On Myths, Bastions, and Lands (Remaining)

 

Go listen to this podcast here.

    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:

1. How does the game present its plot threads and how do the players and the GM interact with them?
   
   
2. 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.

One Year of a Very Secret Bookclub

 INTRO

I have, as I believe I have alluded to in the past, personally curated a group of local(ish) friends to read games with over the last year. They are, by and large, people who have suffered the same curse that I did - people who only ever knew Dungeons & Dragons or perhaps one of its offshoots because that's just what everyone played, and who never really knew anyone who had any other books. A rare few came to this already as game designers, having some projects under their belts (honestly, more than I have frankly). Some, like myself, are avid podcast aficionados and have learned of some games this way - many, unfortunately, have the particular mélange of neurospices that make listening to actual plays literal actual Hell for them and so just haven't had the opportunity to be exposed to other games. All of these folks, however, have two things in common: they know me, and they know I've got an unstoppably huge backlog of games to get through. What is pictured above is most of the games I own IRL - I've left out most of the D&D specific books, and of course most of those zines haven't been properly filed. 

With the season of unchecked capitalism upon us (read: Black Friday & the push for buying games for folks for the holidays), I felt like I should run down the games we've read this year and give you some mini reviews in hopes of inspiring you to purchase them for yourself or for others. I don't have any affiliate links or anything, nothing you click in this will give me any money - I'm just doing it for the love of the game(s) and shilling for stuff I like. In no particular order, we have:

Triangle Agency

Triangle Agency rules. Full disclosure, I've been hooked on this sauce from the very beginning: as a gift to myself back when the Kickstarter was running, I backed this at one of the highest levels so I'd get a chance to play with Caleb, I got to bring some podcast friends along, it was great. I've since run this on-air for The QueerXP, and I've run it off-air a few times including an as-yet unfinished mission I wrote prior to the game coming out. But why do I like it? For the reason I think a lot of people get it wrong - this is a game about your fundamental understanding of how you interact with the world, both in and out of game. It is a game that, if you break the rules and start reading beyond the playwall and you go read all the GM tips on how to run the game, forces you to reconcile with exactly how games work in a way that I personally have not been challenged before. This is a game that does require some GM prep, yes, but it is also an onboarding manual for helping players think more creatively and fill in the world with you via its "Ask The Agency" move, a move in which a player presents a causal chain for a thing they want to exist in the world to be true, and then there's some input from the table about it and then they roll to see the impact. I have now started playing almost every other game like Triangle Agency - not that I get to Ask The Agency and reshape reality in every game, but rather the same kinds of questions I would engage with when thinking about using that move are ones I'll ask the GM. If the GM hasn't established something, it's in a quantum state until they do - if a game doesn't let you mechanically assert your own narrative about it, the next best thing you can do is ask the GM! This is a thing that I think that people have done for ages in a sloppy way - the "rule of cool" argument can be somewhat of a large club swung around rather than a precise and delicate masonry hammer - and I think that by filtering this tendency through the prism of Triangle Agency, you learn to be better at other games.

Also there's a bunch of cool weird shit you get to do that lets you be an absolute horrifying freak. I don't know what else to tell you here, if you haven't already bought it I'm going to roll to Ask The Agency to have made your [benefactor/trusted adult of choice] get it for you.

Moonlight on Roseville Beach

Look, you had me at "queer disco cosmic horror." This is a game I ran at PAXU in 2024 (a thing which the game's creator mentioned might be the first time it's been run at a con not by him? And if that's the case, I need y'all to step up here okay), have loved GnomeAnne's 4-part AP of it, and generally wish I had more chances to run for folks. In terms of what you do in this game, you and your fellow players are queer weirdoes living in a beach bungalow in a seaside resort town in the 70s. It's a homonormative, lightly magical, and very mysterious alternate 1970s setting that lets you investigate supernatural mysteries - some of which might be your fellow players! My favorite prewritten adventure I can only describe to you as "Warlock Berghain." I love the dice pool system - one you don't really see in other games, where you're building a pool, rolling, and assigning dice to various tables to see what results you get which really lets you dial in your varying level of success in a narratively interesting way. Roseville Beach lets you go as silly or serious with the horror as you like - it's a really excellent and versatile game.

