Old Men Running The World

Category: advice

  • The Mythic Bastionland GM Oaths

    There’s been a little cottage industry of advice for Mythic Bastionland. I’m not proud enough to resist. Pride was always my dump sin.

    You can understand why the industry. Some games need cheat sheets. With Mythic Bastionland, there’s an unserved market for someone to expand the rules from their haiku-like density into something more bloated, spending a page explaining on what Mythic Bastionland does in a sentence.

    So: what should a Mythic Bastionland GM do?

    I think it’s exactly the same as the players. You follow the oaths.

    • Seek the Myths
    • Honour the Seers
    • Protect the Realm

    It’s just that they have a different meaning for you, the GM.

    The Sprite illustration

    Here’s the short form. I’ll expand afterwards

    Protect The Realm

    The realm is the heart the game and, first and foremost, you must protect its integrity. Know the big picture to start with, and increasingly fill in its details. Once conceived, it exists. The primacy of the players’ actions is reliant on having a real environment to interact with. If a world changing event happens, you need a world to have been changed.

    Honour The Seers

    Your seers are the dice. Your seers are the spark tables. Your seers are the enigmatic sentences of the game. Do not consult them idly. When you consult them, honour the results. What the seers have told you is as real as anything else.

    Seek the Myths

    You have to seek the myths, because they are from outside the realm. The Myths are written in short, evocative statements. It’s only through interpretation (honour the seers) and contextualisation (protect the realm) they can enter play in a meaningful way. The world exists, and then the Myths arrive to distort that.

    Protect The Realm

    This comes first, because it literally comes first – both in the manual and in your planning.

    In a previous career, I was at a games conference in Australia. An academic was presenting their research, based around recording games and breaking down what actually happened. He asked what we thought we did in Mario 64. The room gives the obvious answers, in terms of all the colour and character. But no. 85% of Mario 64 is moving a figure on a 2D plane. Everything else is an aberration to that norm. It’s also why the simple basics of Mario’s movements are so polished and satisfying – because if they sucked, it would slowly erode your joy.

    When looking at Mythic Bastionland, it’s easy to over-stress the myths. They’re the vast majority of the book, after all. But no – the actual core of the game is those first 16 pages of rules. These are the equivalent of Mario moving on a 2D plane, and what everything else emerges from.

    Don’t let the short form confuse you. You’ll find everything you need to run a quasi-medieval kingdom. Famines? Got you. Sieges? Got you. Taxes? Yup. What an average peasant in a small town knows about the existence of Myths? Oh yeah. If you are trying to simulate a realm, it will support you. Trust the core game. This is a key part of Protecting the Realm.

    The second key part is to have a Realm to protect in the first place. Yet again, follow the instructions – generate a map, either manually or using one of the online generators. I recommend this one, which lets you edit and tweak as you progress.

    Then, at the end of the Create The Realm page, there’s a wonderful bit of Mythic Bastionland’s laconic nature.

    ADDING DETAILS
    Spark Tables (p22) can add detail to significant locations and people in the Realm.

    There’s whole universes in that sentence, and is where the OSR-classic technique of Blorb is turned to more characterful focus than its traditional worries of how many skeletons are in a room. Turn to the spark tables to create the rulers of this realm… and then honour their reality, and protect it.

    They’re not Spark Tables to you, however. They’re Seers.

    Honour The Seers

    Mythic Bastionland is a game where spend your time looking into the guts of a butchered animal, trying to read the future in the turns of entrails. I wonder what could this gloopy whirl of intestine mean?

    Then you see, and it is true. It is true, because you are honouring the scene. And once it has been decided it is true, it is part of the realm, and must be protected.

    (In play, I keep the generators to hand. I mostly use the online generators, which lets me generate what I need at a glance – this one and this one are in a tab at all times.)

    When I created my Realm, I rolled up the Ruler in the Seat of Power. The Fox Knight. I roll a prompt for History. “Nomadic Injury”. This makes me think that he is not originally from this realm… but also perhaps the injury was caused by a nomadic people. As the meme says, why not both? He reclaimed this land from invaders who had previously held it, but has been injured ever since, in a Fisher King-like mode.

