Our Mythic Bastionland, Session 1

So, we played our first session of Mythic Bastionland. I think I’ll be blogging a log of events, and I’m going to skip anytying that would be spoilers for stuff the players don’t know about, for now at least. Maybe once the series is wrapped up, I’ll post a separate post with accumulated background spoilers and comments.  

The epic begins quietly, deep in the Merragon forest (on the western edge of the map I shared last time), sometime in the afternoon. Three knights appear, riding their steeds. The first is Sir Yorick Childermass, the least knightly-looking of the lot in his black cloak and doublet, his ruffled sleeves and collar, and his feathered black hat. He has a nice steed, at least—a marsh steed named Pantano. He carries a long dagger and a buckler—and that’s the extent of his arms and armour. He has a thing for bones, as we shall see:

Next follows Ser Lyssa Ashenfeld, a bastard woman knight in mail, a helm, and brutal plate mail. She smells of booze, of which she has a great amount loaded onto her steed (which is named) Turnbucke, but seems unaffected by however much of it she has consumed thus far today. She hates the sea almost as much as she loves her sword and her liquor:

Finally, Ser Augustine follows behind, musing about his own magnificence—he’s the type of takes credit for every victory he can—as he rides upon his steed Caesar. He is arrayed in golden plate mail over his gambeson, and wears a gold-masked helm as well. Gold, gold, gold… Besides carrying himself with as much dignity as humanly possible while festooned in so much gold, he carries a great mace. 

The trio is new in the realm, having been sent over from a neighbouring realm by the Twilight Seer, who knighted Sir Yorick, and provided them with a travel itinerary designed to ensure the best possible weather for the trip over. They know little of this new realm, save that the Seat of Power, Blackwort Castle, lies somewhere in the middle of the realm, and that it is ruled by someone named Boren Gladsmere. 

The characters glimpse nothing but more forest to the north and east, but see the glinting of a great river through the trees to the south. Yorick retrieves some bones from a sack he carries with him, and converses with them before informing the others that the bones suggest they follow the river, staying on the north back. Ser Lyssa grumbles about her hatred for water, but nonetheless assents, much to Ser Augustine’s pleasure, for he has been wanting a bath. The group agrees to camp by the river, and continue following it in the morning.  Augustine bathes and polish his armor—once they reach the river. Sir Yorick instead looks around, trying to get a sense of the lay of the land. Lyssa bathes in some of her alcohol and then builds a fire to cook a large hare that they had slain earlier in the day. 

As they ate, Sir Yorick took a bone from the rabbit and slipped it into his bag of bones. Then, just as the sun began to set, they heard an enormous, deep rumbling sound, and glimpsed branches growing quickly up into the sky somewhere just beyond the northeastern horizon. The characters agreed to set forth in that direction on the morrow, in search of glory. The rumbling continued off and on through the night, but otherwise each character’s watch was uneventful. 

However, along the way they ran across an old ruin: a wall with some kind of structure behind it. They spied a main gate open from the distance, but on approaching it they found it was surrounded by a deep, steep-walled dry moat, and the drawbridge that once connected the near side of the moat to the side closer to the structure lay broken down in the moat itself. Down in the moat, they glimpsed a number of small mounds with dark swarming shapes moving around between them. They would not be able to bring their horses along, so they left them on the outside of the moat, knowing that they would come when called, as long as the horses could hear their masters. Ser Lyssa prepared a bottle of syrupy liquor along, possibly to use it to lure the ants away if need be. 

These shapes, it turned out, were in fact somewhat large black ants—about an inch in length—which Augustine discovered when, without waiting for Yorick’s suggestion that they toss a rock onto one of the mounds, he tied off a rope and rappelled down into the moat. The ants immediately began to swarm him, a few crawling into his armor but to no ill effect. He noticed a part of the broken bridge lay against the moat wall, and attempted to climb it.

By this time, Sir Yorick had tossed the rabbit bone onto one of the mounds, and saw the ants bear it away, deducing that they might be carnivorous. Meanwhile, noting the distraction of the ants, Ser Lyssa and Sir Yorick made their way down into the moat and then set about trying to create a way up over the moat’s other side. Yorick tossed a rope up, trying to get it around a tree multiple times, while Sir Augustine discovered the remnant of the bridge was rotten and tumbled down onto his backside, to be even more completely swarmed by ants. At this point, his suit of armor was crawling with ants, but he was somehow still unbothered by them. 

