r/MythicBastionland

Hey, I have been living in Mythic Bastionland for the last month working as editor/sound designer for our ennie award winning actual play show, Mystery Quest. I am absolutely in love with the world and system ChrisMcDowall has made and wanted to drop by and share our series here for folks who might get a kick out of it. There are still a few more episodes left to go but hope you enjoy!

(Also comes out as a podcast outside of YouTube for those who prefer).

While working on my campaign I notice that I cannot come up with situations where players would need to make a SPI save, it's almost always CLA that fits better. It bothers me that I underutilize one of the virtues in the design, probably because I don't understand it properly. I remember that in one thread here I saw a half-joking explanation that CLA is for confusing s**t and SPI is for depressing s**t, but this still doesn't give ideas on what exactly would cause it during exploration or battle.

What do you do with it? What kinds of attacks would call for a SPI save? In what situations a Knight would need a SPI save during exploration?

Hello, first time dming this system, may have got a bit carried away and made a map that's 280 hexes large. Is it just easier to cut back at this point or could I run more than 6 myths to try and balance it? If i do keep the size should I lower the chances of myths being encountered on a wilderness roll?

almost completed map

Hexes w/ decoration (idk why its overexposed)

Hey yall! I’ve been running a Mythic campaign with my group for over a year, and one of my players is retiring his character during his next session and stepping away from the game.

I wanted to do something special and thank him for playing, as playing TTRPGs is not his usual scene. I wanted to hire an artist to draw his character, The Emerald Knight, and give it to him.

Would anyone happen to know any reputable contract artists by any chance? Wasn’t really sure where to look, and thought coming to this thread would be a good start. Thanks!

In my current campaign there's an NPC who could potentially reward players with a one-way "shortcut" to the City through the Underground. Having discovered this possibility, I'm now debating with myself whether it's worth giving this choice to the players.

On one hand, this might be a fun side adventure where they get lost for a couple of sessions in a fever dream that is Bastion of the electric era, and try to find their way back home. Due to Underground time shenanigans, this can also result in a time skip and introduce complications into the story lines they abandoned for the opportunity to see the City. On the other hand, I feel like the tone between the two settings is very different and the Knights might look out of place in Bastion, and not in a fun way.

I like how the books explain the (potential) connection between the two settings (going further away from Bastion you travel back in time), but I'm not sure if it would feel "right" to the players to discover this concept in the game in such a way.

I'm looking for advice on how to shift the setting in a satisfying manner, as well as opinions if it's a worthy idea at all.

I wanted to share some photos from my first Realms. The first map I made all by myself, including the hexes, which are a real pain in the ass to draw by hand. I found this blogpost https://www.redblobgames.com/grids/hexagons/ to be an really interesting read and helpful in drafting out a grid that I used to make the hexes themselves. The math wasn't perfect by hand which is why the hexes wound up slightly longer than wide.

I created a simple mini game for my players, who drew the map entirely on their own during our first session. I placed the rivers at the end and plopped down the Holdings as well. I really recommend having the players make the Realm! They all said that they enjoyed it, and one player who had played in my first campaign as well said that he felt way more connected to the Realm just from the outset.

I hope people find this interesting!

The blank hex map, AT sized (4 sheets of A4 taped together because I am not fancy). I photocopied this at my library to to keep a template.

Cat for scale. He's sitting on my A4 dummy copy I drew all the terrain on first, and some of the tiles are sketched in on the big map.

All the tiles are fully inked and rivers are added with blue ballpoint pen! Again, not fancy.

Colored pencil layer was final step.

Slightly better lighting and background on my bed instead of my Magic Eye looking kitchen table.

And here is Realm number 2! Made by my players in about an hour and a half instead of multiple days all by myself. I love how different all the styles are compared to my first map.

First of all- is this my favorite RPG system of all time? Have been playing D&D since the mid 90s. Lots of white wolf. OSR. I am a forever DM and I’m not sure anything has been as deeply satisfying to run as this game. Granted I am very comfortable and experienced making things up on the fly, and I don’t think this system is super friendly to new DMs but for me it feels like it was custom built. Just love it.

Anyhow with that gushing out of the way, I had just a few quick rules questions that I couldn’t find answers to.

1- First when myths are completed do new ones take their place? Or do you knock out all 6 and then take it easy for an age?

2- I think this one is clear, but deny can be used for every single enemy attack right? I had a character with 18 spirit and being able to constantly deny (even protecting his Allies who were standing next to him) was very nice.

3- I guess not a rules question but I’d love to hear from other DMs some creative ideas for interesting environment variables in combats. Due to the awesome dice mechanics are battles were usually a fairly static affair. I am considering a map for future games just to have some incentive of moving around a bit more and using the movement gambits more.

I'm thinking out loud.

You could play a game of all Space Marines. Still on a hex map, but it's a war zone rather than a region.

Maybe groups of xeno 'myths' grouped by type. Protect the Imperium, seek out the enemy, honour the emperor.

The combat gambits could encompass ranged AND melee type manoeuvres because its abstracted to just the right amount.