    But then I remember he’s the Fox Knight, whose special ability is to create illusions.

    A plot of an old novel book returns to me – a king faking illness to try and lure his enemies out. I lift it. I roll his name. “Foxter.” How can I ignore the Seers when they’re all but screaming at me?

    That’s the background of this kingdom – a king who is trying to create a trap. This is our reality, and I will not back down from it. It is as real as the dice in my hands.

    I turn to the other three holdings. What do we have here? I roll two knights, which instantly feel like his children. One has “Outcast Romance” and “Resentful Guardian” and is the Meteor Knight. I realise that the flip of having a father pretending to be weak is that everyone else has to take up the work. I see this knight is in charge of the bustling town by the local lake, and soon I have the image of Peryna, the knight who wanted to adventure, but has instead basically ran the economics of the kingdom… and was also driven away from her father when he refused to accept her love match.

    She’s joined by her brother, Endry, whose prompts I have absolutely misplaced, but was in the “Sharp Fortress” to the east, which make me realise the invasion would traditionally come from that direction. He’s the one who’s handled the military situation.

    Finally, we have Gedric, a “Deceitful Healer” with “Academic Migration” and “Tumultuous Enemy” plus in charge of a “Soft Citadel”. That comes together to make an experimental but evil academic who came along with the Fox Knight, but is increasingly frustrated by not being allowed to do what he wishes… and has plans to betray the realm. The “Soft Citadel” is metaphorical – it’s the soft underbelly of the kingdom.

    So that’s the political situation. I realise the inciting incident of the campaign is that the Knights arrive here, having heard a call for Knights to help a realm in peril. They think it’s from the ruler – when in fact, it’s secretly from the desperate son in the under-powered Sharp Citadel.

    And that’s where I start the game. There’s a few two-word prompts for some of the landmarks, but mostly I’m not interpreting them yet. I don’t need to know them yet – just the context of what the players are near. This is the tinderbox that the knights are riding into.

    So, it’s all set up to be a realistic game of politics, generational betrayal and warfare.

    Seek The Myths

    Now we set fire to that.

    Of course, the players will do that by their explicit actions, as they interact with all the cast and do all the things players do. It’s a setting, not a plot. Would the players obey the King? Join the enemies? Keep the secrets? Take over themselves? Ignore it all, and let it play out, and do their own thing? Their call.

    However, they will also do that solely by the mechanics, as they seek the myths.

    You don’t need to prep Myths due to all the work you’ve done by following the previous two oaths. You know the Realm. You know where they are. You know what else is going on. You know who rules the nearest settlement. And if you don’t, you consult the Seers some more, until you do.

    As such, you can then integrate the myth events with the fiction of the world, and what else is happening. The Goblin is stealing young people? And you’re by the Sharp Citadel. When you know the Sharp Citadel is desperate, you know that will include their young soldiers – leading to our knights meeting their first Squire. At the absolute least, you know who will be upset that a Hydra is rampaging around eating people.

    In short, when you have sought the myth, you then protect the reality of the realm (by integrating the myth with what you already know) and then consult the seers (to interpret what the details of the myth means in the context).

    To choose one example from the campaign: our own Hydra haunted our realm for 50 years. This meant it first met the Knights when our band were teenagers, and was defeated when they were well into their dotage. They knew the Hydra could only be endured… but wanted to find something else to end its blight. They turn to the Seers in the game. I turn to my Seers, in this case the Myth itself.

    What is the Hydra? All the Hydra says is “The Hydra, punishment for past sins.”

    I consult the Seers of that sentence. What is the sin that needs to be punished? I protect the realm.

    The sin that has shaped the whole game was the Fox Knight lying to his children – and the whole realm – for his own strategic decisions.

    And we went from there. We climaxed in a battle in a burning forest, where they try to forgive this embodiment of sin to death.

