Mid-Year Gamer Checkpoint: Mythic Bastionland & The Electrum Archive x Ave Nox

 

    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!

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.

Knights of the Triangular Table

 

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.