Hi guys, I'm currently running my second-sort-of-third campaign of MB, feeling like I've improved a lot with improvising using the system, but I've been hemming and hawing about how to handle 'non-omen' events as the players are exploring the wilderness. My basic question is; should I even bother? I feel like I should be throwing small things at them a bit more that aren't tied to the myths, both to make the world feel more alive and to make the supernatural weirdness of the myths stand out more against more mundane events (bandits on the road, passing wildlife, encountering weirdoes on the path etc.) Also, do you guys have ongoing Myths crop up in ways outside of the Omens when the book doesn't explicitly call for that? Undead appearing if the Catacombs is active, having the Goblin getting up to tomfoolery that isn't specified in the omens, etc?

One of my players has a Foundry license and has set up an instance for me to mess around with so I can get familiar with it and eventually migrate our campaign to that platform; I’ve only ever used Tabletop Simulator so this is new and a bit overwhelming for me!

Others here who use Foundry: What advice/tips can you pass along to someone who’s new to it? Additionally, what’s the best way/program to create a foundry compatible hexmap?

In mythic, even if a damage is listed as 3d10, do we only take the highest value of one of the dice and use the other for gambits if need be? Similarly, if a smite grants a user +d12 does that mean that they roll both the dice, pick the higher number and use the other for a feat as well if possible?

Asking cause I may or may not have rolled 3d10 damage as a wyvern and one shotted two players 👀

Hi all! I am running session three of our campaign this week (loving it. never had a group of players so invested, which is nice). They finished off the Order last time and in the course of doing so, they saved the thief from omen 3 or 4 and one of my knights found out about the location of the silver armor.

My question is: do you guys just tell your players what magic items do? I guess they could go ask a seer what the armor does if I don't tell them. But have you found any fun/interesting ways to let players uncover what magic items do (other than just asking or trial and error)?

Thanks!

I had a session of MB on Saturday, it was fantastic as usual, so much fun. However, right in the middle of it I admit I was suddenly quite confused about the warband rules. In that my instincts about what should happen and what I think the rules say should happen were in conflict.

First, the specific situation; there is a single warband led by an enemy knight. There are five player character Knights fighting these enemy forces. Everyone is in melee contact. For reference, the Warband rules are on page 11. Crucially and most importantly to this discussion, the fight is taking place on a cliff, where Repel is suddenly a very valuable Gambit, especially as a Strong Gambit.

Now, here are my questions:

* The warband automatically gets Blast. The enemy Knight gets to add their weapon to the Warband they are leading. That means the warband can attack all five knights (per Blast rules on page 8, rolling 5 times), and the enemy Knight's weapon is used all five times. Is that correct?

* How are gambits applied with Blast in this situation (maybe any situation?) Particularly non-Bolster gambits (e.g. impair). That is...

>> Can the player Knights use a single die in their roll to Repel both the Warband and the enemy knight off the cliff? Or would that take two dice?

>> Can the warband + knight use a single die to Repel ALL of the player knights off the cliff? Or would it take five gambit dice?

* The warband rules say that the leader "takes the same damage" as the warband. I think that means that you essentially treat the warband + leader as a unit, roll once against them, and then use the damage die twice against the GD + VIG of each. Is that right? This is as opposed to if the Knight were fighting but NOT leading the warband, where you you would roll twice, once again the enemy Knight and once against the warband.

Edit: bonus points questions :-)

* Let's say another warband moves into position next to the first on the narrow cliff path. Can the players attack both at once with a blast, or just one at a time?

* Do ALL the player knights have to Blast when attacking a warband, or is it enough that one of them does so?

EDIT: after re-reading my first bullet above, I think I see the answer to my second >> question. You are rolling five times (not once, as I was doing mistakenly during the session). You would need a gambit die on each roll to Repel that specific Knight off the cliff. But you could definitely end up Repelling all the Knights. Does that seem right?

EDIT: another bonus question...

* Are the separate rolls from a Blast separate Attacks? This matters with respect to Deny; if separate you could keep Denying until the saves are failed. If one attack, each Knight could only Deny once.

Hey everyone I have been running Mythic Bastionlands with my local play group and have played about 10 difference sessions in total mostly with 1 and 2 shots and been having a blast but I have come to find that the pure randomness of the virtues can be a bit of a bummer.

So I was thinking about adding a table to character creation called Knight Adjectives (title working for flavor). It'll be a 1d12 table and I intend to have my players roll on it to basically add the adjective to their knight name and that will define the characters. I'll starting using it my next session where characters are created but figured I'd get some feed back from you guys.