    PUTTING IT TOGETHER

    Soon enough the Oaths are all talking to each other. You sometimes realise you want to do more – and you can. Your desire is another Seer to honour. The Goblin’s myth says he has a lair – so I turn to the Site rules, to generate it (as a generator, it’s also a kind of Seer to be honoured). It’s not even always about the Myths. Reading the Entombed Seer I am inspired by a few lines, and feel I want a site from it. I honour the Seer by creating it, I protect the Realm by placing it in the world and (together) we Seek the Myth when a petrified (NPC) knight begs to become entombed in hope the Hydra can’t find her.

    Our game was full of this stuff – elements that were randomly inspired, treated as real and then warped by myth.

    I’ll end with an extended bit from where I felt the game was singing, the best example of the realism of a realm within the grandeur of myth.

    I was going to write this going “Protect the Realm”, “Honour the Seers” and “Seek the Myths” in brackets after each incident, but I’ll spare you, as frankly, it’d be unreadable. If you want an exercise, re-read it and do it yourself.

    It was when the Fox Knight’s plan was put into action. The Invasion had finally happened. The Knights’ mission was for them to lead an army to outflank the invaders, and take the traitorous Soft Citadel behind them. Holding that cuts off their supply lines, so leading to a final battle at favourable terms.

    So far, so War of the Roses drama. This would have been great on its own, and the game would have handled it perfectly. However, this is Mythic Bastionland. The Myths have other ideas.

    The Knights leading their warbands up the western flank starts setting off Myths. Namely, the Mist. The mists that have filled the lands for fifteen years start to thicken, and soon the travellers can barely see… and monstrous figures begin killing isolated soldiers. No-one is getting any sleep, and their abilities crater. Soon, they are reduced to walking in a chain, with no visibility beyond arms’ reach.

    And then the Wheel of Time kicks in, and spring turns to winter. Immediately, the players understand the seriousness of the situation – if they camp outside, they’re going to start to starve to death, and will soon lack the strength to fight. They have to work out a way to get inside the castle, immediately. At which point, the next Mist myth omen kicks in – which is that of troops from a nearby holding spotting them and opening fire, thinking they’re the monsters. Of course, that’s the holding they’re about to try and get into. Our desperate Knights rush them, defeat them and then barter with the leader to turn them, try and sneak inside the castle and take it, leading to a solitary duel between a knight and the murderous academic.

    Meanwhile, however, I’ve been protecting the realm in a key way – winter has appeared for everyone. The knights know they’re in trouble? So does the invading army. What do they do? They’ll head back to the citadel which they still think is secure, and stay the winter. Do they march together, or do they separate units? I’ve generated their leader. I know him. What’s he thinking? I use the rules for movement to see how long it takes, and whether they get lost or not. I also keep track of how many nights their units have been outside in winter, and track how it hits their vitality.

    So a few days later, the invading army arrives. It’s enormous, so looks like bad news. However, I know they are paper tigers – they are on their last legs, and most the units will scatter if attacked at all. What does this army do? Well, they try and bluff, clearly. Their guide is sent forth to try and talk their way in… and she’s the woman who the knights let run off to the east fifteen years earlier, now with her ancestral enemies, because a girl has to eat, right?

    Can she talk them into letting them in? What does she do when she fails, knowing that she’s going to get her throat slit if she can’t? Well, she’s going to desperately try and switch sides again, because that’s who she is.

    And what would the players do to that?

    I had no idea. Hell, I was always aware there was a fair chance of the Hydra just turning up throughout all this and eating an army.

    This is one reason why I’ve found Mythic Bastionland so wonderful to run. It’s a game which generates such a rich space of narrative and possibility, encouraging you to think of a fiction from so many angles, and so richly. For a game which is clearly at heart from the OSR tradition, it creates a narrative that is ripe with character and life.

    I don’t mean this is a story game – I mean narrative as a series of events. Story is what is created retroactively, from looking at those events and taking joy in them. And, at its best, Mythic Bastionland creates History – a saga of a realm and its people, their struggles, their failures, and how they survive and are transformed by the forces of Myth. And that emerges if you just do what the game asks you.

