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If you have gotten the Mythic Bastionland brainworms like so many of us have, you've likely been stalking around into the deep places of the Internet wilderness trying to find other people talking about the game. Maybe you've stumbled onto the many excellent actual plays, like the ones done by Mystery Quest, 3d6 Down The Line, or My First Dungeon, or certainly you've dug into Chris' own podcast and videos on the subject (to say nothing of his blog where so much of it began and still lives to this day). If you somehow have done all of that and not come across The Smiling Fox, I would highly recommend it as they are to my knowledge the only folks out there actually speaking about their experience with the game rather than just writing it down - because look, I love blogs, but reading blogs while driving is much more broadly discouraged than listening to podcasts, and that means I've listened to way more of this podcast than I have read blogs on the subject.
But you're here, which means you're either better at reading and driving than me, or you simply prefer to absorb knowledge via your eye-meats rather than your ear-meats, so that's fair.
Anyway.
While the folks over at The Smiling Fox have done a lovely job talking about the game and their experiences with it so far, they brought Chris McDowall on to chat in Episode 11 and a few things they got to chatting about got me thinking about how Mythic Bastionland fits into the sort of greater milieu of modern games trying to tell the story of knights (or knight-adjacent weirdoes) going on quests while desperately trying to avoid falling too heavily to Monty Python references. Part of what I'll be referencing for my own thoughts I've talked about here and here if you want to go read, but the tl;dr is that Mythic Bastionland interests me specifically in a few ways:
- How does the game present its plot threads and how do the players and the GM interact with them?
- How do other games playing in a similar design space handle certain player expectations for the kind of story they're trying to tell with their mechanics?
Limiting Scope
Now, you can likely assume that if I'm here writing a blog post, I've got many other things I'm supposed to be doing and am desperately attempting to dopamine farm to get back to doing those things. If I don't zoom in on a single game to hold up against Mythic Bastionland, I'll be here until the end of time by nerd sniping myself. I'm going to compromise with myself and limit myself to a game family that, much like the Bastionland games, has been iterating on its own core premises as each new game comes out focused on a slightly different genre - the Carved from Brindlewood games, and most specifically The Lands Remaining.
If you're here and somehow don't know about The Lands Remaining, right around this time last year Jason Cordova began musing about what a fantasy version of a Carved from Brindlewood game could look like. While much of the core premise has carried through to where the designs are now (the game is, as yet, still unpublished, though there are several playtest APs and PDFs up online), the schtick is that each of the characters you play is the Platonic ideal and emblematic version of whatever type of Weird Little Guy they are - and the Weird Little Guys are thrust into a dark fantasy world many centuries into the future from when they lived in it as they must pick through the ruins of a world that refuses to change. It's intentionally playing on tropes popularized in FromSoft's ludography - your Bedarkenèd Souls, your Very Old Rings, and your Hematologically-carrieds if you will. It's also pulling from a design choice made popular in Dungeon World that has been a throughline in I would wager 90% of Jason's games - the characters are the only one of whatever they are: Not a wizard but The Wizard, for example.
I come to this specifically because this comes up in the The Smiling Fox episode - Chris says he'd briefly thought about having all the characters being their own special kind of Weird Little Guy but landed on them all being knights that had strange little powers. Meanwhile, this design choice does still remain with the Myths - each creature that has its own myth is the only version of that creature that exists. I find this fascinating, because while on the player side of things this is roughly a similar experience (i.e. the player is handed a named character with a short list of abilities and things that clue everyone else in to who they are that they are then able to customize a little bit and will grow over time, but each character also has a Very Obvious Expiration Date), the actual execution is vastly different which leads to some very strange divergences. To be more specific about that though, I need to hop back and explain the other point first.
Solving Problems
The Lands Remaining, as do all CfB games, have characters gathering clues about the mysteries that they're interacting with as well as a metaplot about a Big Bad. As the game progresses through its phases of play, those clues can be cashed in to solve those mysteries either outright or via smaller questions which can shape the final form of the mystery (for example in another CfB game, establishing whether someone can or can't be cured of lycanthropy before unlocking the "how do you deal with them" question). Clues in CfB games are evocative but lightly described items/ideas/situations which the players will string together to establish some kind of continuity to the mystery - and it's done this way to make sure players don't ever get stuck by a breakdown in communication between GM and player. As the players continue through the phases of play, more mysteries unlock, and as more time passes without them being solved, some can escalate to cause more problems for the characters or even end up aiding the Big Bad, or sometimes just get weirder. If the players resolve the mysteries, they get some thematic rewards from them.
