Meditations on Mythic Bastionland
Introduction
I've been playing in a regular Mythic Bastionland game for over a year (about a year and a half) and so far, it has been one of the most intense and rewarding TTRPG experiences of my life. I wanted to reflect a little bit on why this experience has been great thus far, both on the part of Chris McDowall's game design and our own group's interpretation by the GM and players.
What It Is
I sense that Mythic Bastionland is pretty popular in indie TTRPG spaces, but if you aren't interested specifically in newer takes on classic dungeoncrawling fantasy systems, you might not be aware. Mythic Bastionland (henceforth MB) was created by Chris McDowall, the designer who created Into the Odd (henceforth ItO) and Electric Bastionland (henceforth EB) 1. It's probably safe to say ItO provoked a minor revolution in indie RPGs, becoming the foundation for both the Cairn and Liminal Horror systems.2
In regards to my play group, we started playing around November of 2024, and have alternated on a roughly monthly basis between weekly sessions over video chat and playing PbP-style over text message, creating a very unusual play experience and making me realize how amazing PbPs are. Our stable of players has been mostly steady over the course of all that time (and fingers crossed it stays that way because I like playing with them).
System
MB is based on ItO with some pretty major revisions. Like ItO, it has 3 stats (albeit renamed), and combat is designed without to-hit rolls. Attacks automatically hit, but are first reduced by armor, then diminish your "Guard", then start actually wounding your flesh and potentially knocking you out or killing you.
On the other hand, MB's combat is much more complex because the PCs are supposed to be trained knights. The expectation is that a knight will roll several damage dice in a given round. One of these dice (but does not have to) be set aside for damage, while the rest can be used to perform cool "Gambits" like moving an enemy around, dismounting them, or making their next attack weaker. Knights can also do powerful "Feats," though they must use this ability sparingly as each Feat carries the risk of fatiguing yourself and losing the ability to do Feats for the rest of that combat.
This makes combat extremely fun and exciting once you know how this relatively simple system works. A lot of OSR games have pretty dull combat, honestly, because the expectation is that players will avoid combat as much as possible or the GM will add interesting set dressing to spice up encounters. But MB's combat feels really electric. My character is a renowned duelist in no part because I, the player, love duels; they're some of the most fun I've had in an RPG.3 And I think this is because it rewards the player's strategizing even when there are no external factors to combat: so when I'm in a fight, I have to make decisions about which weapons I'm going to use, whether I'm going to use a certain Feat or save it in case I need to use a different Feat later on, etc.
Beyond the shiny combat system, probably the main mechanical innovation of MB is the gameplay loop which revolves around knights discovering Myths (more on them later) as they travel around a big hexmap. Whereas I took to the combat system really quickly, I've actively avoided learning about how the Myths work mechanically so that I can be more wowed when things happen in-game. I think I have figured it out by osmosis, pretty much, but from my limited understanding it's both really good and simple. I believe each Myth has a specific zone of the map that it tends to appear in, but they have a chance of appearing anywhere. Because of this, the world feels really cool and... mythic.
Character creation is also awesome. Whereas ItO is similar to old-school D&D character creation, MB is more like EB, where there are a large number of predefined archetypes (kind of like pseudo-character classes) that a character starts with. You roll what type of knight you are from a list of (I believe) 72 options, getting things like The Iron Knight or The Hive Knight or (my character) The Salt Knight. You get some simple abilities, equipment, and a lot of flavor, but (importantly) not a lot of characterization.
When I rolled the Salt Knight, I had to do some detective work to figure out how I should play him. The Salt Knight's ability is to draw aggro from enemies while their "Passion" is taking on difficult challenges. My version of the Salt Knight has a cynical, taciturn exterior hiding a deeply-buried heart which is genuinely kind and caring.