Finally, Yorick managed to get a rope over a tree branch and use it to scurry up the moat wall to the other side. Ser Lyssa followed, and the pair of them pulled Ser Augustine up last. As they made their way from the moat to the gate, ants poured back out of Ser Augustine’s armor, scurrying back toward the moat. 

Through the gate, the trio spied two ruined buildings: a larger one with columns, its front half collapsed, standing at the center of the walled area; and a smaller one off to the side. They elected to go into the larger building, and as they did, they noticed a large stained-glass window depicting a feminine face, green as the leaves that surrounded her face. (The figure depicted was unfamiliar to the characters, no such figure being known in their homeland.)

The interior of the building—it had the feel of a temple or church—was overgrown with moss—even in the darkest corners—and as they looked about the place, they noticed a larger altar beneath the stained-glass window, as well as two smaller altars off to the sides of the last pillars before the main altar. Those pillars, one of them noticed, were not of stone, but rather seemed to be large, living trees. Whatever the place once was, it seemed to have been abandoned long ago, for the walls—inside and out—were covered in moss. 

Yorick decided to approach the altar and then noticed a door beyond it, beneath the great green window. Without needing any more prompting than that, Ser Augustine strode directly to the door and through it, to find a small room, similarly overgrown with moss (except for one the bas reliefs on the walls), with a small altar against the wall and another dark doorway. The bas reliefs depicted a green woman, seemingly the same one as was depicted in the stained glass window, standing with her arms outstretched as if in welcome. In each bas relief, she stood at what appeared to be the end of a road through the forest. 

Yorick looked at the altar and found a small stone bowl with what seemed to be very desiccated berries in it. Ser Lyssa offered some of her strong alcohol, attempting to rehydrate the berries, and Yorick poured it into the bowl. After a short time, Ser Lyssa attempted to eat one of the berries, but found it was still almost completely desiccated, so she gave up except to drink up her alcohol from the dusty bowl. 

By this time, Ser Augustine was moving through the dark doorway, and discovered a mossy stone stairway leading down into the darkness beneath the building. He lit a torch and descended, and as he did, he felt a fleeting moment of profound serenity, of being right where he was supposed to be—a sensation the others did not experience. At the bottom of the stairs, they found a cave lit by one small hole connecting the cave to the surface. In the center of the beam of light piecing that hole, they spied a small tree, a sapling almost, its branches laden with berries. 

Sir Yorick brought forth a torch and lit it from Ser Augustine’s. Just at that moment, a grumbling sound echoed from one of darkness of the cave…

… and that’s where we left off. Is it a monster? Something related to the sprouting tree branches seen earlier? Something else? We’ll find out next time. 

Notes:

• While not obligatory, it’s been a running joke that an ant threat has existed in several of our group’s most recent campaigns. (One player lost a character to a giant ant during playtesting of Isle of Joy, and ants were a major threat during our recent Mausritter game.) That said, I included these swarms without initially thinking about it, not as a deadly threat but rather as a potential drain on characters’ CLA[rity] virtue. 
• I want to get a better handle on pacing, because I’m now in the position of having to think about quite a few possibilities when it comes to prep—we’re in the middle of a Locale pointcrawl, and while I know where the characters will probably head next, I don’t know where they might proceed after that, if I need that prepped. So I’ll have to think about a few possibilities. I’d rather end things having a little clearer sense of where PCs are probably headed next, to make prep a little easier, even though I’m going with relatively laid-back prep for this game, as it seems like that’s the spirit of Mythic Bastionland. 
• I am starting to think I’d rather not use images (like the above) too much for pointcrawls, and go more for theater of the mind all the way through. The challenge there is (a) tracking PC locations when they split up, which is easier when you throw a few images onto a screen and place the character tokens accordingly, and (b) that I am aphantastic, so I can’t see what I’m describing to players in my own mind… so I need to maybe prep some notes for locales, so that the descriptions they get are a little less bare-bones than what I can come up with on the spot. That’s nothing new for me, of course, it’s just that previously I sometimes used images or maps to bridge the gap in a way I’m finding hard to do now because I can’t find images that really capture what I have in mind, and I am no longer willing to generate images using an LLM.
• I like the spark tables. Ser Augustine’s strange sensation of serenity and being at the right place at the right time was the result of my flipping to a random page and being inspired by something at the bottom of one of the spark tables. We’ll see whether it pays off into anything specific next session, but either way it was a surprising, interesting moment. 
• I am using “advantage” in this campaign, basically as a “help” rule. When a PC lends another PC aid in a non-combat situation, the PC taking the action rolls with advantage (rolling two dice and taking the better result).