As many of you have recently, I presume, I have been corrupted by Mythic Bastionland brainrot. There is, by my rough calculation, at least one day's worth of content from Chris McDowall himself explaining things about Mythic Bastionland on YouTube split between his own channel and the PlusOneEXP channel. Having been sucked into the Fantasy Life sequel recently and being unable to do less than two things at one time or my brain explodes, I've had a lot of time to absorb this content which has been riveting but unfortunately it has solidified the brainrot and that means I have to make a blog post so I can go back to my life.
Give Us This, Our Knightly Brainrot
Around the time I started watching all of McDowall's deep dives, I also saw Caleb Zane Huett posting on Blooski about wanting to play knight games and getting sucked into Pendragon and Mythic Bastionland. Now, seeing Caleb talk about what he wanted out of knight-focused games combined with the literal day's worth of hearing Chris McDowall talking about the inspirations and mechanics of Mythic Bastionland got me thinking about a few things I'd never really stopped to consider before since I'm not really any kind of Arthurian scholar:
1. The Knights of the Round Table are really weird. Like, really weird. Like, possessed of superpowers that make almost no sense for anyone to have.
2. The thing that solidifies myths as myths is in the power of the telling - that is to say, the specific iteration of a myth might be mutable or adapted from region to region, but the broad strokes of the story are going to remain the same no matter who tells it.
3. The thing about Knights (certainly in Mythic Bastionland, probably in the Arthurian tales) is that broadly speaking, they're just dudes who fight well. Sometimes they're dudes who are invincible or can grow to giant size or shoot lasers from their hands or get really strong, but they're just dudes who are concerned with Doing The Right Thing and Being Honorable.
Hang on a second. Regular Dudes who have some Very Specific Special Powers, can regularly defy death with the power of Plot, and are extremely concerned with a narrative metacurrency which is mainly used in the context of their job and occasionally checked by Deific Powers-That-Be? Why does that sound fam-
By God, Triangle Agency agents are knights. It's knights all the way down.
(Hang on to Point 2 though, we'll come back to that.)
HWÆT
"Now hang on," you say, "you can't just overgeneralize two games as well as an entire category of story you've just admitted you have no background with and point to them all and go 'It's the same thing!'" Well, first off, yes I can, you've just seen me do it. But second off, the reason I point to all of this is because I think that that not only does Mythic Bastionland have some procedures that can fill in some gaps in Triangle Agency's encounter/campaign design, I also think that these games are both playing around in the same metanarrative space despite being wildly different genres and it can be helpful to examine them both.
I'm going to try to talk about this as sensically and concisely as I can without just copypasting huge swathes of both rulebooks into this post, but unfortunately I do need to point to a few concepts so you know what I'm talking about. In Triangle Agency, the middle third of the book (that nowhere near enough of you have read, because you followed the instructions not to read it) deals not only with GM tips but also some fundamental background truths of the world of the game that you're supposed to enforce - in other words, while much of the game text is dedicated to encouraging the players to improv and design the world right along with the GM, this part describes a number of failstates for a campaign by way of explicit worldbuilding, thereby setting some guardrails around your game. (By failstate, I mean from The Agency's perspective. That's not to say that triggering these failstates is bad, but rather it functions as another way to let GMs expose the metaplot behind Triangle Agency and choose to either accept or reject the core conceit of the game if they haven't already made that choice.) A big portion of this section is dedicated to understanding how Anomalies work - the threats in this game. An Anomaly is a concept given agency to affect the world, and while Minor Anomalies can be dispatched by hurting them physically, the Major ones (which are the main targets in the game) usually don't just go down by punching them real good - usually you've gotta figure out a trick to them, and this portion talks a lot about this.
As it turns out, all of these principles map directly onto the Myths in Mythic Bastionland. Just like Anomalies, Myths have their own spheres of influence, portents of their arrival, and while some of them are concrete monsters that can be overcome quite a lot of them are just oddities that create situations that need to be dealt with like "The Wall" or "The River." In fact, while the challenges the players need to overcome as well as the basic conceits of the characters themselves overlap quite a bit between both games, Triangle Agency and Mythic Bastionland fit together precisely because they are mostly concerned with giving you procedures to deal with opposite problems: Triangle Agency gives you a largely mutable world with hyper-customizable characters who are given concrete tasks which must be created by the GM using a toolkit to generate new threats; meanwhile, Mythic Bastionland gives you largely immutable characters in a world that must be defined by the GM prior to play and populated from a known list of threats, but then leaves the actual exploration and interpretation of the world up to the players.