    Protect the Realm. Honor The Seers. Seek The Myths.

    Mythic Bastionland is on sale now.

  • How to get better at improvising

    You will get better at improvising.

    This post is aimed mostly at people who GM or want to GM, but I think it goes for all players. Role-playing is, fundamentally, about improvising in the moment, which is funny because that’s also one of the most difficult things to learn, to get good at, and is one of the things people are most nervous about when it comes to TTRPGs.

    The most basic thing is also the most challenging thing.

    But don’t worry. You will get better at it. 

    You can get better at it, just by playing TTRPGs. But maybe that’s not good enough. Not in this age of self improvement and watching videos about going to the gym! No, indeed. So let’s consider how you can improve your improvisational skills, since you don’t always want to increase a skill by performing it in anger, do you? You are wise to look for other strategies!

    HOW YOU CAN PREPARE

    One of the most common bits of advice I see — and this is good advice — is to prep for improvising. Not just read the scenario and now some monster statblocks or whatever, but have other stuff to hand that you can use if you need to. This seems contrary to just being off-the-cuff in the moment, but if you want to be good enough to just create stuff off the cuff, then actually having a bunch of stuff ready to deploy as needed is a pretty good way to start. Check out Cordova’s 7-3-1 technique for a useful example of it. 

    “Before a session, I come up with 7 total NPCs, locations, and encounters. I give each of these a motivation. I then come up with 3 sensory details for each that I can describe at the table (sights, smells, sounds, and so forth). Finally, I think of 1 way I can physically embody each at the table (a distinct noise, voice, verbal tic, body posture, mannerism, etc.). I write all these things down.”

    However, this in itself is not improvisation. Cordova says it’s not prep, either. “I’m hesitant to call it “session prep,” because the point isn’t necessarily to end up with a bunch of notes I can use during the game,” he says. “Rather, the point of 7-3-1 is to help interrogate my setting so I understand it at an intuitive level.”  These things you can prepare to allow you, the GM, to inhabit the people and places you’re going to have to talk about.

    So if it’s not session or game specific prep, it’s sort of GM self-prep. Preparing yourself as a player in the game. And one thing I’ve heard a lot from GMs, wannabe-GMs, and GMs who struggled once before and don’t want to go through it again, is that this sort of stuff is THE solution to improving their game. Innumerable times I’ve heard folks express anxiety about not having read enough, or that if they had created more plans and notes, then they might have been ready for all the situations the players throw at them. And all that will help, but it’s not improvisation. It’s the intuitively understanding stuff that I think is the most important part here. And that is really practice. Ultimately the goal is to prep less, to a point where you need the thinnest sheaf of notes, and can be prepared to just find out what happens, or to not feel devalued when your prep is of no use to you.

    So here are some other suggestions that don’t involve just struggling through it at the table, and some of them are already games.

    THINGS YOU CAN DO AS EXERCISES

    Play Solo Games

    Now I admit I find solo games to be a lot like work, but the structure of them is very much like improvising on the spot. Set yourself a time limit. Don’t ponder, just do whatever it is the game prompted immediately. Getting faster at it is the exercise.

    Regard solo RPGs as exercises intended to improve both your writing skills and your improvisational flexibility, and they soon become even more interesting to play, I think. They need a chess timer or something. Read prompt: go!

    I suppose you could boil this down to: write! Writing is always good, whatever it is that you write. The gym of the mind. Especially when you try to write stuff from someone else’s point of view. But the point is here that solo RPGs are great at creating situations that you didn’t think up but now need to respond to with something sensible. And that’s improvising as a GM.

    Practice with story dice

    My kids loved these things when they were small, and I quickly realised they were getting better at improv when playing them. Initially they would look at the symbols and say “uuhhhhh…. Ummmm…” But after we’d done it a bunch of times they reacted immediately. You could practically hear those brain connection pathways being formed. So get some! Make up a story every day. Do it as quickly as you can. These are direct exercises that will improve your response time and the convincingness of your made up shit during the game.

