to relate to the Myth.

Because Glory is obtained by resolving the Myth - whatever that looks like - the gamist orientation seems to drop away at that moment of climax. It's pretty interesting, I think. It reminds me a little bit of Agon 2e. And also a little bit of the Green Knight RPG - the mechanics are different from both of these, but the gamism driving towards the need to make a thematic choice at the end is a bit similar.

Yeah, I think you are definitely right about Agon 2e. The Island for each session kind of sets up parameters in a way similar to what the Myths sound like in MB. I found Agon's gamist aspect a bit lacking, but maybe we were just not playing it hardcore enough to push on that. If MB is kind of like a more open-ended and interesting in a game sense thing, then it really might be pretty interesting.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

If the players can't see past the need to obtain and act on information, then when the time comes to resolve a myth, there's the risk of the players looking for the "right" answer, rather than injecting their own thoughts as to what resolution means.

I think the GM needs to somehow make clear, at least by what is implicitly signalled if it's not explicitly flagged, that the players have to choose rather than just try and find out.

This is another place where experience with Agon is useful. There can be a very definite tendency to try to find the 'right' interpretation of the Signs of the Gods. Even I wasn't immune to this as a player, at first. When an Island is designed, the signs clearly should be designed such that they bear on the action to come in some sense, but it is how the leader of the adventure interprets them which determines their meaning, the GM/Island designer should NOT be assuming any particular interpretation! Even 2e didn't quite say this explicitly, or maybe I am just daft. Anyway, as this bears on MB it seems pretty significant, the players establish the meaning of each Myth!

 

[Breaking Star Games]

It seems very fun so far after a oneshot and first session of my campaign. Knight abilities and passions are often very evocative. Myths tend to be quite fun too.

I find myself frustrated by many Combat-oriented Omens aren't necessarily interesting combat encounters on their own (Quinn's Quest went over this in his review of Mythic Bastionland). They don't immediately inspire secondary objectives, unique terrain or some other complication. Without any of these, combats do just look like piles of bodies smashing against each other where every turn will look quite similar and the Combat Spark Tables aren't necessarily perfect for this either. So, I am compiling tons of advice for this and doing more prep on certain omens that are upcoming. I also wanted to have a better idea how hard a fight is, so I saw someone mention balancing to show how many actions will the monster get if being focused:

X= Number of Players

• 0-1 actions: VIG 3X, GD 3X
• 1-2 actions: VIG 3X+4, GD 3X+2, A2.
• 2-3 actions: VIG 3X+8, GD 3X+4, A3.

My rough draft of Combat Objective Verbs: Save/Protect, Obtain, Escape, Prevent/Delay/Disable, but you also need to answer "why don't the PCs just kill all enemies or just ignore all enemies to focus on the objective" - usually having it be more limited on how many PCs can do said Side Objective helps.

I also don't like improvised descriptions of locations and NPCs. These are my usual go-to prep because I want to be evocative (hit a few different senses, feel a fairly cohesive mood/tone, usually a color) in two sentences. This kind of fantastical description takes time and editing for me to get down well. In MB, you will be improvising these based off some tables you roll two results and combine them or from a word in the random name generators at the bottom of each Knight or Myth page. So it comes out a bit messy. I was lucky to get a break before writing up the travel towards and into the first dwelling, so when I had time, the Spark Tables are really quite nice.