Don't Just Ask A Manifold For Help
Okay, so that's a lot of words to say that these two games are interested in going about vaguely similar premises but approach that concept from opposite vectors. The reason that needed to be so explicit is because having run Triangle Agency a few times at this point, I've found that one thing that the core rulebook and The Vault (a book of pre-written adventures that, with care, can be strung together into a campaign) don't spend a lot of time doing is helping GMs with defining the actual space that players will investigate during the course of their adventure. Triangle Agency is not a game that cares about travel-focused exploration, instead focusing on defining scenes in which action happens, and so that means it can take a little more work than expected when those interstitial parts suddenly need to exist for one reason or another. For some tables, this may be a non-issue - particularly for tables more familiar with more story-based investigation games like the Carved From Brindlewood family of games. Additionally, the fewer things that are defined ahead of time, the more opportunities the players have to shape the world themselves with their powers/the Ask The Agency move, which in turn allows for opportunities to roll dice and generate Chaos and move the plot along that way.
For other tables though, I think that the "Sites" rules on p. 15 of Mythic Bastionland provide GMs a handy way to conceptualize an investigation space for Triangle Agency - functionally, it provides you with a way to not only loosely physically map a space but also to narratively map story beats (such as features or threats inherent to the space) to provide a visual key to go along with the story. Likewise, I think that mechanizing the distribution of information via travel (i.e. the revealing of Omens) can be helpful when you need something to fall back on to allow the world to reveal information if interacting with NPCs isn't driving the investigation as strongly as you'd hope - this problem is somewhat hinted at in the GM tips section of the Triangle Agency book, but only in the context of if the players have accrued a lot of Loose Ends and the world begins to unravel causing NPCs to become somewhat meta-aware (or The Agency speaks directly through them).
Some of you might be going "But Adam, travel literally doesn't matter in Triangle Agency when Manifold players can just teleport around/Timepiece players can just bend time so there's no penalty for travel times so why even bother trying to set any kind of map?" A fair question, but it's important to remember that even literal/functionally instantaneous travel is still travel. Both of those things are extremely valid ways to solve narrative problems - using them doesn't invalidate challenges as presented any more than a sword invalidates a monster. You're just using game mechanics to interact with the game world. And that brings me to one other point...
Knights of the Triangular Table
This is mostly revealed in that middle third of Triangle Agency with a little bit scattered around elsewhere, but from The Agency's perspective the biggest threat to reality is the Chaos generated from regular people observing and interacting with Anomalies. All players are playing Resonants, which are regular humans who have bonded with an Anomaly to give them extremely specific powers - and because The Agency has deputized them, they themselves have a very localized exemption on that Chaos issue but still have to be mindful about how much Chaos they cause by (mis)use of their powers around regular people and/or by rogue Anomalies. If you let too much Chaos accrue, your literal game world begins to unravel, and in the intervening time you might be assigned not only to cleaning up your messes but also those of other agents - unless you follow the plot presented by The Urgency, who advises you that Chaos is really just a resource that will lead to a new and better world. (Or you ignore them both and seek the path of Reality, which has Other Outcomes.) Compare this to the metaplot of Mythic Bastionland, a quest that pays off on the conceits of the world going back to Into The Odd - the players are Knights who have been appointed by all-knowing Seers, blessed with very specific superpowers, who must maintain their own realms lest they fall to schemes or revolutions but must ultimately seek enough Glory that they are worthy of embarking on The City Quest: the quest that will establish Bastion, the only city that matters. What I'm saying is, both Triangle Agency and Mythic Bastionland are telling stories of shaping the world and bringing on what at least the characters (and maybe the players) believe to be a bright new future. And if we accept that there's enough overlap between the metaplots and the narrative conceits and the player choices and on and on and on that these games are trying to do the same thing, then I think the only logical realization to come to is that when Caleb said he was hunting for the perfect game to play knights in, he didn't realize that he'd already written it.
