r/MythicBastionland

Hey y’all! I just ran a session of Mythic (have been running this campaign for about a year), and one of my players voiced that they’re feeling underwhelmed by Mythic’s mechanics.

She loves playing DND, and enjoys adding dice rolls and doing the math, as it were. She really likes the idea of making things challenging and adding dice to rolls.

Have yall added complexity to your games? I want to stick to the spirit of Mythic, but also keep them mechanically engaged. Any input yall might have would be incredible - thanks!!

To kick off the latest season of My First Dungeon, Chris joins Elliot Davis and Brian Flaherty to teach them the rules of Mythic Bastionland and to offer his best tips and tricks for how to make their first ever campaign a success.

This is the start of a 10-episode Mythic Bastionland actual play series featuring award-winning sound design and an album of original music by BE/HOLD.

I am running a pretty long chronicle on MB and I wanted to reward my players now and then with some powers. There is a pdf or a list of feats that I can use? Thanks!!

Usually in my dnd adventures i put plot hooks and quests around the town like a merchant getting bullied by local thugs and all that.

These quests just dont really fit in a mythic knignt adventure.

So idk how i make my towns feel more alive

One of my players has gleefully chosen the Saddle Knight, salivating at the idea of both talking to every horse he meets, and having me talk as the horses. He's also keen on the 'cannot be dismounted' ability. I'm heading into the first real session tomorrow (after a Session 0) so I haven't really seen the character in action. I'm not really sure how I'm going to tackle either element.

The Talking: So, forcing your GM to improv every horse you meet is obviously a great bit and I support that, though obviously having to get the opinion of every horse we meet is going to be exhausting. Further, it frequently doubles the amount of NPCs in a conversation and the GM talking to themself is something to be avoided. I realise that as written, the power really states that the Knight can talk to and command horses, not so much that they talk back, but he's keen on the bit and I hate to kill a bit. I am thinking I might have a word that only a few horses he meets are going to talk back to him, special horses that will have distinct personalities. Most will response to him but won't really do anything more than a horse would. With the exception of any time he's alone, the horses will talk all they want (whether its their own embarrassment, his embarrassment to talk like a horse in public, or something happening entirely in his head). I will probably rope the other players into playing horses where I can. I know he's keen on being the goofy horse guy so I'm worried I'm squashing his idea but every horse is pretty untenable. Does that feel fair? Would you take another route? Another open question is the mechanical advantages of talking to a horse - how would you navigate a request to have a horse throw off its rider in combat? I know the easy answer is 'no, it obeys its rider' and often that will happen but a blanket kibosh is not fun and not good gming. I am considering openly telling him that establishing relationships with horses will make them more likely to listen to him.

Dismounting: So in the first horseman vs horseman combat of the campaign, I will get to foster a cool moment where I pretend I forgot about the dismount-immunity and have the enemy knight spend a gambit to dismount the player, and he'll go 'AHA!' and have a good time. However, that lie only really works once. Now, obviously, it would make sense for enemies to spend gambits on useless dismounts - few of them would have reason to do otherwise, especially early on - but, to me at least, that feels very unsatisfying. A character using a power to overcome an obstacle is great - the GM deliberately and openly making a useless play however, feels unsatisfying for both player and GM. It's mechanically appropriate, sure, but it's sandbagging, awkward at the table, reduces the interesting choices at the table (the enemy does less stuff) and confers an 'invisible' buff (the enemy losing a die is mathematically a big deal but not intuitively impressive, and not interesting for the players). How can I reward the player for having that ability? I considered maybe rewarding the player with a d4 instead of using up an enemy die on nothing in circumstances where they'd otherwise try to dismount him; and that's better solution (it feels better and is more active for the player) but its still very arbitrary and going to lead to awkward situations where I'm saying 'oh you don't get a die, I don't think she'd be trying to dismount you here'. Again - how would you approach this?

Thanks!

I rolled up six Myths for a game I'll theoretically be running, and all of them clicked for me pretty well except for The Cudgel—the way it reads, I just feel like I'm missing something. If this is just one of the more abstract Myths, that's fine, but I thought I'd ask others to see if I'm just not getting a reference or something.

Here's my current take on the Myth. Spoiler text in case people don't want to be corrupted by my read of it.

>!It seems to me like like the Myth of The Cudgel is supposed to be about dreams. The Myth's poem seems to say that both the Cudgel and the City itself are ultimately empty dreams that people like to imagine, but that they'll never actually see. The duchess in Omen 1 is obsessed with sleep and dreams, but this is never expanded upon. The cast of the Myth all seem to be pulled from a kind of Wonderland-like setting that works off of dream logic. Well, the clawed bees are a reference to medieval bestiaries, but the hawkleon is reminiscent of a child's imaginary friend or whimsical drawing, while the hedgehog seems like a classic trickster animal that's intelligent only because it's coming from a genre wherein talking animals are commonplace.!<

>!As for the Cudgel itself, I'm not sure. Its wielder "knows the location of every enemy in their heart." I feel like there are a couple ways to read that, but that's probably on purpose. But the fact that the Cudgel will only release itself for somebody who will destroy it makes me think that the Cudgel is some kind of unwilling nexus of dreaming that wishes for everyone under its spell to wake up and be free—the hawkleon is drawn to the Cudgel because it was born from it, and the hedgehog wants to steal the Cudgel because it's aware that it's a dream-creation and doesn't want to vanish when reality "wakes up." Idk, I'm kind of reaching, the hedgehog might also just want power.!<

How do you read the Cudgel? Is it just one of the more open-ended Myths, or am I missing something obvious?

Hello good knights, last night I ran my 3rd session where the company ended up facing the clockwork knights as part of the tournament, I had it all planned out that it would be a series of encounters through several days with other intrigue occurring in the seat of power to keep things interesting

Suffice to say it did not go to plan

The company got completely mauled, we had the first death of the campaign and would've had 2 had the fox knight not used their ability to peace out of the arena(the gull knight rolled slightly below average VIG, the Fox has 5 VIG lmao, but all PC at least rolled 5-6 GD on creation), the halo knight is built like a tank with their stat rolls but would've been overwhelmed had it continued. Dice luck definitely played a part here, despite have 18VIG the halo knight has managed to fail the first or second smite roll in each of the 3 combats we've had so far, and the others not much better. I think another issue was that they ended up splitting combat between individual clockwork knights and man, 4armor was an insane DR to pass for the group whose highest dice was an 8, meanwhile the clockwork knights consistently score 4-6 in rolls and grinded them down.

I feel like I'd heard these clockwork knights weren't much of a threat, and was frankly at a bit of a loss for why the fight felt so lopsided. I'm not actually complaining since it's resulted in a fantastic settup for next session but I feel like I failed to properly convene the nuances of combat to the group, what could they have done here to beat the knights? and have you fought the clockwork knights? how did your combat go?