Since roughly the beginning of 2026, I've been in two consistent TTRPGs in my spare time - one being a player in Josh Domanski's Mythic Bastionland game along with two of their other friends, and one being my home group where we rotate games and GMs periodically where I've been running the adventure Ave Nox using The Electrum Archive. With the MB game having wrapped up recently (much later than we originally projected, oops) and with the AN x TEA game getting into the endgame, now's as good a time as any to reflect on these two experiences.
Mythic Bastionland: or, Three Weirdoes Keep Stumbling Into Danger
I am always incredibly grateful when other creators, especially ones I consider actual professionals compared to whatever it is I'm doing out here, invite me to their game table - and yet somehow it took me months before I actually had time to sit in on a game with Josh. It turned out I picked a great time though - Josh had been gearing up for Mythic Bastionland, and I had just recently read it with my local TTRPG bookclub so I was ready and raring to go. At the table were myself and two of Josh's regulars - one of whom I learned had taken several decades off of playing TTRPGs, and the other was someone who ended up being responsible for dragging me into a Caraphracts game where I ended up being a silly little lizardman jester for what turned out to be the Cartoonishly Evil Empire. So. Y'know. Vast breadth of skill levels, experiences, and general expectations for how this game would go.
I ended up with the Weaver Knight, and I also ended up with what we might professionally refer to as "absolute fucking dogshit" stats for my young knight. This meant that I was leaning heavily on gimmicks to stay alive because boy howdy was this guy not getting in combat. To my delight, the Weaver Knight got a fun little magical swapperoo ability as well as a horse whose super power was the ability to unerringly smell fruit. This meant that in our First Age (i.e. before we did our Shonen Anime Time Skip To Power Up) I accomplished something that I feel will be a high point of my gaming career for quite some time, which if you'll forgive some screenshots was documented and commentated on back when it happened (and includes a seal of approval from Daddy McD himself).
In our Second Age, my Weaver Knight thankfully rolled way better and could actually contribute in ways that involved rolling dice. And I know what you're saying, "if you're rolling dice you already fucked up" and yeah, yeah, I know, but sometimes it feels good to be able to roll the dice without fearing for your character's immediate death. All in all, over 16 total sessions we completed three myths, partially completed two more, and had elements of a few others thrown into the world. There were also a few side mission days - the very first session, which I missed, Josh ran folks through What A Horrible Knight, one of the other days when we didn't have everyone Josh pulled in something from Valley of Flowers, and another week we were down we played through a thematically related scenario in an unreleased game of Josh's called In Residence which was somewhere in the general space of Silent Hill and Trophy Dark. Obviously, given the GM, many of the things we interacted with were horrifying in some way, which made me all the more apologetic when I pulled some absolute clownshoes nonsense out to get us through a situation. That said, even I had plenty of opportunity for heartfelt roleplaying with the other characters and even when myself or one of the other players took a more bombastic swing narratively, it always felt like we were being supported both by the GM and by the game itself. Our final battle involved the three of us + a warband versus two enemy knights + their warband, and it truly felt like a clash of superheroes slowly wearing each other down as the enemy knights used the same tools we had against us. Truly, the only thing that won us the day was the fact that our third knight and the warband were able to punch through the enemy warband and come just in the nick of time to weaken the enemy knight commander such that the knight who had been fighting with me was able to harm the enemy knight commander and disintegrate him with his cursed blade. Legitimately epic stuff.
So obviously, Josh is a demonstrably competent writer of games and scenarios, so anything they were running was going to be good, but knowing what I do about how absolutely little the Mythic Bastionland book does in terms of spelling out concrete situations, from the player side of things it still felt like there was always an answer for any time we had any kind of weird scenario come up which meant that there were very few situations where Josh was left struggling for a ruling. We might have played a little more cautiously than some groups, but it still felt like the game was progressing at a pretty decent clip, and we never succumbed to my great fear in hexcrawls - a terminal case of "wherethefuckdoIgo-itis." No matter where we traveled to, things happened - and not in a funhouse kind of way where it felt like the important stuff was just waiting for us to show up, but rather that we were in a living and changing world. I am both curious and terrified to get on the GM side of this for a full game, but to dip my toes in I'll be running a few sessions of What A Horrible Knight at GenCon this year so hopefully I'll be able to carry what I learned from Josh forward.
Ave Nox x The Electrum Archive: or, Just How Deep Does This All Go?
As I identified in my post back in January, running AN with TEA presents a few weird issues. For one thing, the lore of the two games doesn't necessarily line up, but it's not wholly incompatible.
- TEA's lore says that the underdark is home to a number of bug-people kingdoms and that humans are wholly extraterrestrial to the planet Orn, and that any super high tech ancient stuff is from the old precursor race that abandoned the humans there.
- AN is built on the premise that meets somewhere between Dark Souls and Fallout with an ancient civilization having gone underground and now explorers have found evidence of that civilization and want to find out more.
There's also the combat elements:
- TEA, as an "attacks always hit, armor is damage reduction, and spells are WEIRD" kind of system means that any situation where PCs are taking damage can spell the doom of one or more PCs
- AN, legally being system neutral but functionally being built on an OSE chassis, means that it kind of expects PCs to be a little bit tankier when it comes to combat and while it tends to omit random encounter tables in all but a few areas (which both serves as a storytelling point as well as a way to teach people how to engage with the dungeon), it means that some challenges are functionally impossible without a high degree of mastery/cheesing of the base game system
And perhaps most interestingly is the economy:
- TEA has kind of a unified economy of "elder ink" - a kind of magical gasoline that can be found in tech abandoned by that precursor race I mentioned - being both used to buy and sell things but also to teach spellcasters new spells (and to cast the spells in the first place). What we consider precious metals are functionally worthless due to them being present in the sands of the planet Orn.
