[OC] but warning: long post, TL;DR at the end.

I thought I would share my work on a recent homebrew of playing the Dread RPG but in the Mythic Bastionland setting/system. I've split this long post into various sections, but I want to acknowledge up front that in creating this mashup I did use AI tools to help with some coding and initial generation of some icons. I know some people feel passionately about the use of AI, especially in creative realms, but my use here was partly to make the workload manageable for one person, and partly because I wanted a meatier project to get more familiar with AI workflows and their capabilities.

With that out of the way, I present A Balance of Oaths.

Seek the Myths, Honour the Seers, Protect the Realm... and play Jenga?

A full printed and custom homebrew mashup consisting of unique 150 item cards, unique 92 Seer cards, 37 unique tarot cards (status, rules, abilities, effects), two custom map making tools, alongside other thematic "feelies" like letters, maps, etc.

Introduction

Every year as a Halloween tradition I run a one-shot of the RPG Dread for my friends. For those unfamiliar, Dread is a TTRPG where instead of rolling dice, you pull blocks from a shared Jenga tower for skill checks. If the tower falls over, your character dies (preferably in some gruesome, horrific, but cinematic way). So at the start of the game your character can easily accomplish things, but as the story develops there's a natural tension that builds, and your players will begin to fear even doing the simplest task, lest they be eaten by a grue or gored by a werewolf. Previous years I've had my players camping with werewolves, fighting zombies on an abandoned spaceship, and shipwrecked with pirates fighting a cult in the jungle (in each case, few players survived to the end, which is part of the fun). This year I decided to take on the ambitious project of building a world in Mythic Bastionland but merged with the rules of Dread.

I may have slightly underestimated the scope of the project.

What the heck, why???

Honestly, this was somewhat of a spiralling project that consumed my attention for dozens of hours over many late nights. After I learned about Bastionland I was intrigued, I watched some reviews, I bought the book, but my current friend group just didn't have the bandwidth to start another campaign among all the others we currently have running. My friends really, really like Dread, and it's led to some incredible moments and stories, so I saw an opportunity. The idea seemed simple enough: run a one-shot of Mythic Bastionland but instead of dice, use a Jenga tower.

The How: Game Mechanics

I won't go into too much detail, but generally I tried my best to follow the excellent rules laid out in the Mythic Bastionland sourcebook. In the end I tried to capture the spirit and feeling of Bastionland, but the implementation is decidedly different, resulting in combat and dialogue being equally perilous. A big difference is my janky solution to trying to balance a system where every skill check is all-or-nothing (that is, you pull a block and succeed, or you fail and the tower falls). On top of this whole system there's also the tension between players that is a key part of Dread. Sure, you're a party travelling together, but are you actually friends?

I did end up writing a whole separate rules document, which I'll omit here, but I will share the quick reference I made for myself and my players.

The Basics

Instead of rolling dice, every risky action means pulling from the tower, same as a normal game of Jenga. The riskier the task, the more pulls required, from Trivial (1 pull) up to Impossible (7-8 pulls). Advantage (a good Virtue, item, or ally) reduces pulls; Disadvantage increases them. Simple, safe stuff just succeeds with no pull at all. If the tower falls, it's death or a wound so great you're on death's door at least. As with Bastionland I used Vigour (Strength/Dex), Clarity (Intelligence / Wisdom), and Spirit (Charisma / Constitution), but instead of numbers Knights of Vigour would just get advantage (-1 pulls, less pulls are better remember?) for doing something strength related.

A quick and easy cheat sheet....

Wounds, Scars & Recovery

Players don't have a health value, instead it's Wounds. Each of these are like negative conditions for pushing past your limits or the result of negative circumstances. The way this worked in practice is that each player started each day Rested but if they took an action that requires significant or strenuous effort (combat, scaling a cliff, fighting mental demons in a nightmare realm), then they would be Fatigued. If they continued to push past their limits without Recovery then they would become Injured, then Wounded, and finally Doomed. In this way it actively encouraged the players to work as a party instead of just letting the person who has the best axe do all of the Combat, as that sole fighter doing all of the pulls would quickly exhaust and die. These wounds can be healed by Recovering (resting at a safe place), Remedies, or by Knights fulfilling their passion.

The Wound cards, wouldn't want to so foolish as to get yourself doomed would you?

Not all wounds can be cleanly healed however. In some cases (serious events or because a jenga block said so, more on that later) a player could receive a Scar. Scars are meant to be both thematic for the player but also a physical handicap at playing Jenga. Get a Scar like Fevered or Disfigured and you might be pulling blindfolded, one-handed, or with a glove on for the rest of the game. This was the thing my players laughed hardest about, even mid-panic. Have you ever seen two people play Jenga as a duel to the death while one was blindfolded and the other can only use a chopstick?

Quick! You better find a sawbones - or better yet, pray.