Ryuutama

Ryuutama is the game that actually made me start this whole bookclub thing, because I knew I needed to read it and yell about it with someone. Finding out it had already been out in America for almost a decade and yet I had NEVER heard about it blew my mind. There was a very recent video promoting it, and it does seem like periodically someone like myself will pick it up, yell about how nobody seems to have heard of it and then it falls back to obscurity, and I think that's a real shame. Especially with stuff like Fabula Ultima catching on recently, a game like this can really shine. It is, at its core, a game of not playing heroes, but rather people who are off on their One Great Journey in their life. There's all kinds of collaborative worldbuilding things in it and some very special things for GMs to do including building their own GMPC which may or may not directly affect a session - a lot of choices make sense when you realize that the author is/was a teacher, and used this as a game to teach people the fundamentals of roleplaying games. I do find it strange where it decides to get into the crunch, mainly on the overland travel rules, but I suspect this is a holdover from D&D's export to Japan and certain aspects of it simply sticking around in the Japanese game design space whereas we in the US had chosen other aspects, but I'm not educated enough on this to make definitive statements - regardless, it is a very easy game to pick up and play, and while certain elements may see part and parcel for a lot of modern fantasy adventure games, the fact that this did this a decade ago is something to be noted. There are nuggets of wisdom to be gained here.

Also, and again, cannot stress enough I do not make money from this, but I cared about this game enough to take part in a community zine and created a sort of Shaman King-y, DanDaDan-y class you can play along with including some advice for running games with death and the undead as a more prominent element. I think everyone did a really good job with it, I encourage you to check it out if you end up liking Ryuutama.

Salvage Union

Salvage Union is a game I am so Normal and Neurotypical about that I have literally reactivated my locked Twitter account to go pull up a thread I posted to put into this post because I forgot to delete Twitter before it got scraped for AI - a thread in which I went to bat for Salvage Union because I was so tired of people saying "Oh it's just another mech game that's all about combat." Salvage Union is a game that DOES let you do mech combat, yeah. It's also about building a community to live in a post-apocalyptic wasteland dotted with corporate arcologies, a sea of zombifying nanites, kaiju, raiders, and simple folk who are just trying to stay alive. It's about being a part of a union fighting against those who would tear you down and either wipe you out or use you as just another cog in their machine. The three pre-written adventures have you either dealing with corpo espionage, horrible kaiju meat-mechs, or a cold war where people fight to control the bountiful and extremely dangerous resource that is the aforementioned nanites. Or you can just go off and do your own thing, man! Do a Borderlands With Mechs if you want to. Or a Fallout With Mechs. Or a Zoids But With Non-Animal Mechs. Or anything else your heart desires honestly! It's a cool game.

Now, you can skip this part if you don't want to hear my arguments about why this game isn't just about combat and actually it mechanically supports lots of RP options: Please pardon the extreme amount of spreadsheets I'm about to share here, but what I did was I went through every possible character option available to choose either as your pilot character or for your mech, and tagged everything as either being RP focused, combat focus, utility focus, or a hybrid, and tallied up all the totals for each section. They're all color coded for how they are in the book for easy reference. (Click each to embiggen!)

Pilot Abilities

Pilot Equipment

Mech Abilities

Mech Systems

Mech Modules

Mech Chassis

Also, none of these even touch on the Carrier Mech options, which are where all your NPCs live and which are almost EXCLUSIVELY about RP options with a small hint of combat or utility - because that's your home base where your guys live, and it's also a soft worldbuilding/tone setting choice because the kind of carrier you build denotes what kind of game you're going to play! AGH. OK I'm done yelling for now.

His Majesty The Worm

Ah yes, blessed be the Wormgame. I am very grateful to have played this game once with its creator and I have to say that it is very much a game that makes more sense once you get it to the table, at least in terms of how the game actually functions. Josh is an extremely prolific blogger and is the current editor for the OSR magazine Knock!, itself a collection of prominent blog posts from over the years. As such, much of this book is poised to teach you a lot of basic principles and how they apply to this game specifically - designing a megadungeon, building a believable town for the players to exist in, codifying interpersonal roleplaying with a set of mechanics to encourage you to get into character, all kinds of cool stuff. It uses tarot cards as its RNG and which tie to your stats, specialties, and also some really interesting combat tricks. It is somewhat of an arcane contraption and may not be for all tables - but if it's right for your table, I think it's a game that really sings. It's done well enough that it pretty regularly sells out, and right now the expansion/megadungeon that Josh has been working on is preordering/slowfunding over on Exalted Funeral.