This should, of course, sound very familiar to folks who have played Mythic Bastionland - you've got multi-phase play, you've got Situations That You're Supposed To Deal With that progress as time passes that can become weird or bad for you if you don't, you've got players trying to piece together a continuity from the weird clues (i.e. Omens) they come across. There are some notable differences, though - for one thing, Myths in Mythic Bastionland don't really have a set way to resolve them and a clever group may accidentally skip some of the Omens via rendering them irrelevant. While both leave most of their mysteries up for interpretation, the fact that CfB games mechanize the actual resolution of each story and provide explicit (but still up for interpretation) rewards rather than Mythic Bastionland's choice to just leave everything up for interpretation means that the kinds of stories told in CfB games come off as more active storytelling rather than Mythic Bastionland's reactive stories.
And I say all of that to say that this is really weird! Because having played both game families (admission: I've played The Between, the previous mainline CfB game, as well as Beach Blanket Body Bag which is a much smaller and tightly focused CfB experience, but I've yet to play any of the playtest versions of The Lands Remaining - if you want to help me change that, hit me up), I would argue that CfB games feel so much more reactive than Mythic Bastionland! In CfB games, because of how a single failed dice roll has the potential to obliterate your character and everything important to them I felt so much more like each roll would cause me to rethink everything I was doing. In contrast, Mythic Bastionland technically has new stuff happen every phase if you're traveling, but it felt so much more planned out - we would consult the hexmap, chart a course to whatever place we'd heard about that might be where a Myth resided, and then play that out.
Yes, I Know, I Can Hear You Screaming
"But Carved from Brindlewood games and Mythic Bastionland aren't even the same genre!" you cry. "Of course they're going to produce different game experiences, they come from different game traditions! They're not the same thing at all! Carved from Brindlewood games are storygames! Mythic Bastionland is OSR! I mean, NSR! I mean, post-OSR?"
Statistically speaking, if you're reading this blog, you already know exactly how befloggèd of a deceased equine the "OSR and Storygames Overlap Actually?!?!?!?" topic is, so we can just go ahead and scoot past that. You're also pretty likely to know that prior to Jason's Brindlewood renaissance, they (along with many other folks who were a part of The Gauntlet gaming community) produced Codex going back all the way to 2016 which explored the spheres of OSR and Storygame play, as well as producing the Fear of a Black Dragon podcast that is explicitly about reviewing OSR modules. I realize it's a little superfluous to sit here and list Jason's bona fides when it literally isn't necessary (mainly, I just don't hear Codex of FoaBD talked about much these days and that's a shame), but what I'm stabbing at is that all of this game design was bathed in the same flames and hammered at the same forge (pun intended).
Broadly, both games pull from the same deep well of inspiration, and despite slotting into different taxonomies of game, they're still attacking the same kind of problem - and the more you drill down on that, the weirder it gets. TLR choosing to have the players have so much immediately tangible agency in the world means that it can feel like every choice has world-warping ramifications - it helps reinforce that the world the PCs are in is stagnant and that their actions are potentially the only things that can make meaningful change within it. MB does give its players similar levels of agency, but only in specific situations such as during a time skip - otherwise, most of the world curation is left to the GM which in turn can feel like the players don't have as much understandings of the machinations underpinning the world. In fact, they explicitly don't in a few cases: the big one being that players generally don't know what Myths are happening at any given time, and certainly have no confirmation what Omens go with which Myths. That means that unlike in CfB games where you know what the next question you need to answer to move the story along is, MB just throws you into a world that you need to come to terms with that your actions will affect, but it may take your character's whole lifetime to see those effects play out. The world of MB is constantly in flux, and so it's not that the players' actions are insignificant - it's that their actions simply join an already vibrant tapestry. To put it another way, if the world in TLR is a black and white drawing and the actions of the players are brutal red highlights, the world in MB is a Magic Eye Puzzle and the characters and their actions form the hidden image within.