HI all, Tonight I'm running a session where some of my players are taking part in a feast of the stars tournament. There is to be both jousting and duels, but I'm unsure if the rules for this want me to use the scar system or not? Non of the fights are meant to be to the death and I have take death off the table for the players as it is supposed to just be entertainment for the festival. I know this is where I should just make a ruling and let the players know but I wanted some other people options before I made my ruling. Thanks.

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:

My printer was low on yellow ink, but fortunately my \"coffee\" (actually roasted barley, yarrow, and dandelion root powder) stained enough yellow back in to make it less noticeable.

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.

I just wrapped up a 12 session campaign of Mythic Bastionland and I want to start off by saying we really enjoyed it. I agree with all of the positives that have been laid out in other reviews: the fantastic art (to my taste, the best of any RPG book I have seen), the concise and elegant ruleset, the strange and evocative knights and myths, and the combat system that manages to make fights even faster than bare-bones OSR games, while offering more tactical depth.

That said, by the end of the campaign I was struggling. I felt like I was fighting against the very systems that so impressed me at the start of the game. The rest of this review is going to sound very critical, because my issues with the system are what I wanted to talk about, but I want to reiterate that we enjoyed our time with Mythic Bastionland and I would encourage anyone curious to check it out for themselves.

A part of me worries that this review pulls back the curtain a bit too much, and it might spoil some of the magic for new players. If you intend to play (not GM) a game of MB, I would probably encourage you not to read further.

The core system

At its heart, Mythic Bastionland is a hexcrawl. Hexcrawls have several big issues that can make them difficult or awkward to run. One, which MB handles excellently, is resource management. Quinns covered this well in his review, so I won’t repeat him. But another issue, arguably the biggest issue, is that hexcrawls just have a lot of hexes! If the choice of which hex to travel through is going to be a meaningful one, those hexes need to be different, which means either a ton of preparation (the majority of which will never be used), using a premade hexcrawl (which won’t be to everyone’s taste), or using randomly generated content (which can feel, well… random, and isn’t the most conductive to storytelling).

MB’s solution to this issue is its Myths, which provide six short events each (called Omens), along with a couple of stat blocks, a random table, and a gorgeous illustration. While travelling, the party has a chance to encounter the next Omen from one of the six Myths active in the realm. Myths and Omens vary wildly, from unexpected weather, to an undead tyrant subjugating the entire realm, but they all have a coherent narrative, which will be experienced in order. Of course the PCs will usually steer the course of events, but the GM will always have an Omen ready to go, no matter where the PCs decide to go. This provides interesting content that tells stories without needing much prep and still giving the GM wide latitude to create a world.

Though this system can be slow to get going (early Omens are often quite vague and lack the hooks I would want to inspire my players to action), a few sessions in I really started appreciating it. The amount of prep it would have taken to balance six competing stories in parallel would have been significant, and my players started getting invested in the narratives. I liked how varied the Myths felt, in tone, content, and pacing. But as time went on I started to have more and more problems with the system.

First off, is it really a meaningful choice which hex to travel through if what happens is mostly random? Are Myths just “quantum ogres” that randomly pop out, independent of player agency? The book suggests using its spark tables to generate content while travelling, which can provide flavor, but does it make the players’ decisions meaningful? Also, as more Myths are introduced the number of bread crumb trails started to overwhelm my players and they began to lose track of the various threads. The narrative felt scattered and random.

This is probably where I should reveal what I meant by running the game “wrong”. At my core, I am a “trad” GM. If one of my players has a long-lost father or an obsession with ancient tomes, I want to reveal the villain is the PC’s father or tantalize them with a hidden library. The Myths in the book are fascinating, varied, and great at sparking the GM’s imagination, but I found myself desiring a unified narrative, woven to draw in and interact with the PCs specifically. MB tends towards the OSR end of the RPG spectrum: random generation is core to play (the majority of the book is in fact, a giant random table of knights, myths, creatures, moods, dwellings, etc) and the core motivation of the players gets one sentence that provides a pretty unambiguous direction: knights want glory, glory comes from Myths. More and more I started tweaking Myths, changing the results on the exploration table, and trying to come up with ways to steer the ship. By the end I wasn’t even rolling the die. I was using an OSR-style system to run a trad-style game and I felt it.

Balance

MB doesn’t provide any tools for balancing encounters, or even hints at how dangerous its various foes will be when taking on PCs. Quinns brought this up in his review and a pretty common response I saw was that Quinns is just a trad GM looking for balance and fairness in an OSR system that is mostly unconcerned with those factors. “Combat as war” means that the world isn’t balanced around the players, and they need to learn how to deal with it. With the admission that I am another trad GM experimenting in the world of OSR, I have to say that I just don’t buy it.

The desire to understand how threatening a creature is doesn't mean everything in the world must be fair and balanced. If I want a big horrible monster to be terrorizing the realm, but a junior knight PC kills it handily, not only is that unsatisfying gameplay, it's a narrative issue. If the monster was that much of a pushover, how was he such a threat?