Also, this is another game I was so moved after reading that I joined a game jam for it just to build a fishing minigame, because every game needs a fishing minigame. It's free online and probably will be forever unless I take time to actually make it a product worth paying for, but I had a lot of fun with it. Speaking of fishing minigames...

Hellwhalers

Hellwhalers, another game I ran at PAXU 2024, is actually a game I felt maybe too Jewish to do justice? Like, to be clear, it didn't actually impact my ability to run the game, nor did it really impact my ability to play the game with PlusOneEXP this year (a Twitch stream which has sadly been lost to the depths), but this is a game of a very particular kind of Christian religious horror that I feel like people raised Catholic will really, really get a kick out of. Or if you're just a hardcore Moby-Dick fan, that's also an option. You are, predictably, in Literal Actual Hell, on board a whaling ship on the hunt for the Hellwhale - a foul demon that your mysterious captain has told you is the only ticket out of Hell. This one's got a lot of juice - as a GM, you can play with or leave behind as many pieces of lore included in the book as you like. The story is primarily driven by the nightly gambling - in a very slick piece of tech, the results of your roll on the sic-bo board will provide you the prompts for the following day's activities, and aside from that it really leans on the characters' playbooks to encourage different kinds of roleplay scenarios. It's a lot of fun if you're a sicko like me who enjoys really, really bleak games, gallows humor, and roleplaying just an absolutely awful person. It also got a zine of extra content this year!

The Wildsea

What if the apocalypse didn't come from war or bombs, but instead an eruption of vegetal life - an uprising of the trees, drinking the oceans dry, burying people beneath new waves of brown and green, and at the tops of these ever growing trees a new world arises - a world in which people ride around giant, chainsaw powered boats trying to make ends meet, tell each other stories, and make sense of this world. That's The Wildsea. It also gets a distinction for being one of the only truly post-human games on this list: like, yes, there are technically human-like people you can play in this game, but they're...not humans like you or I know them. Some were trapped in amber for centuries and have been changed by it. Others, the true descendants of the humans of the old world, have been mutated by the toxic sap that oozes from these giant trees and permanently rerouting the course of their evolution. But much more common are other lifeforms that have been elevated - cactus-folk, fungus-folk, discarded-machinery-folk, thousands-of-spiders-forming-a-single-consciousness-like-that-one-alternate-universe-version-of-Peter-Parker-folk. Rather than classes and hitpoints, your character instead gets built of a number of traits which have their own boxes which when you take damage get marked off, helping more accurately represent how one loses access to the things that make them good at what they do as their failures mount higher and higher in desperate situations. It's a game that is all about the wonders of the world, of hearing reality-warping Whispers on the wind. It is a game of adventuring in a new world, only as concerned with the old world as you want to be. I mean this both in the modern sense and in the antiquated meaning of the word - it is an awesome game.

Mausritter

I probably do not need to sell you on Mausritter. It has an extremely healthy community, maybe even too healthy by some standards - it, like Mothership, has caught on such that the community is regularly holding game jams, doing collective Backerkit funding months, and is all over the place. My friends knew none of that when I showed it to them, of course, nor did they know Into The Odd or any of the other games that ultimately derived from it. (Hold that thought, though.) This being many of my group's first foray into anything from that lineage, I think folks found the character creation mechanics extremely novel and interesting, as well as exactly what kinds of things the rules of the game concern themselves with versus what things are left to the table. You get rules for making your mouse, for the things they carry, for interacting with other animals and for waging very tiny wars. That is, mostly, it. There are of course GM instructions, but while there are rules for making hex maps to set up exploring the world, and there's a mechanical impetus for the mice to make it home to be able to level up (if they survive that long), there's not a whole lot else in there - which has let people play around and make some really cool campaigns for it. There is of course the official boxed set The Estate that has a bunch of adventures in it, and there's Tomb of a Thousand Doors - originally a community-created megadungeon that then got polished, crowdfunded and published by PlusOneEXP. But you don't need any of that to play! There's so much free content out there, and honestly creating a Mausritter adventure is easy enough just by looking around your own house and imagining the mice that are (hopefully not) in your walls and what they might find. And if you're like "Adam if it's so easy why haven't you made anything for Mausritter yet," first of all 1. how dare you, and also 2. I'm in the very early planning process of Krabberitter, so just hold your horses.

