Coming Soon: Mythic Bastionland!

My turn to run a game has come up with my Sunday night group, and out of the options I offered everyone to choose from, the big winner was Mythic Bastionland. I’d fortunately just read the whole thing, and also had recently gotten a chance to play a one-shot of the game with my other group, GMed by the inimitable Jeremy Tolbert. After that, I felt like I had a pretty good handle on the game and that I could do it justice. 

I really admire a few things about the design. For one, it has the same kind of highly peculiar, fun characters that made me love McDowall’s earlier game, Electric Bastionland. Next, it solves some pretty major issues that I have with hexcrawls—mostly that so much work is wasted if you play with every hex populated, but that your “emergent” narrative is unlikely to hang together well if you just wing it or go with random encounters. It’s also figured out how to make the relatively light combat rules of MacDowall’s other games compatible with the epic feel of knights charging about on horseback like in Arthurian tales. (It also captures a lot of the deep weirdness of Medieval literature that seems to have been blocked out, forgotten, or deemphasized in our cultural memory, despite the wonderful efforts of work like The Green Knight.)  

What’s more, I’d just finished putting together my entry for the Mythic Bastionland Jam (as I mentioned in a recent post), so I even had spare material (though I’m going with mostly stuff from the book to start with). 

Anyway, while I’m not going to share all the setup materials here, I think I will keep a log of what happens in-game here, as part of a thread. That kind of thing helps me with remembering the week-to-week story, as well as maybe (with my players’ permission, of course) any fun stuff that the players make in response to the game. (Usually we have something like this, where you can get bonus XP for drawing a picture from the game, say. I am not sure what I’ll offer for game art in this game, but it’ll be something.) 

Anyway, I’m still in the preparatory stages, as we’re working toward the season conclusion of our rollicking Mausritter game. That’s good, because I still have a fair bit of prep left to do, and I don’t really have much to write about yet. I do, however, have a pretty map… 

It’s a beaut, huh? I made with the popular program Hexkit, using the Fantasyland tile set from the app’s author (Cone of Negative Energy). 

Now, I need to populate the hexes a bit. I’m still deciding how much detail to get into while doing that, but I want to capture the mood and vibe of each hex, so maybe a little more than just laying out the barriers, myths, holdings, sanctums, and so on. We’ll see. I found a crackerjack GM tool for running Mythic Bastionland, so I’ll probably lean into that for finer details along the way rather than pregenerate everything… which would be a huge job and probably would also turn out to have been pointless for some percentage of the hexes, come the end of the game. (Perhaps they’ll get to every hex, but even if they do, I doubt they’ll need details about the local food at every point along the way, so I plan on using the spark table content more as inspiration when it’s needed.)