My Materials for a Mythic Bastionland One-shot
This weekend I'll be running a Mythic Bastionland one-shot for a few people who have never even heard of the system. As a forever DM, I'm relishing the opportunity for a rare in-person game in a system I picked, so I've been spending a good chunk of my free time this week preparing some physical materials and props for my players that I wanted to share with a community that might get equally excited about them.
It turns out you *can* end up needing all that geometry you learned in high school...
Early on I decided I wanted to go all out with a large scale realm map. I had some spare 22"x28" poster board laying around, so I thought to create my realm map on that to give my players a good first impression when they see a huge poster splayed out on the table. Its a one-shot, so I decided to shrink the grid a bit to an 8x10, then mathed out that each hex should measure 1.5in on each side.
However, even with what I thought was a strong foundation of planning, it turns out I *vastly* underestimated the effort of free-handing a hex grid. I started by trying to cut out a template hex to repeatedly trace (thinking I could exploit the effort and use cutout hex tiles later to cover the map), only to discover that the tiniest imperfections in my measurements compounded over iterations to create a very sloppy look by the time I reached the far end of the grid.
I tried again, this time by drawing guidelines at what I thought were the significant points for constructing my grid. I got enough right that it wasn't too hard to measure out the rest, but I missed what would have been a very helpful set of vertical lines for the "off-rows", and had two useless vertical line sets that did nothing but go straight through the middle of hexes.
Then it came time for coloring, and I cracked open a set of pastels I haven't used in years.
pro-tip: don't rub your eye immediately after blending pastel colors with your fingers...
Here's my realm, all colored in. It's not super detailed, but I've got a couple little doodles to represent a few of my towns, myths, and landmarks. There are a few more I'm going to create cutouts for that I'll tape on top of the map as players encounter them, but for the level of skill I have in art I'm happy enough with how it came out.
The thing I'm actually proud of though is my custom character sheets. I wanted to really capture the feel of Arthurian fantasy with courtly customs and medieval trappings, so I created a template sheet that has embellishments vaguely resembling a contract of knighthood. To then sell the bespoke medieval effect, after printing the sheet out I tore the edges and coffee-stained the paper before drying it for a minute in the toaster oven, finished by flattening it under a book. The final result for my proof-of-concept sheet (The Pigeon Knight) came out like this:
You can't really get the full appreciation of the weathering effect from a photo, but the little wrinkles and creases in the paper feel very authentic to the touch, but the paper seems sturdy enough to still be writeable for players.
Tonight and tomorrow I'm going to be staining the remaining character sheets and creating a few more blank leaves of aged paper for props and a letter that the knights will be tasked with delivering to the seat of power to give them some direction at the start of the one-shot (very excited to crack open my sealing wax for that!), but I really wanted to share what I've done so far.