Score=1.0(Vigor)+0.6(Clarity)+1.4(Spirit) ---> My balance Equation

Knight Adjective	Vigor	Clarity	Spirit	Score
Fierce	15	7	8	30.4
Pious	5	7	15	30.2
Cunning	10	17	7	30
Gallant	13	8	9	30.4
Learned	7	11	12	30.4
Brutish	18	6	6	30
Stoic	10	8	11	30.2
Wary	13	13	7	30.6
Noble	12	7	10	30.2
Vigilant	10	15	8	30.2
Hallowed	8	9	12	30.2
Steadfast	11	11	9	30.2

TLDR: Mythic Bastionland felt too disjointed and aimless for me. The weird myths and hex encounters made it hard to stay connected to the story and my character, even though I think the combat and atmosphere are great

Experience with the system as a player: 9 sessions, ~27 hours played

The Myths / Weirdness

The myths are all rather confusing. I know this is on purpose but it worked against the overall story for me. There's a weirdness to the game because of the mythical theme.

Unfortunately, this makes it hard to connect to the story. Story threads can change depending on the roll, so my group was often unsure of how to proceed with a situation. I often felt aimless in what to do next or what even a myth development meant to me or the realm. It's a real, "Huh. Yeah, that's weird..." type of feeling.

It's on brand for the game to feel this way but not exactly engrossing me with what's happening.

Hex Crawl / Character Goals

Every movement on a hex spawns a myth of some kind and adds to this disjointed feeling as well. If you're trying to get from point A to point B, you might find yourself doing something else entirely before even getting there, if you get there at all. It makes character goals feel unconnected to what's happening.

For example, I needed to get to Point B on the map to collect something my character wanted. On the way there, we ran into numerous myths that needed our attention.

Cut to a few sessions later, and we still hadn't gotten to where my character wanted to be. The answer is that we could have ignored the myths happening in each hex, but the three guiding principles of each knight kind of imply that you should follow through with what the myths are presenting you with.

Character Creation

You have to bring a lot to the character as a player to make them interesting. It's very easy in this game for your character to just be kind of a blank slate wandering around a map.

There's no real bonds between the players and there's no built-in goal your character wants besides the three main goals given to you by the game (Seek the myths, honor the seers, protect the realm). You get some tiny lines of flavor and then gotta make the best of it.

I can usually make a character work for any RPG, but with how the myths are often unrelated to what the characters are doing, the characters themselves being given very little to work with, and the three main principles that each knight has, it was very difficult to get a feel for who my character was.

Combat

The combat for Mythic Bastionland is one of its strengths. It's simple but has depth. However, the looseness of the rules sometimes makes it difficult to tell what you can and cannot do.

In the moment, combat doesn't always feel exciting, even though it plays better in retrospect when you think back on what happened during the fight.

Also, combat can feel surprisingly long considering how much of it is repetition.

This post is inspired by the discussion I just read ("Mythic Bastionland: strong combat and atmosphere, but the structure felt disjointed and hard to connect with")

So anyway I Referee'd my first session last night and it wen tok but I am working to wrap my head around some aspects of the game and how they work for my (virtual) table. I had a similar challenge with Pendragon and in that game I thought of it as the "Plot Armor" problem wherein Arthur, Merlin, etc. have plot armor - as in they don't get killed because if they do you're no longer able to use any of the other settings and whatnot. (I'm sure it could be cool to run a campaign where you break this very thing, but you get my drift). And this is cool but is by definition a part of the world your players can't shape by their decisions, for better or worse. So in other words they don't have total player agency.

Last night I was feeling the same way about the Myths. The Omens happen whether the Knights head North, East, South , or West. And to make this illogical fairy tale vibe work the game just kind of has to insist "The Mountain blots out the sun". Doesn't matter if it's morning and you are East of it or Afternoon and you are West of it.

So ok fine -this is what we are working with now how do we deal with it. Asking for advice and ideas etc. I saw in the discussion I read some ideas people suggested:

- Moderate the amount of randomness so that at least players and Ref can work together to improv a more coherent story by a) fudging some of those wilderness travel rolls on an as needed basis b) fudging in a more systematic way by rolling a d8, or d10, etc. - either so that Omens appear less often - or so that they "turn out" to be all from the Myth that is furthest along.

- Come up (in advance I think) with ways to tie the Myths together into some more coherent tapestry (that's a big ask - but maybe even a little bit helps)

- Ponder in advance, keeping player-knights' abilities in mind, ways the Myth could turn out totally differently if the players act to fend off what is happening.

But that last one gets to the rub - between the plot armor that the myths have and the agency the players crave. While the play advice in the book very clearly pushes the idea that the actions of the knights take precedence, the myths are very much presented as is - and their logic is so inscrutable that it is hard to know how they work and therefore how they can be disrupted. The example given - of cutting off the Wyvern's wings and therefore it cannot fly - is good but maybe oversimplifies the challenge presented by the bizarre it-just-happens-this-way logic of most of the myths.

Your ideas solicited!

