This game runs itself.

I don’t mean that it’s easy to run, because I think if you are coming from a traditional or even OSR background you will find that this game is quite an adjustment. I did.

My first session was a rough one. I felt like I was on the backfoot as the Referee while the system would repeatedly try to pull the rug out from under me. For context most of my background in GMing is through running dungeon-crawls. Sure the games would often involve a lot more than just dungeons but 90% of play took place in sites.

Combat was also a bit of a learning curve. The rules are simple enough, but that actually caught me off guard a bit. No lie, early on I had players adding their damage dice and totalling the numbers at first because I’m just wired that way, only later realizing post-session why combat was such a cakewalk. And I read the combat rules like 5 times before running the game. Old habits die hard.

Mythic Bastionland is wide open in a way that few games actually are. In a DND hex-crawl, you could certainly argue that players are free to go anywhere, but player movement is often slow and frankly you aren’t getting very far especially in OSR games where resource tracking and travel is of major consequence. Mythic Bastionland isn’t asking you to track rations for most journeys and the hex-crawl procedure is mercifully simple. Your players all start with horses and can feasibly cross the map in a single session or at least cover a lot of ground.

Speaking of the players, their characters start with all the tools they will ever need from the get go. And everyone has access to the same feats and gambits.

This is a positive or negative depending on your players. The players all have very similar toolkits here, and while the Knights are unique, it’s not like they fulfill separate player roles as codified by traditional DND classes. Players’ uniqueness here is defined by their kit and their actions, but it’s not like the Knights will gain new feats over time. PC progression in the meta sense is out of the question. So players who are really looking to level up and gain better stats will be disappointed.

Diegetic advancement is the name of the game. Attaining Glory gets them access to seats in court, having their own holding, amassing armies and even ruling the Realm. It’s essentially social currency in this world. In fact, it’s the only currency that matters. Wanna aura farm in court? Wanna buy a warship to sail the seas? Wanna build a shiny new castle? Get thee some Glory.

The most obvious way to do that is to resolve the Myths.

In this game, players will not only be seeking Myths but actively chasing them. I didn’t quite realize how crucial the bit about primacy of action was in the rulebook until it hit me right in the face. On session 1 my players should have been allowed to resolve a Myth, but I didn’t let them. In hindsight it was a mistake on my part.

This game really asks the Referee to sit back and react to the players’ agency and the system’s. I can’t impose my will on this game and I am starting to learn just how refreshing that is. If anything, I am given the role of weaving the threads loosely and making ties on the spot between the Myths, the factions of the Realm, and the players. There is almost no way to do all of this in advance. The Omens will surprise you and they must come to pass. So get used to improvising scenes.

Having played 3 sessions so far, I feel like I now have a much better grasp of how this all works. In my first session, the Omens gave me quite a bit of anxiety, I just didn’t know what to do and felt a bit lost, but now it feels almost natural to present the omens during play. If anything, they are my excuse to slow down and really think on how to present the situation. The game already moves at lightning speed so it’s fine to just take a breather.

In fact, this game is so fast that the amount of ground you end up covering per session (both in the sense of actual distance travelled and narrative progression) can be quite staggering. It’s a bit overwhelming to go back and write session notes. In two and a half hours you can easily end up resolving a full myth and have time to spare for adventure shenanigans and court intrigue.

Some of the Omens feel like nice interludes. They aren’t scenes but rather paint a quick picture of something on the horizon (I mean that both literally and metaphorically). Those are over and done with quickly. Generally the Omens aren’t meant to take up a whole session, but some can play out into something much bigger. Depends on how the table engages with them.

There are some Omens that have some MAJOR ramifications for the Realm, so before you go and prep every nook and cranny, just make sure the Myths you included aren’t going to completely render all of that redundant.

A major piece of advice I would give new Referees to this system (from someone who is still very fresh FWIW) is to not over-prep and let the players fill in the gaps with their theorizing. If you don’t have an answer to a question, let the players speculate, and go with the answer that sounds most interesting. If you are like me, you likely won’t have nearly enough answers to the questions they’ll have, so let them answer a question by asking it. You know “yes and…”

When that fails, you have the spark tables to fall back on. They are very good and I would urge GMs to use them as opposed to more generic tables from other sources since these convey the tone way better. Speaking of tone, this game can get very silly, in the best way. One minute you are playing a mashup of Excalibur and Elden Ring, the next it’s Monty Python. It’s Monty Python quite a lot of the time, actually.

What really surprised me was how much my players and I enjoyed the court scenes. This game is unapologetically driven by the hex-crawl, but court is where you really get to stir the pot of the Realm. In my second session I had the players start in the Seat of Power, attending the Feast of the Sun. That way they got to meet and interact with all the major players and factions within the game. Knights and Seers may hold high ideals, but they aren’t immune to beef. The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills have nothing on the Knights of the Realm.

To date, this might be my most politically intriguing campaign so far, simply because I put all these Knights with petty squabbles in a room and let my players talk to them. Of course they got into a duel with the Gilded Knight, who was in full Mordred from Excalibur mode.

The players seemed to enjoy unravelling the knot of court drama as much as they did chasing myths and getting into battles. Factional conflict is an essential part of any sandbox and it’s no different here. Myths are important, and the maelstrom that the game revolves around, but that doesn’t mean that people within the Realm don’t have motivations beyond their oaths.

The real sauce is when the interpretation of those Oaths lead to conflict. In my Realm, a Seer is the ruler of a holding and a major political influence. Being the Carved Seer, he's quietly manipulating the Realm into war, because this is what has been prophesized. Meanwhile, the Talon Knight, who also rules a holding, has caught onto these machinations wants to put a stop to this and has made himself a pariah. And so the stage is set for players to engage with these two factions and make their own mess of things.

As of writing, we are about to have our biggest time jump going into a new Season next session. That gives me an excuse to really build out what’s been happening at court and work with the players to see how they’ve been involved (or excluded).

Overall this game has presented me with the most interesting take on heroic fantasy I’ve seen in a game. To me, heroic does not entail invincibility, or overpowered abilities. The Knights are strong, and they can take a hit, but they are not invincible. As the Referee, I feel like I can empower the players to attempt crazy stunts in combat, because I don’t need to worry so much about the rules. The gambits cover those cinematic maneuvers much like mighty deeds in DCC. Simple and cinematic, a tasty combo.

So yeah, it looks like my group will be galloping across our Mythical Realm for a while longer. I don’t foresee this stretching into a year long campaign or anything that ambitious, but I do see this being a tight 8 session arc where a bunch of crazy shit happens in each session, because even three sessions in this world completely changed.

That’s the Mythic Engine doing its thing.

For now, I’ll leave you with a quote:

“We'll ride the spiral to the end and may just go where no one's been” - TOOL