Combat

This limited system is the best I could come up with... Same pull economy, plus three Feats depending on your knight type : Vigour = Smite (win the exchange outright, but take a Scar), Clarity = Focus (cut a future pull by 2), and Spirit = Deny (negate an incoming hit entirely, or eat it in full if you fail). Combatants can also spend an attack on a Gambit, an improvised effect like Repel, Trap, or Dismount, instead of a straight strike.

Armour is consumable, soak a hit and it's battered until repaired. Guard is more about positioning, it makes you harder to hit but can be stripped away with the right Gambit. There's also some extra rules about weapons that tryThe knight was Palsied at the time and required another playeto mimic some of Bastionland's rules but believe it or not, I'm trying to make this post shorter...

I included extra powers for Warbands if the party managed to convince enough followers to take up arms but it never came up...

Knights & Squires

Every player starts as a Knight-Errant, young and unproven, bound to their companions by a shared Oath: Seek the Myths. Honour the Seers. Protect the Realm. Each Knight is built around one of three Virtues, Vigour, Clarity, or Spirit, plus a hidden Sin, a personal failing kept secret from the table. Sins matter mechanically later on, more on that below.

“Strength, sight, and spirit — the pillars upon which honour rests”

“Every oath breaks in its own shape. Some shatter loud, others crack beneath a smile.” Each Sin is supposed the corruption of a Virtue, a compulsion born from the Knight’s fall from grace. A Knight under a Sin must obey its strange new rule of conduct — a superstition, penance, or mania through which they justify their decline.

Additionally, each night is either a Loyalist, pledged to serve the king and realm, or is a Rebel who views the king as a tyrant and rejects his tyrannical rule. Problem is these loyalties are secret at the start of the game...

Each Knight also had a Squire, an apprentice who fights alongside them but can't yet gain glory or use Feats. Squires have their own secret allegiance too: Duty or Ambition. A Dutiful squire can throw themselves into harm's way to protect their Knight, and enough sacrifice earns them a shot at real knighthood. An Ambitious squire is playing a longer game, they can quietly steer their Knight's actions, and if that Knight dies through betrayal or neglect, the squire can seize their name, station, and gear outright.

It's a small addition on paper, but it gave the squire players real stakes even while technically being the "lesser" characters, and it set up some fantastic table tension once people started wondering aloud which of their allies might benefit from their death. In our game we had one squire sacrifice himself, survive and was elevated as a knight. Equally, another squire did succeed in pushing her knight off a cliff (The knight was Palsied at the time a required another player to hold their wrist while they pulled, shame their squire just whacked the tower with their limp hand).

Resistance: Bastionland Edition. Surely the threat of betrayal will increase party cohesion right?

Seers

Every Knight Errant can become a Knight Gallant by Swearing an Oath to a Seer, a strange, often barely-human entity who grants power at a price. Each Seer in the book comes with a want (usually deeply weird, sometimes deeply sad) and a Boon they can grant. Ask one for a blessing and they'll name their Cost, some small ritual sacrifice, humiliation, or act against your own interest. Refuse the Cost, and you instead take the Penalty, usually a Sin or Scar that hits far harder than the Cost would have. These Seers were great encounters for my players and definitely the highlight.

To keep things interesting (and because I'm a glutton for punishment apparently), I included all 92 Seers from Mythic Bastionland as potential options. Seers encountered were random, my players drew randomly from a deck and we improvised the encounter.

I really loved this addition, and I'm sure many of you will sympathize as this is a key part of Bastionland. I know the Knight Errant vs Knight Gallant is used differently here than in the book but I wanted my players to build up to getting strange powers instead of having them from the get go, added to the magic and wonder I think.

I did make custom cards for all 92 Seers (some pictured below). Understandably, I will not be sharing these files or cards, as they contain Alec Sorensen's incredible art from the Mythic Bastionland sourcebook and these cards were for my personal use only (please forgive me).

Know the rules of all Myths, their secrets, weaknesses, and cures. Know all Landmarks in the Realm. Such vast knowledge is never given freely.

Items

I made over 300 unique items for this game, each with their own art, stats, and lore... why? Because I'm insane, clearly. We didn't use even 20% of them.

Items don't add damage, they just shave pulls off a check when used well, and every item can only be invoked once per scene. Quality matters more than type: a Fair item cuts one pull, Uncommon cuts two, Rare cuts three. A Knight carries two weapons and one set of armour; everything else, tools, relics, remedies, counts against a shared pool of two carried Provisions. It keeps loadouts lean and makes every item choice at the outset actually matter. There were also Mounts, Wardrobes that acted as quick origins, and items with special and unique powers bolded in the text. My favourite item was probably the rare and illustrious Brazen Brass Codpiece that gave significant advantages only if worn with extreme confidence otherwise it was a debuff.