Do yall follow the creating the realm rules to the T, or what do you change / improvise

I’m thinking of changing the landmarks (except for dwellings and sanctums) to be apart of a table that i semi-randomly select from whenever a “landmark is discovered “ via the wilderness roll

Because plotting all these landmarks kinda seems not only like a pain in the ass, but also makes it very possible that a lot of them be skipped over, or missed

But even beyond that, how do you guys tend to structure your realms?

Cheers!

Hi! I’m slightly curious so wanted to ask people who’ve played longer campaigns - are there any rules you haven’t used in your game yet?

For example, I seem to read mostly about people doing a Wanderer start, rarely Courtier or Ruler. And while Warbands seem to pop up in many games (fun! I would love to hear how the players recruited them…) but don’t see a lot of Dominion play.

Interested to hear more of other people’s campaign! Especially from a player lens.

This is hard to explain, but basically I’m wondering how much the GM (me in this case) should explain or in a way expose how the inner workings of the game work.

The easiest example is the myths omens
should I teach the players at the start that there are 6 Omens per myth? that Omens can happen from any myth on the map? that there are exactly 6 Myths hanging out around the map, and are tied to hexes?

Or should all of this just be vauge, and basically i just tell them “your knights, there are spooky myths around the map, go get em’” and thats largely it, and the players don’t even really realize that there is a concept/system such as Omens?

A second example might be the realm map. Should i inform them that there are x amount of seers, x amount of holdings, etc.

Thanks for any advice!
I’ve only run this game twice like a year ago, and it was a blast! but i was always a bit confused on how to explain the game mechanics outside the players control

I had an idea to use the like Catan Hex pieces to build out the hex crawl map in a fog of war kind of way
But i was gonna tape or stick paper to the hexes so they looked more on theme
however i realized I don’t have the Catan game anymore as i gave it away.

How/where could i acquire similar quality (or at least like, weight / size) blank hexes that i can draw on or stick stuff on? I don’t wanna use paper cutouts cuz they move around and are annoying to deal with, which is why i ask.

A couple of hours ago i finished a short campaign that lasted 4/5 months.

The Realm

Players really didnt like to be interrupted by stuff that felt random even for me, no matter ho cool it was.

But they liked to camp outside and meeting stuff at night.

I didnt like how they might pass an hex and never find the cool point of interest depending on a roll.

I liked how Chris wrote about extra points of intrest like willow trees on his site for the map.

The Time

Even by asking each session how much time they wanted to let it pass, Players begged me to ignore that rule and start the next session on the ending of the earlier.

The roleplay

Players loved to be knights and act with a code even if goofing sometime, the respect and the fear, but also tales and honor.

I loved how the vibe of the game brought us all in the same world

(plus or minus)

The enemies

They were so weak compared to 3 knights (+1 sometimes)

I had to use schemes and factions to tie palyers hands, as i had an hard time chipping away stats for a grand finale (city siege), where they were doing anything to recover at full without time skipping

I had to use custom statblocks following a post, of someone else, to give a challenge that wouldnt flee in the second round.

The Combat

i was unable to make them plan their turn without either:

taking way to long or seeing them splitting the actions in more individual turns.

I loved how easy is to simply roll the dice and hitting with that force if above 3.

The few myths they persued never put them at risk for any other stat than Vigor.

The Myths

Cool each and everyone of them, but so many are a stand alone adventure pf wich players will skil just to end the work in progress.

liked the wilderness roll but i also added an idling roll for when they were beating around the brush

Ps

i might add more tomorrow qith a fresher mind, let me know if you had these problems and how you dealt with them

It might help someone

see ya

Something I keep seeing come up in this subreddit is the confusion about myth and its qualities: the ephemeral, vague and oblique. In an industry steeped in simulationist tendencies, it makes sense and can seem daunting to comprehend and implement.

In a culture and time when the bulk of information is freely accessible and science has dissected almost everything; the spooky, dreamy and mysterious can feel disingenuous at best and out right indulgent or uneducated at worst.

In entertainment, the proliferation of universal narratives offer completionist timelines, spanning all possibilities (see Marvel, Star Wars, Wheel of Time, GOT, etc). Comprehensive narratives refuse mystery, while maximizing profits. There is no room for the reader/viewer to fill in the blanks or speculate. In a time of such little doubt, the only true mythology is an economic one.

But, what draws me to Bastionland games are the mythological underpinnings Chris taps into in such evocative ways. They draw us back to the caves and around the fire, where story was first conjured. And I wonder:

• What tools/perspectives do you use to enhance the mystery and make it accessible to our modern malaise?
• How should 21st century people approach doubt and the unknown?

We just skipped an Age in our MB campaign and I’ve been having fun aging up (or killing off) all the NPCs the players have met. But I wonder about Seers.

Do you think Seers are immortal beings? Do they take on apprentices and pass on their titles like knights do? Should they age and die? Or should it be a case-by-case basis? The Crimson Seer is kinda like a vampire, it could be fun for her to stay eternally young, for example.