    Pause the TV show

    Dialogue is one of the trickiest bits of a running and RPG, and when people have to pause and stop to think “what would this character say?” then it can become particularly stilted and awkward, “uuhhhhh…. Ummmm…” As with the story dice, this can be improved. Not least in intuitively inhabiting the characters. 

    Try this: when watching a dialogue sequence on a TV show, pause it mid scene and make up the next line of dialogue. Say it out loud. If one character asks another a question, supply your own answer. This is amusing for its own sake, but it will improve your response time and flexibility. Just don’t do it while your partner is trying to watch TV. Nothing on Earth will be more annoying, and you will end up in the bad place.

    Practice With Spark Tables

    If a game comes with spark tables, as Mythic Bastionland does, then practice with them. You can buy entire books full of the things, and picking a couple of these for a situation or person and then seeing what it suggests to you is great practice both for actually using the spark tables in anger, but also for having descriptions and twists on your improv generally.

    There Are Other Tools

    I don’t have anything like an exhaustive list, but TEETH-friend Pate has linked to his It’s Worse Than That tool to us on a number of occasions, allowing you to practice your Night Move responses for games like Brindlewood Bay and The Between.

    I am sure there is something similar for Forged In The Dark complications and consequences, but I am too lazy to dig it up. Hey, I wrote the rest of this article. 

    HOW TO GET BETTER AS YOU PLAY

    Play games that force you to improvise

    Ultimately you need to get better at improvising at the table. Games that require you to come up with improvised moments includes basically all RPGs, but anything PbTA-derived (so, Forged In The Dark Games, Brindlewood games, and other favourites of this parish) will force you to do it for their very most regular and fundamental mechanics.

    You can also play a GMless game. Or play games that are nothing but narrative, with nothing more than prompts. Our own False Kingdom is a pretty good example of that. I say, modestly.

    A key part of why people struggle with this stuff is that they’ve played games where they can read off the NPCs, the monsters, the encounters and so forth. And that’s all good stuff: a fine pre-written adventure is a great thing to have at the table, but the more it’s meticulously set out, the less you need to flex that muscle.

    So, for example, we ran a few sessions of Blades In The Dark where I, the GM, was not allowed to prep at all. And so I did not. Blades is pretty forgiving when it comes to this sort of play, but making no prep at all, not even mental notes, well, that was a bit of a high wire act. The players told me what they wanted to do, and I just went with it. It worked really well. After the first session the gang were extremely sceptical that I hadn’t prepared, and I can imagine this being incredibly tricky if you weren’t used to it, but maybe ease into it. Start playing Blades in the Dark instead of D&D! Take fewer and fewer notes, slowly ease yourself out of prep. You aren’t going to do a 200kg deadlift on your first time at the gym, nor are you going to go straight to pure improv as a GM. But with the right games, you can do it.

    Play some For The Queen, too, stuff like that will help everyone in the group.

    Adopt the trait

    This might be the toughest one. TTRPGs are rightfully lampooned for GMs doing funny voices, but the thing is about the voice or adopting a mannerism is that it helps you intuitively inhabit the character. Kieron likes to wave about a glass of wine when he’s Lord Scurlock in Blades In The Dark, for example. You might not be able to keep it up, it’s tough to get over the embarrassment of pretending to be a naughty goblin, and accents especially are hard, I know, but the more you adopt the character’s mannerisms, the easier it is going to be to answer as they would. I don’t know why this works, but I promise you it does.

    (I try to give my badguys Russian accents, which is heinous and maybe even unfair stereotyping (not really), but it meant I got better at the Russian accent and improvising at the same time.)

    Make the players do it

    If you are the GM and you are stuck at the table, just offload it onto your players. Having a bunch of stock questions that creates a character out of thin air. “Who is the person in this room? How do you know them? How do we know they are angry with you?” 

    There’s a bunch of other people sat at the table! Make them do it. 