All players love loot

The Blocks

This is the part that's pure Dread and doesn't exist in Bastionland at all. Before the game, a handful of Jenga blocks get marked in advance: "pull again,", "keep", "find item" etc. Blocks could be awarded and saved by the players, allowing them to place a saved block instead of pulling them directly from the tower. This allowed my players a bit more agency, particularly near the end of the game when the tower was looking desperate.

Pulled blocks, letters, and an incomplete map. Feelies for my player to enjoy.

Death

Another difference between Balance of Oaths and both Bastionland or Dread is how we played out Death. Since there was limited playtime, rolling new playable knights wasn't feasible, instead we take a haunting approach – dying doesn't take you out of the game, it just changes what you're playing. When a player dies they become a Restless Spirit, allowing them to haunt players. If they can guess the sin of a player making a pull they can interfere with their pull as much as they want, only rule being that they can't touch the tower, table or the player themselves. But yelling, whispering in their ear, or even holding up a pillow in front of their face is all fair game for example.

Oops I guess you're a ghost now.

Maps

Inspired by many excellent map tools and handout sheets I've seen, I wanted to make a custom map tool for both the hex map and for building sites. As a lot of this game's story was improvised and I wanted to give my players the freedom to explore as they wished. I needed something that was responsible and adjustable on the fly but also had all the features needed to mark many of the story and terrain features in each tile. This culminated in two programs:

Seer's Atlas is the realm-scale hex mapper. Paint terrain, rivers, roads, lakes, and oceans onto a hex grid, drop in castles, ruins, sanctums, and other landmarks, and it handles fog of war, barriers, and per-hex notes for you. It'll also generate lore on demand (using gemini-flash api), ask it about a specific hex and it writes grounded, sensory description tied into a rotating cast of factions and NPCs, so the world feels consistent without me hand-authoring every single tile. This thing had a wild amount of feature creep but in the end my players loved having a live active map on an adjacent TV to explore. It also allowed me to make outdated or incomplete maps as feelies that my players could get form NPCs and guide them on their journey.

Fog feature was essential. Icons in red (landmarks) were hidden from my players.

Site Weaver handles the small-scale stuff, dungeons, ruins, camps, anywhere the party actually gets out and walks around. It follows Bastionland's hexagonal site-generation method directly: six points around a hub, each rolled as a Feature, Danger, or Treasure, connected by Open, Closed, or Hidden routes. Click a point to cycle its type, click a route to cycle its connection, and it redraws live. Same AI-lore hookup as the Atlas, it'll flesh out entrances, points, and connections once the skeleton's in place, and everything's fully editable afterwards, since the AI doesn't always stick the landing.

This ended up being essential as my players really dove into the cities and towns I made. Not shown are the saved states and printout generator built into the tool.

The Story

I'll try and keep this very brief, as I doubt it has much interest for anyone but...

The setting is Valdenmere, a kingdom stitched together by King Ealdac over four decades of conquest and duelling. He's old now, fading, propped up by his advisor Master Ardan, whose real loyalty lies with a Seer whose name nobody says out loud. One region never fully bent the knee: Aldrenfell, and its last holdout, the fortress of Barden Tor, is under siege as the campaign opens.

My Knights were freshly knighted at the King's court and sent north to reinforce that siege, sworn to the same Oath every Knight swears: Seek the Myths, Honour the Seers, Protect the Realm. What was supposed to be a straight ride north immediately went sideways, a body count in the capital before they'd even left the city, a smuggling cult under a watermill, a Seer's blessing that cost one of them a piece of themselves. They rode out into the Blackfen, a fetid swampy region where the crown has little influence. After getting lost and encountering a few omens from The Wurm myth they made their way to the pirate-filled Asterleigh Harbour. There they got embroiled in some skulduggery and were blackmailed to go find a relic trove in the mountains for a spymaster. After a difficult journey, encountering some omens of The Underworld myth, the party arrived at the archive only to find a giant hole which turned out to be the lair of the The Wurm. After a few player betrayals and duels, they killed The Wurm in an epic fight, with its death throes causing a massive cave-in. To escape, the party flung themselves into a twisting dark portal after a shrouded guide from The Underworld myth beckoned them inside...

The Wurm and The Underworld myths and omens were taken directly from the Mythic Bastionland sourcebook.

If you made it this far into the post, thanks for reading. It was a fun project and I just wanted to share.

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TL;DR: Mashed up Mythic Bastionland with Dread (Jenga-tower horror RPG), dice became tower pulls, damage became physical handicaps (blindfolded, one-handed pulls), added hidden allegiances, a haunting system for dead players, all 92 Bastionland Seers as an encounter deck, 300+ homebrew items, and two custom map tools with AI lore generation. Party got lost in a swamp, blackmailed by pirates, killed a giant Wurm, and dove through a portal to escape its collapsing lair.