Prepping for Mythic Bastionland

Choices, Choices

For over the past year, I've been running games as part of an in-person ttrpg community called ATLRPG. The group runs three events each week, two of which I regularly attend, either to play or run games. I've mostly run one shots along with two short lived campaigns: one of Mausritter and the other MÖRK BORG. The former ending because of player schedules, the latter because I was done with the game after five sessions. Yet the desire to run a longer campaign still burns inside so I took a look at my shelves and tried to pick something that could make a fun open table campaign.

My choices came down to a potentially short megadungeon campaign running The Sun King's Palace, Mothership, or Mythic Bastionland. As you can guess by the title of this blog I chose the last one.

My reasoning against running the Sun King's Palace being:

1. I could not decide what system I would want to run the dungeon with. I am leaning toward's Jason Tocci's Grave to embrace the Soulslike lore that I am getting from the text.
2. To fix some glaring holes such as only two of the five geese required for an important fetch quest are detailed in the text.
3. To add more interactions and desires between the factions. Right now most of the NPCs seem to very static.
4. Add more pathways hidden and not between the major sections of the dungeon. The dungeon is quite flavorful and looks like a blast to run, but needs some work before I would be willing to bring it to the table.

Mothership is at this point a good friend whose layers I am still learning even after years of companionship. However my experience has been completely with one shots and I could not decide if I wanted to run a campaign of Gradient Descent or figure out a way to stich together a campaign from the multitude of modules that I own. Weeks later I stumbled upon this blog which would help me see how I could run the latter.

As for Mythic Bastionland, I've long been a fan of Arthurian legend, the Odd-like games, and the mythic qualities of video games like Elden Ring. Months ago, I had enjoyed my one foray as a player in an open table campaign. I wish I could have played more, but the three hour round trip drive was too much each week. Decision made, I dove into the game to get the campaign ready.

First, I voraciously reread the book, then I went about creating the realm. To save some effort I eagerly pilfered the predrawn realm from the Realm Sheets. I did make some alterations on the gm version of the sheet move landmarks and barriers around as well as reorient the sheet for portrait printing. I followed the procedure in the book along with the wonderful blog post by Among Cats and Books. I can't recommend the post enough as I am the type that needs to see how someone has written things down to better orient my own writings.

Myths

One thing I would strongly suggest is to curate your myths. While you can randomly roll them, I suggest having at least one of the following:

• A myth of a monster/beast to fight: The Wyvern, The Boar, The Eye, The Beast, etc.
• A myth of an item to quest for: The Crown, The Blade, The Cudgel, etc.
• A myth that changes the environment: The Tree, The Mist, The Sun, The Desert, etc.
• A myth that endangers a Seer or a ruler: The Eagle, The Mist, The Lion, etc.

I think I went through 3 or 4 iterations before I finally settled on my initial set of six myths for the realm: The Boar, The Mist, The Cudgel, The Inferno, The Wight, and the Snail.As you can see the Mist will be doing double duty as I had to have a dragon, and the thought of the Wight challening the Knights to duels was too juicy to pass up.

Additional Prep

In addition to the prep outlined in the book and in the Among Cats and Books's post, I also gave each holding a thread in line with Chris McDowall's blog post. I also made generous use of the Referee Companion to generate:

• descriptions of holdings and people
• warbands for each holding
• random npcs for some of the landmarks

I also snagged the Mythic Bastionland Calendar which builds upon Chris McDowall's post. I added the definitions of the days of the week to my copy of the sheet.

I also recommend reading this amazing reddit post on Why to Advance Time in Mythic Bastionland, and How to do it!. I was initially worried about advancing time in the game as it felt like potentially robbing the players of agency over their knight's story. When talking with the guy who ran the Mythic Bastionland open table I played in, he said he wanted to advance the seasons and ages, but he left it up to his players who never decided to advance time as they always wanted to deal with the current issue. So after that conversation and reading the post above I resolutely decided I was going to advance time during the game!