A further point on the presence or absence of randomness in these games - both games contain a looming metaplot that can shape how players interact with the game world, but again they're both realized in ways that produce strange results when viewed together. All the main CfB games have Mastermind Plots, which give the game a central Big Bad behind the scenes pulling the strings. Their story will come in to play if players roll double 6's (the highest roll in these games) while gathering clues, and once they're in play they will begin to haunt the narrative until boxcars are rolled again (or when suitably dramatic). A campaign of most CfB games might not ever resolve their plot, but TLR draws them in as being the bosses of the realms the players must traverse through on their ultimate goal to save(?) the world. Let's contrast this with The City Quest in MB, the quest that everyone is told about but you're not allowed to attempt until you've achieved an amount of Glory (from solving other myths and being generally heroic) that is nearly impossible to obtain in the natural lifetime of a character - and even if they CAN begin in, due to how Omens are distributed it's entirely possible that that knight may not finish it. AND EVEN IF THEY DO, the "reward" they find might only bring more questions rather than leading them to their promised land.
One might assume that because Masterminds are a much more present and immediate threat, they might have a greater influence on how players engage with the narrative. And they do, kind of - but despite The City Quest basically existing to taunt players, its mere existence can keep a campaign on track in the moment in MB as players try to push their characters to further heights of Glory to have a chance to undertake it. Outside of TLR (and even then, still true for a portion of it), everyone knows Masterminds are in play, but their existence is largely treated as irrelevant until they show up to dominate the narrative and Cause Problems.
But Where Are My Trophies and/or Gold?
Neither TLR or MB care particularly about currency or the day-to-day particulars of your characters' inventories nor the currency to buy them. That makes what both games care about tracking super interesting and indicative of the playstyle they want you to slot into. It was interesting to hear Chris say in the The Smiling Fox episode (hey, remember that? we were talking about a podcast at one point) that he'd almost put Conditions into the game because despite leaning more into his well-worn system of Hit Protection & spillover damage attacking the character's life points ability score directly, the way that characters heal that damage still maps very closely with how CfB games handle clearing Conditions - use a limited resource, be in a safe place and have a scene involving it, or indulge in your character's special interest. CfB games give you more consumables to burn to stave off negative impacts to your character, but Bastionland games are (often) less lethal since in CfB games the consequences of an action are established via conversation with the GM vs. just raw numbers - in other words, the impact of similar actions in CfB games from turn to turn may vary wildly in impact due to the needs of the narrative, but Bastionland games are almost always raw numbers. CfB games - and particularly TLR - provide character advancement via the provision and improvement of signature weapons and moves as well as (in some games) a sort of global enhancement by upgrading your home base and befriending side characters. You technically do some of those in MB: earn enough Glory to become ruler of a domain and you'll technically get an army, though you'll need to dedicate time to upkeeping your realm; you could always a town or a local lord for better weapons or equipment, but outside of a Myth it's unlikely you'll get anything noteworthy - and even then, most Myths resolve in such a way that your only reward is the Glory of getting it done or, if you're (un?)lucky you might gain a beneficial Scar as a reward for taking some damage in a fight.
In yet another "opposite of what I expected" situation, I find it fascinating that the way CfB games utilize items and moves as a form of diegetic advancement (as well as getting to chat about your character's backstory exclusively when you burn a reroll resource or when with another character clearing a Condition) which tends to use the game scenario as a way to tell the story of the characters - yes, you're resolving these mysteries, but in doing so each character becomes more focused and defined either as a reward for completion or as a cost to avoid losing the character. In contrast, the only way you're advancing in MB is by however the game world is shaped by your actions. MB's gameplay loop necessitates the characters traveling to various places when they need to heal or find information which will then trigger more Omens which leads to the advancement of the Myths which leads to forming more bonds...it's doing the opposite thing, because while there's time for character moments every step of the way, almost every action will use the characters to tell the story of the world.
An Outro, For Now(tro)
Last year, I wrote about meeting games where they are. I like trying to pick apart game design and understand why certain design choices were made. I don't even just mean this as (someone who LARPs as) a game designer, I mean this as someone who wants stories to be told well: by sitting with a game and trying to parse out what its intent is, how it's achieving that via the mechanics, and really examining any parts that chafe me when I use them to verify if they're designed in a way I don't like or if they're just tools I don't know how to use yet. Infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters and infinite time may be able to produce the works of Shakespeare by accident, but I'm just one very over-stressed and under-medicated bag of mostly water with too many ideas and too little time - sometimes, it's worth it to sit down and get new tools to make your work more efficient even if it feels like you're not learning anything in the moment.
I really appreciate the communities around Jason and Chris' work, and how extremely prolific and transparent they both are about their design processes. Being able to watch or read so much of a creator's actual thoughts and intentions behind their design is truly a blessing, and the people who have taken their work and run with it in all kinds of new directions and further iterations continue to show what other people pick up on and think is significant is a truly fascinating and enlightening thing to watch unfold.
Stay weird out there.
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