Setting
Another thing MB really nails is its setting. MB is about knights, but it consciously avoids the Christian trappings of chivalric romances. The default culture of MB is pagan, animistic, and has decentralized spiritual leaders in the form of Seers, bizarre oracles practicing extreme forms of asceticism. To me, the religious environment of MB's setting resembles the Vedic religion described in the Hindu epics more than any extant, modern-day religion. The "Mythic" part of Mythic Bastionland is the Myths, which are various strange and mystical problems cropping up in the realm. One of the cool things about experiencing this purely from a player's perspective is that I don't actually know what is and isn't a Myth, so sometimes a purely natural problem, like smoke coming out of the earth and poisoning a village, will seem like a magical one; my first thought when we encountered this exact scenario was that it must be a dragon, which feels like a very medieval inclination to have.
One of the things that really jumped out to me about our campaign was the juxtaposition of the simple Knight's Creed: "Seek the Myths. Honour the Seers. Protect the Realm." with the complex and cynical motivations of most of the NPCs we've dealt with, even and especially other knights. I've compared our campaign several times to Chinatown, as I gradually realized with some horror that our PCs were seemingly the only people in the entire Realm actually committed to upholding the ostensible values of our vocation.
Story
The story of our campaign quickly coalesced into something really interesting from a bunch of random elements, if our GM's reports are to be believed. I would actually consider the Myths secondary (though they're great) to the story of our group of knights, serving rather as almost a backdrop to the sophisticated political machinations of the realm which our intrepid heroes are constantly getting caught up in.
In one of my favorite story arcs of the game, a few random encounters during a joust produced two long-running plot elements: the Salt Knight discovered one of his opponents was being blackmailed, and the Gilded Knight (another PC) won a squire from his opponent in a duel. Both of these elements were intimately linked to the uneasy peace following a brutal civil war and factions that resented the new King. The squire was heir to one of the unhappy fiefdoms, and the opponent had secretly betrayed her side's troops to bring about a speedier end to the war. This culminated in a duel between the Salt Knight and the blackmailer, the Iron Knight, with the squire and his father as seconds for opposite sides of the duel. Meanwhile, the other PC knights were illicitly breaking a giant bat out of the capital's dungeon because he had been falsely accused of killings and cattle thefts. In the end, the Salt Knight was lauded for plunging the realm into further chaos while the unknown conspirators were condemned despite saving an innocent life.
Playing the same character for over a year in some pretty intense roleplaying scenarios is a really special experience, and one which I think PbP has actually enhanced since I have had a lot more time to ponder specific responses and how my character would react to things. Ironically, making a character who doesn't talk very much requires putting a lot of thought into their responses.
I also like analyzing the emergent story of the campaign as if it were a novel. I don't know and don't want to know what's going to happen next, but I think there are recognizable themes that are fun to pull out and mull over. My character has really good stats (the best in the party by a slight margin) which I've tried to compensate for by making him miserable and shortsighted in-game. He's not a bad person; in fact, I would say his heart's in the right place. But I think he is yoked to a bad system and has a flawed approach to solving problems. I think this is one theme, intentionally or unintentionally, where MB really produces some interesting ideas. MB is a game about people whose job is to protect, but whose main distinguishing characteristic is their ability to do harm. It sounds a little dumb, but thinking about how to solve problems in a game about knights and magic has made me reflect in real life about what it means to try to make the world a better place while working within a flawed system. And just like any good text, MB doesn't produce answers to that, and I don't think our campaign will have those answers. I'm just happy to be along for the ride.
It seems to me like EB doesn't get talked about nearly as much as McDowall's other work, but that might just be that I don't play EB.↩
I also feel the need to note the starter dungeon for ItO, The Iron Coral, is possibly my favorite dungeon of all time.↩
It's interesting that D&D's combat system was a watered-down version of miniature wargaming rules, while MB takes ItO's combat and waters it up(?) to a pretty fun wargame; there's even skirmish rules. Honestly, if you had released just the combat system of MB in 1977 as a medieval wargame, I think people would have loved it.↩