The Skim: Mythic Bastionland

It is this organ’s firm and unyielding belief that one cannot review an RPG from reading it. You can review a manual, certainly, but you’re not reviewing the game in any meaningful way.

However you can skim and see what pops out.

This is the Skim, and this is what we got from skimming Mythic Bastionland.

IN A SENTENCE 

Kieron: It’s OSR¹ hexcrawl² Pendragon³ in miniature⁴ (complimentary⁵). 

THE DENSITY OF THE RULES

Jim: When the book arrived I hopped into a video call with the charismatic designer-artist Marsh Davies, with whom I am in love creating GOLD TEETH, a book about deeply messed up pirates. I leafed through Mythic Bastionland, remarking that the twenty-odd pages of rules was a very fine thing, comparing it to the… considerably more that we have in our forthcoming book.

Now, in part that’s because we adhere to the convenience and slablike tactility of the A5 format, but in truth the rules in Mythic Bastionland are compressed such that twenty pages of Mcdowall’s lean-yet-ornate rules writing would immediately expand into forty pages in any other hand. Brevity! But no paucity. McDowall is a sage of procedurality. Behold, as you skim, the rules for warfare, politics, aging, and everything else simply designed, as if by miraculous formulation, into these few pages. A feat. A wonder. I am forced to envision McDowall as The Concision Knight, a wandering fellow on whose armour is etched the long tale of his deeds, in extremely efficient prose.

EXAMPLES OF PLAY

Kieron: There’s no examples in the rules. There’s a handful of bits where things are clarified, or other rules are pointed at – if you want a Mythic Bastionland drinking game, drink every time you read “the Primacy Of Action”. However, the rules are stark. 

Instead, all the examples of play are gathered in a thirty-page section at the back.

This isn’t the Japanese-model extremely-long-extended-play example – each example here is a page, divided into two columns. On the first, an example of play. In the second, commentary on the example – what is working, what isn’t, other ways one could go. For a usability thing, it works incredibly. I don’t understand “Exploration”? I go to the page for Exploration and see it in play. It’s also more than just classic rules topics – it’s got sections on things like “Getting rules wrong”. In other words, it’s a hybrid of GM advice too. It does a lot, presented in a naturalistic way and I love it.

I will clearly be ripping it off.

The Tables. THE TABLES. 

Jim: The big table and then what follows is probably the second or third thing that The Skim reveals, because it defines MYTHIC BASTIONLAND like a spine defines a vertebrate. I sure have seen books filled with or based around tables before, but I can’t think of anything that has ever been structured quite like this. The big table gives you d6+d12 KNIGHTS (player character types: The Silk Knight, The Vulture Knight, The Tankard Knight, etc, each with their weapon, ability, iconic theme) and d6+d12 MYTHS (all the things of myth they are dealing with: The Hole, The Tournament, The Dwarf, and so on, each with its omens, cast, and provocative imagery) and then the rest of the book expands outwards from this in a KNIGHT/MYTH/KNIGHT/MYTH alternating page format which dominates the entire book. It’s wild. It feels like as if a D&D manual was structured CHARACTER CLASS/MONSTER for 150 pages. But the big tables aren’t the only tables, there are TABLES for other things (curious in what it omits, as we might well discuss elsewhere) so that a GM can invent a person or a combat situation, or a town, with just a rapid prompt string, as the horrible god of OSR intended.

THE AGING RULES

Kieron: This isn’t quite a true The Skim, but something that popped out when I first skimmed an early PDF. I actually gushed about these the first time I met Chris at a gaming event, which is one of the nerdiest things I’ve ever done, and I’m me.

But this is a great example how Mythic Bastionland seems to be trying to do the dynastical model of Pendragon with a much smaller footprint. As the game progresses, you move through ages – and as each age passes, you grow – from Young, to Mature, to Old. When you go from Young to Mature, you re-roll your stats, and if they’re higher, you keep them – the skinny youngster filling out, the arrogant kid learning wisdom. When you move from Mature to Old, you reroll your stats and if they’re lower, you change them to that. The perils of age come at you unexpectedly, without warning. There’s one stat which takes a standard reduction (of D12) and if it hits 0 you die of old age.

Point being, it’s a sophisticated, simple and dramatic way of representing aging in the game, and gives a lot of material from very few moving parts. Disturbingly, I absolutely recognise it. You work until you don’t.

The second part of the Pendragon dynastical mode is having successors, which is achieved by choosing to do so between ages. Between these mechanics, I suspect Mythic Bastionland is going to get something about that long, mythic, historical lens, but played in a handful of sessions. Even if they survive the ordeals of knighthood, I suspect your PC will be dead by 6 sessions… and then the world continues.

Anyway, aging rules, good, actual aging, bad, my ankle hurts.

FUCK ME, THIS INK IS POWERFUL

Jim: The smell of new books being a powerful stimulant is well known science, and this book is an extremely potent active agent in this regard. I know it’s irresponsible to give drugs to the impressionable, but I had my teenage son smell the book after it arrived and his eyes popped “that’s incredible,” he said, taking a second huff. Powerful stuff. And an undeniable enhancement of the skim. (I later caught him taking a third hit.)

1. Office for Statistics Regulation, the government body which provides independent regulation of all official statistics produced in the UK, and aim to enhance public confidence in the trustworthiness, quality and value of statistics produced by government⁶. 
2. A mode of adventure where players travel across a map, exploring each area and seeing what’s there. The map is divided into hexes, hence the name. The other part of the name is deceptive – the players don’t spend their time crawling. Unless they choose to. Player agency is important.
3. Greg Stafford’s generally accepted masterpiece, where the players become bit-part supporting-player Knights in an Arthurian saga.
4. No, there’s no miniatures involved. To play The Great Pendragon Campaign takes 80+ sessions. To play Mythic Bastionland takes fewer sessions. 
5. Clarifying the earlier words are good things if you were confused. Internet joke structure,  which I know, so is clearly out of date as I am very old (derogatory).  
6. Or it could be the Old School Renaissance, a movement which any definition of will get people angry at us. Rules lite, favouring GM-rulings over pre-codified rules systems, embracing player agency over pre-created plots, a lot of random tables, harking back to a possibly-fictional era of imaginative 1970s RPG (which is all too appropriate in a game with“Mythic” in its title.)