- AN, presuming a normal fantasy world, obviously still occasionally has coins as treasure - but more bafflingly presents a situation in which very little random loot appears paired with very few places to spend it as the locals in the area of the dungeon (the folks living on the surface, that is) don't really use money and basically only use it to trade with the few outsiders who have set up shop in the area.
- Both games present some vaguely similar items at wildly different price points - this was such a head-scratcher I went and harassed a friend of mine who's an economist to try to help me put together a blog post explicitly on fantasy economies but you'll just have to have the version of that I allude to in my original Ave Nox post I linked earlier.
There are a few choices in Ave Nox that chafe a bit, and not just because of trying to make the module and system speak the same language - and what's interesting is which of those chafe points are intentional and which are not. Having talked to Charlie, I know that one of the things I wish the module had was something that got left on the cutting room floor and which I know still exists (which means hopefully someday we can get it as an extra zine or something to help out): what the goals of all the NPCs in town are! The factions in the dungeon itself are all well defined, though most of what the players learn is sparse and can leave them confused. This is an intentional chafe point, and it pays off later on. But there's all these NPCs in town that have little descriptions, and then there's all these mercenary companies around - but none of them have any goals! And when you've got a game like TEA that has a lot of systems that depend on the wants and needs of NPCs - carousing, hiring minions, etc. - not having clearly defined goals for them can be a struggle. That's not to say that that void is completely free of fruit - for example, one of my players really wanted to set up something of an adventurers guild which eventually pivoted to a bathhouse, and so while following the rules for making an institution we ended up getting results showing that some other local group was pissed at them, and so we got some of the other mercenary groups involved and it was fine - but otherwise, you've gotta really work to figure out where to slot these guys in in places that feel natural. Setting up some objective clocks for each faction, or even just some wants and needs for them to match similar things in the dungeon itself (see: Knife Man and his list of goodies he'll trade you for particularly hard-to-procure meats) can fix this, but it's a shame to know that that kind of thing was intended to be included but cut last minute.
 |
| Sketch of "The Snapdragon" - a monster without official art in Ave Nox, by my player Krysta Collins |
To get back to intentional chafing that pays off - a few sessions in, one of my players remarked that the first two levels of the dungeon feel really sparse. Like, there's almost no loot, there's almost no random encounters, and the few obviously story-relevant things hanging around kind of don't mean anything to anyone. This is all by design and pays off once the players get down to the third level and they figure out why everything is so sparse - it's because those top two levels were the most easily explorable by other adventurers. Sure there's almost no cool loot - people already grabbed it! Sure there's only a smattering of random cultists going around and hunting - they're just trying to get some easy food! All the juicy stuff is down in the bowels of the dungeon itself - and in the "final zone" which my players stumbled into after realizing that they had the macguffins necessary to access it without understanding what it was. This was fine - the module punishes those who delve too deeply when unprepared and they got their shit REKT. All of this to say, it becomes painfully obvious where the active story is once you get there - but if you play too cautiously and keep returning to town after every encounter (which is something that TEA can sometimes push you towards thanks to limited inventory and torch guttering, which is not a bad thing but is an unintentional chafe point when combining these things together), you might just think there's not actually anything going on.
At this point, the players have learned a lot of the secret hidden backstory of the adventure, although there is so, so much more for them to find. Some of the characters are approaching max level, which is an interesting situation - the Vagabond currently has a golem arm grafted to his back and is basically wrecking any corporeal enemies that get in front of him, yet he still dares not hunt King Linnorm (one of the several world bosses in the dungeon which may actually be functionally impossible due to the aforementioned auto-damage of combat). One character has found some shards of an obsidian mirror with a particularly interesting spirit within (weirdly, a piece of lore that works both in TEA and in AN!). One character was writing an adventure novel, only to have it be destroyed by a Rotgeist and to have had his entire character motivation shift to becoming the most deadly motherfucker in the dungeon as revenge. And one character (who is the second character for this player) is desperately trying to level up and keep pace with her companions who are all becoming more twisted and horrible the longer they stay in the darkness. It's a lot of fun. And it's only going to get wilder once they start moving into the bottom floor of the dungeon where the big-time run-enders are - things like...well, you know that one scene that Comedy Central cut out of reruns of Dogma back when they played it super late night in the 00s? If you do, you already know what kind of time this party is about to have - and that's not even including the options they have to go down into the mines, or to the oubliette, or to become HVAC repairmen.
 |
| Art by Worthikids. Both Bob Hoskins lives are available to you in Ave Nox. |
I'll probably come back and do a final post-campaign roundup for this one once we're really done - I'm guessing depending on how quickly the players start plowing through the final areas (assuming they're not overwhelmed by the things that truly can just wipe a team) we may have somewhere between 4 and 10 sessions left.
Outro
GenCon is coming up, and I'll be running some sessions of What A Horrible Knight and something for Moonlight on Roseville Beach with the folks at PlusOneEXP - come out and find me if you can! I also threw my hat into the Appendix N Jam this year to force myself to actually finish something, and if I can get that done then that bodes well for my other pending projects - the vastly overdue Kingdom of Slime splatbook for Down We Go, finishing all the tables for The Ballad of Johnny 45-Dicks so that can finally be complete, and a few others I've got rattling around. I've also started playing in a small game of Stonetop where I am once again playing a weird little guy, but at least this time I also somehow managed to opt into the version of weird little guy that gives me a bunch of magical spirit friends that absolutely aren't going to murder me once I help them achieve autonomy.
Stay weird out there!
No comments:
Post a Comment