If this sounds like an extreme case, know that throughout my campaign I never once felt like a group combat challenged my players. They went toe to toe with some of the biggest threats in the book (with some additional buffs improvised to make them more dangerous) and always came out victorious and often with 0 vigor damage. My read was always that the combats were balanced around 2-3 PCs and my group of 5 was simply too powerful to be threatened.

In MB in particular, I think power scales very fast with party size because of how Feats and strong gambits work. While I think I was getting close to figuring out how to balance a combat by the end, I really wish there had been something in the book that saved me the time. The frustrating thing is that combat in MB is excellent, but at my table it only really shined in one on one duels where 5 knights weren't bullying some hapless monster. Once again, maybe this is not the OSR mindset, but to me being able to craft a threatening encounter without a ton of trial and error is important.

Conclusion

Mythic Bastionland pulled me in with its art and evocative Knights and Myths and impressed me with its tight systems and snappy combat. But I do think that the core of MB is OSR, while I prefer the trad style of GMing. I enjoyed my foray into a style of gaming I hadn't really experienced before, but for now, I will probably be returning to systems more aligned with my personal style.

I’m starting a Mythic Bastionland campaign soon, and one of the players rolled the Gull Knight as their knight. I also chose to roll for the Myth, and I ended up with The Mountain. I know not every Myth is designed to be a challenge for the knights—and that any form of interaction is valid—but the Mountain’s Omens make it pretty clear that climbing it is the main objective. I also know OSR systems aren't meant to be balanced, but it would feel incredibly anticlimactic if the Gull Knight simply used his ability to reach the summit and that was it. At the same time, I don't want to render his power useless when dealing with this Myth. Any advice on how to handle this so his power remains useful without trivializing the climb?

Hello! Im a brand new DM looking to start a campaign of mythic bastionland soon(tripped into it because no one else I know has the means to run this cool ass game damn it).

Im going to be doing a session 0 soon to get my players on the same page, one thing I'm scratching my head at is the dominion part of the game. I've got an grasp of the general gameplay loop but Im not sure of the actual benefits of ruling a dominion, past something like being able to muster a warband. I think understanding it would at least help me set up a functioning court that my players could interact with in the future(tho none of us are particularly game of thrones savy)

My honest to God first impression is a lot of management for not much actual gain? I would love some insight from people that have run the dominion element of the game

Link: https://oldmanlucy.itch.io/the-church-for-mythic-bastionland (looks like itch.io is kinda slow/having server issues today)

Hail! I'm the same fella who shared the 'Tournaments for Mythic Basitonland' supplement not too long ago. I wanted to share a second supplement I've been using for my own games, this time centered around the 'The Church'.

By default, Mythic Bastionland leaves faith largely open, implying a collection of beliefs among the people that are shaped largely by local custom, superstition, and nature rather than by any formal doctrine, but if you're anything like me and like to introduce things to shake up the game's structure every now and then, then this supplement lets you do that by having a dominant faith present in the Realm, in particular an institution behind that faith that introduces miscellaneous bits of gameplay variance and atmosphere as it exerts its influence on the Realm.

Of course, wanting to preserve the minimalist spirit of the game, I designed it as a fairly straightforward supplement that defines only the necessary parts of the Church that are relevant to Mythic Bastionland's core loop.

In short, the Church acts as a recurring figure that maintains its presence and impact on the Realm through 'Church Activity' rolls, which are prompted alongside time skips or rolls for Holding occurrences, and then there's 'Practices', the more prominent of which are assigned to the calendar as seasonal holidays.

The other aim behind this supplement is to introduce an additional playstyle for the Company, done so through the role of the "Templar Knight", who places greater weight on the needs of the Faith and the Church, viewing them as inseparable from the good and order of the Realm.

Well, that's the gist of it. Hope you find it fun to tinker with, and do check out my Tournament supplement as well as some of my other Mythic Bastionland goodies.

I love the system so far though I’m new to it and I want MORE looking for hacks, homebrew rules and more sub-systems if possible! And more character options maybe? Or myths? God I just want more of everything honestly

Hey there, currently doing some prep for my campaign and I have a bit of a conundrum. 2 of my myths are The Ogre and The Wheel. The first session i thought they would combine great, but now I'm looking over their omens again and I'm getting a bit nervous.

The Ogre keeps the season stuck in winter (well not explicitly, but it snows constantly) and the Wheel changes the seasons uncontrollably. If I resolve one myth completely before starting the other, the story works out great. Maybe the Ogre got a hold of the wheel. But if I have to explain how it's still snowing but the seasons are kind of changing, I think my group is going to be very confused on whats happening.

Could I just ignore the omen rolls of one myth till my group finishes the other one? Sure, but I would like to stick to the core principles of Bastionland and roll with the punches and not overly prepare a "plot". I know McDowell says contradictory doesn't have to be bad (like The Sea in a desert) but I just don't know how to play the very opposing omens, should they happen at the same time

Do you have any advice? What's your experience with contradictions of the omens, how did you deal with them?