The Electrum Archive

Getting this one out of the way right off the bat - I am not linking the adventure I made for this, partly because it's not done/usable and partly because I don't want to have to explain the name of it to polite company. If you know, you know.

Now, more to the point: The Electrum Archive is a game of exploration in a science fantasy world. It is equal parts Moebius and Morrowind. As I have told many people, the fact that the way magic works is that you have to huff ancient alien gasoline that allows you to pierce beyond the veil of death to learn the true names of spirits to evoke them into the world isn't the coolest thing about the lore of this game should be enough to have you running towards that Itch page right now. This game truly has the sauce, as they say. I think it makes exploration-based gameplay much more accessible than some other games (Ryuutama coming to mind immediately, but that's kind of an apples-to-oranges comparison here). You can get FromSoftesque with it in terms of loredropping and worldbuilding if you like. There are many NPCs and locales with just enough information about them that you feel like you have plenty of usable tools at your disposal without feeling like you and your players need to go study a textbook. The few times I've run this game have all been wild - it supports dungeon delving just as much as it supports sandbox exploration. There's two zines out for it now, and I'm hoping once the creator's most recent Kickstarter for an expanded version of one of their other games finishes fulfillment, we might see a Volume 3. 

The Smörkasborg Experiment

One month, I pitched a truly preposterous thing to my bookclub. Because Mörk Borg was so short, and because I had so many variants and so so many more existed, my challenge was for everyone to read the base book and then as many others as they could. Here are some one-sentence reviews of the ones me and my crew physically own:

Mörk Borg: Start here - see where everything else compares, have fun dying, idiot.

Dark Fort: The actual one-page solo game start of the lineage, good to play around with to get the hang of it. (Available along with the MB expansion Feretory.)

Grotten: 1-Bit Deeper: Technically a solo or GM With Player tile placement boardgame that uses MB rules, this one's pretty fun.

Pirate Borg: Is potentially overhyped but honestly still good - I would reflavor all the alternate history stuff unless you and your playgroup are real history sickos about that particular time period like I am.

Blood Borg: Real punk shit that lets you do Vampire: The Masquerade without all those pesky extra rules. 

CY_BORG: It is exactly what you think it is, and is the only other MB derivative made by the original crew which means it's the only one with the same level of care.

Kill Your Necromancer: An almost completely standalone adventure book where you're all undead who have to kill the person who has cursed you with life once again - have fun killing, idiot.

Honestly, knowing Mörk Borg is very handy for deciphering so many other games these days, if you don't have at least the baseline one I'd recommend it. There's all kinds of people doing really inventive stuff with it because of how simple and straightforward the rules are, and the people who really put in the time and care rather than just jocking Johan Nohr's style have some really cool spins on the concept - I personally recommend anything Adam Vass (of Blood Borg, above) or Paweł Kicman (of Kill Your Necromancer, above) do if you want a good place to start once you've tried the OG.

(Yes I was born in 1990, what about the slang that is stuck in my vocabulary tipped you off?)

A Tour of Bastionland

Another month, I convinced the crew to read Into The Odd, Electric Bastionland, and Mythic Bastionland - not just because ITO is foundational to many other games as mentioned previously and both Bastionland games build on that, but also because of the evolution both of the narrative of the world and of Chris McDowall as a writer. Like I personally was interested in mapping the plot arc of the universe that Bastion lives within, but without overselling it I really think of these games as paradigm setting for each era they dropped in. These games are the gravity wells that distort the space-time of this particular side of the gaming world, and I think that taking the time to understand them as well as things Chris puts on his blog, or the interviews he does for his podcast online, really end up unlocking a lot of ways to think about games. 

Of course, it doesn't hurt that they're all pretty fun to play. 