So here's what I'd tweak to adjust Triangle Agency to become Knights of the Triangular Table:
- Allow for more lenience on Loose Ends - people have believed all kinds of weird stuff throughout history until science comes in to disprove it, which means that reality is at much less risk of unraveling just because a bunch of peasants saw a weird monster or heard a rumor about a tree that makes you sad if you eat its fruit or whatever. This in turn means a rebalancing of the Weather Events table.
- There are a lot of adjustments to be made to bring the tech level in line across the various ARC types, but I don't think any of them are wholly incompatible with a different time period. Also, a Newborn could come from the regular world/time of Triangle Agency as a fun little isekai treat.
- The biggest change would have to be with The Agency itself - both in terms of what it is and what it offers. I feel like corporate culture doesn't necessarily map well onto other historical time periods, but the idea of studying things and bringing realms to order have been around ever since people learned how to learn and to covet their neighbor's goods. To avoid explicit colonialism or imperialism, I would probably flavor The Agency as The Academy - an organization that maintains a Vault of oddities and dispatches its Tainted Knights out into the world to both help catalogue and contain all of these Anomalies and bring Order to the land. Obviously, these Knights have been Tainted by their contact with these Anomalies and venturing out into the land on behalf of The Academy is the only thing that keeps them from being imprisoned in The Vault. If you did want to keep it on a more monarchist route, obviously you'd have to end up calling it The Regency.
- The Grand Quest the game could build towards might be capturing (or siding with) The Urgency, which would still be up to its tricks but again due to it being more difficult to generate Chaos since people are much more believing of weird stuff in the world wouldn't be as infinitely powerful of an entity. Perhaps the big moral dilemma for The Urgency could come from the fact that they need The Academy to bring more Order to the world because the more The Academy got people to stop believing in Anomalous things, the more Chaos it would generate by forcibly remind people of its existence.
- The Anomaly generation advice still functions perfectly to figure out what Anomalies may be plaguing the towns, forests, and other desolate places the Knights traipse across - just pair it with the hex crawl and omen rules from Mythic Bastionland.
OUTRO
I mention from time to time that I run a bookclub - I had originally called it my Very Secret Bookclub, but I don't think I can anymore since I don't shut up about it. This bookclub is made up of friends of mine, most of whom just like playing games, some of whom interact with the game world more professionally, but all of whom have very specific gaming circles who tend towards very specific games and who never really have the chance to grow their circles. Thanks to my friends trusting me to be a tastemaker, I've now gotten to have a full year of sitting down to chat about games in my backlog I might never have gotten a chance to get to table at all, let alone actually sit down and read no matter how cool I think they are - which includes Triangle Agency, Into The Odd, Electric Bastionland, Mythic Bastionland and a bunch of others.
What I've found really fun, though, is that by regularly reading and discussing games, my friends and I have been able to not only help develop our own ability to identify things in games we do and don't like but we've also been exposed to whole kinds of design concepts that were outside of our areas of expertise. People forget just how much of gaming culture is ephemeral and insular - things that might be painfully obvious to people who were in the Google+ blog circles 20 years ago are brand new concepts to the person who only just started playing games, or who might have had a group where everyone only played one particular game because that's what the person who liked running games owned, simply because those circles never overlapped. I really encourage you to build this kind of community yourself - if you're someone your friends trust as A Game Person, give them books to read for you all to talk about! If you want to learn more about games different games, seek communities outside of your own - lord knows every publisher has their own Discord these days and each of those Discords has people willing to run games that publisher puts out. We live in a time where the barrier to learning is so much lower than at any point in the past - not completely gone, but definitely lower, and I really encourage people to take advantage of that.
A special thanks to my friend (and member of the Very Secret Bookclub) Krysta for doing the mashup of the Triangle Agency promo art with the Mythic Bastionland cover on extremely short notice. She actually did two versions of my prompt and I couldn't tell which one I liked more, so I'll leave the other variant down here and leave it up to your internet browser to see which version gets pulled in for the thumbnail.
Thanks for reading, please go play knights with your friends.