    I was struck recently by someone who said that they didn’t like the Blades mode of action roll, because they struggled to think of the complications or consequences. Well, my solution is to outsource that. There’s a bunch of brains working less hard than yours at the table, and you should be making use of them. The more I have done this, the more I made the players tell the story, the easier improvising has become. And it’s the fundamental trick to making all this work, because it includes them, and it reduces your cognitive load, and ultimately it tells a story that they’re invested in, because they came up with it. 

    So yeah. Make shit up, and make others make shit up. That’s the motto.

  • Where I Solve The Scheduling Problem In Dungeons & Dragons

    I was recently in a pub, talking to a friend about their collapsed game of Dungeons & Dragons. I was somewhat frustrated by their tale of woe – perhaps the most common tale of woe. I imagined all these decades of people wasting time, just waiting for that one player to be free on Friday.

    I decided to solve their problem by writing a patch for the 2024 edition of the D&D Players handbook.

    Here’s a PDF to download.

    Print it out and slide it in after Page 8.

    This is probably overkill, but it breaks my heart, and made me laugh. You can’t resist yourself sometimes. It is actively strange that RPG folks write rules about everything, but have avoided giving actual advice on basic play culture ideas. Generations after generations of players, falling into this particular trap. No more, I say.

    Go! Print out! Stick it in manuals worldwide. This can be a better world, or at least one where people go down dungeons and fight kobolds more often.

    It may work on other RPGs too.

    I wanted to include it on the page, but I ran out of space, but a recent episode of Fear of a Black Dragon discussed this topic at length. If you want further inspiration, you can listen here. The segment starts 19 minutes in.

    Thanks to this homebrew toolset which made the homage easy. It’s genuinely astounding work. Also, thanks to Stephanie Hans for letting me use her art from DIE RPG.

  • What I’d Tell You To Try If You Told Me Your Game Sucks

    Look, ma, I can do clickbait titles. I’m a real boy content generator now.

    I wasn’t going to call the article that. It’s very much what I’d use if I was 20-30 years younger on Youtube and forced to try and engage with that hellscape. Instead, I am on a blog: an elegant weapon, for a more civilized age. I don’t need to do it. I am, because while the blog is a lightsaber, it is a lightsaber made of shits and giggles.

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  • Gates, Chests, Keys & More: The Elements of an Adventure

    I wrote the original version of this as a way to explain how to prep an adventure session in DIE. It ended up being something much more about the fundamental structure of an adventure, full stop. You strip everything away, what does an adventure look like? DIE generates a lot of loose ideas, so giving some ideas of how to organise them felt important. Eventually as the core DIE Rituals game actually comes with a self-organising structure, it became less essential to the book, and so was cut. I was never quite 100% happy with it, but everyone else seemed to find it useful, especially folks who I was primarily aiming it at (as in, new folks.) I’ve tweaked it a little here to be less purely DIE – I think these basic structural shape is a useful way to think of prep in any game which works in this mode.

    DIE Rituals has a standard format – a series of necessary encounters you complete before reaching the final encounter. It’s written with a self-creating structure – a check-list of necessary encounters you work though, turning the questions to the players when you don’t know what happens next and so on.

    However, especially in a longer DIE Campaign, you may want to have a plan for a session, to arrange your material in something you can use, and the players can find their way through.

    In practice, it’s merely a more elaborate version of: “Where are they at the start? Where are they at the end? What’s to stop them from getting from the former to latter?”

    This is how we conceive of the various “Elements of an Adventure”.

    1. Gates
    2. Chests
    3. Keys
    4. Signposts
    5. Smoke Machines
    6. Menus
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  • 7 Things Which Will Make You A Better Player In Any RPG

    This was first published via Kieron’s newsletter, a while back.

    One of the things which I’ve been chewing over since getting back into RPGs is that there’s so much advice for GMs and so little advice for players. I keep thinking over why – though the whys aren’t what I’m about to write about. This is prompted by seeing some folk believe that there was no such thing as general player advice, and all advice is system/genre specific.

    Which got me thinking. Do I think that’s true? As the list below shows, I don’t.

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