Slugblaster

I got to run Slugblaster this year at PAXU and I'm very glad I did, but I really want to get a full game in. I am not usually a person who goes for a game that has mechanized emotional damage as an option, but I'll be damned if getting to play around in a world where you're cool teens (or at least, teens who think they're cool) using hoverboards to traverse the multiverse and cut sick promo videos while also trying to deal with interpersonal drama and keep your parents happy isn't the sickest shit. Most of my experience with the game prior to reading it was via the Quantum Kickflip and the My First Dungeon podcasts which are both excellent. The thing that really draws me to the game, though, is that while yes you can do it as a one-shot and do all your cool stunts and have fun goofing off - this game's downtime activities really do encourage you to build out your character's life in a way that many other games do not. In addition, there's a finite number of sessions you're going to play with these characters - much as life is being a teen, you will be forced to come to the end of this period of these characters' lives and you will be forced to see what the future holds for them based on your actions over the game in a truly Breakfast-Clubian way. Again, I'm in my mid-30s, so the 80s teen coming-of-age movies mixed with 90s highschool-centric TV with its afterschool specials are just as much a part of my DNA as was seeing people be really shitty at skateboarding but doing it for the love of the sport and recording them and their friends trying to pull of sick stunts. You don't have to have lived that era to have fun with this game, but I think any folks my age or older by about 10 years are going to have a certain kind of nostalgia for it.

One other thing about Slugblaster - much like Triangle Agency rewrote my brain about how I interact with any game world, Slugblaster rewrote my brain with the intent behind its action roll - you may have heard to "only roll when failure is interesting," but Slugblaster takes it a step further to say "only roll for WHAT is interesting." If you're being jumped by a biker gang, if each and every punch against each and every biker isn't the interesting part, don't roll for that. Roll to see how well you resolve the situation - a 6 on your d6 might mean you beat the shit out of an entire gang, or it might mean you successfully escaped with your teeth intact. Likewise, and I think I'm roughly quoting this directly from the Episode Zero of the My First Dungeon AP, if you're tied to a chair and need to grab a laserknife to cut yourself out, maybe it's interesting to see each and every inch that you skooch your hand across the floor towards that laser knife. Roll for what is interesting.

OUTRO

So that's it! That's every game I forced my friends to read with me over the last 12 months.

Except that's not every game I read over the last 12 months, is it? Take, for example, my haul from PAXU:

I ran CBR+PNK at PAXU as well on behalf of Mythworks in their big 50+ person megagame, which was absolutely wild. I'm reading Stillfleet now in preparation for playing it on Sunday in the Stillfleet Discord. I read the original preview edition of The Between and played in a medium-length game of it while the hypetrain was rolling for the crowdfunding campaign. While my job ultimately ended up screwing me out of the time off to go work for Possum Creek this summer at GenCon, I'd read and prepared to run Wanderhome. I've been writing an adventure for PlusOneEXP for Down We Go for...frankly too long now actually (sorry Tony) but I've been deep in those mines. I ran The Wassailing of Claus Manor at PAXU 2024 as well, and ended up writing something for the upcoming second expansion for it called The Pine Tar of Claus Manor which is...coming out sometime soon? I used the original edition of A Land Once Magic (updated version pictured above in the hand-stamped bag) to help worldbuild for a game of Armour Astir (which I talked about in a previous blogpost). I played Mappa Mundi, Trophy Dark and Inevitable for charity streams this year. I've played an absolute shit load of Mothership and Cloud Empress this year, both of which have had a ton of adventures to flip through and use (CE's books are still pre-shipping from the crowdfunder, but watt sent us the PDFs ages ago and lemme tell you, they're worth it). I finally read the Old School Essentials rules so I could play in a stream over on PlusOneEXP to promote Duginthroat Divided. While I haven't actually sat down to read the Cairn 2e rules I got recently, I did get to play one of Joseph R Lewis' adventures with him at a con in Baltimore with a veritable who's who of the Cairn extended family. And that's before getting into all the zines I got either from PlusOneEXP's Zine Club or from the various zine month crowdfunders! It's been a huge year for games, both personally and broadly! I encourage you to get out there and go buy some of these games - every single thing I've talked about in this post is a game I feel has value either as reference material or as an actual game to be played, and I'm very glad that both my friends that I pressganged into a bookclub and the people out there in the world who've welcomed me into their gaming groups and streaming games have all been willing to play with me this year. Excited to see what 2026 holds.

Stay weird out there.