by Ramanan Sivaranjan on January 14, 2026
Tagged:
intotheodd
mythicbastionland
chrismcdowal
I spent a little bit of time over the last two days getting ready to play Mythic Bastionland. I made a map over the holidays, but didn’t finish filling it with stuff at the time. I was writing down NPC names, rolling on spark tables, and getting enough notes down so that there was some solidity to the world the players were going to explore. Mythic Bastionland encourages some amount of improvisation with its structure, but if you lean too deeply into that games can start to feel meaningless. (Chris has a small blurb about this risk in the book as well.) There was more I wanted to prep before this game, but my personal brand is not doing that extra work. Honestly it all worked out.
I asked some friends I hadn’t played games with in a while if anyone was free to play, people from back when G+ was a thing:
- Alex is playing Sir Creed, The Masked Knight
- Ben is playing The Pearl Knight
- Ian is playing Renard of Red Velvet, The Hooded Knight
- Kyana is playing Sir Turquoise, The Turtle Knight
- Zzarchov is playing The Fanged Knight
A few of us had played the game when it was being play tested, but no one had played recently, so it was all new to all of us.
The engine of the game is exploration. Mythic Bastionland is a game about exploring the wilderness, travelling from hex to hex in search of adventure. A day is divided into three phases: morning, afternoon, night. You roll for a wilderness complication at the end of each phase of the day. On a 1 you encounter an omen for a random myth in the realm. On a 2-3 you encounter the omen of the nearest myth. On a 4-6 you’ll stumble upon the landmark inside the hex, if one exists. As you move through the world you should expect the myths causing trouble in the land to bubble up. The game should create situations for the players to resolve.
In theory, half the time the players should be bumping into something weird like they are exploring the Southern Reach. This session the players rolled too well: they encountered an omen for a myth with their first wilderness exploration roll, and then never rolled a 1-3 for the rest of the session. Sometimes that’s how it goes. The result was a quieter session, but I used that as a chance to better introduce the world they were exploring.
It can be tempting to try and inject some drama into a game when the dice and your notes say otherwise, but I generally like to play things straight. You need quiet sessions or moments so that there is real contrast when the drama does arrive. I am not a fan of trying to manicure a perfect story up front. It’s almost always more satisfying when these things happen organically.
We played for 2 hours, ending our session in one of the holdings. I actually had good notes for the holdings, having rolled up many NPCs and other drama about the places. (This was easy thanks to all the spark tables and online generators.) I forgot to roll for the local mood when the party arrived at the town. A lesson for next time. That might have been the only rule I forgot today.
[Update] When I shared my experience with running the game online, I mentioned that I had the players rolling the wilderness event rolls. This is normally how I play. I like to have the players roll the hazard dice. In this game that’s likely not the right approach. Knowing that you have encountered an omen seems fine to me, I normally run games where I try and be clear and telegraph what’s happening. But knowing it’s a random omen versus the nearest one maybe tells the players a little too much about what’s going on. That knowledge may make the myths and omens feels a bit less mysterious.
The plan is to play for the next few weeks. An enjoyable start to a new campaign.
by Ramanan Sivaranjan on January 02, 2026
Tagged:
intotheodd
mythicbastionland
chrismcdowal
Long time readers may recall I had started an Arthurian Dark Souls sort of setting I never finished called Misericorde. A year or so later Chris started sharing his work for Mythic Bastionland, and it was more or less exactly what I wanted to do, but better in basically every way. (I mean, for starters, he finished it all.) So anyway, I want to play Mythic Bastionland. The first step is making a realm.
Chris outlines how to create a realm on a single page in the book. Elm Cat has an incredibly thorough post about getting started with Mythic Bastionland that also discusses making a realm. They expand upon Chris’s advice with their own, based on their experience having run the game for a while. Chris’s video of preparing a realm for play is also great. He walks you through his process. You can watch how he uses the spark tables to flesh out a setting. Chris preps his realm in an about an hour. It took me longer—but not that much longer! These two resources are well worth reviewing.
I started by making a map in Hex Kit, a fun activity in and of itself. I decided to start a fresh map rather than continue off the one I had made a few years ago. In my head this campaign could be a prequel to the game I had thought of running, where the king is dead and knights wander the wilderness as transformed monstrosities. I can come back to that idea later, perhaps informed by how this Mythic Bastionland campaign unfolds.
With the map done, I got to populating the realm with some holdings and landmarks. I followed Chris’s advice and examples. The system works! I enjoy the act of building something out of random seeds, trying to figure out how everything could fit together. My first ruler was interested in gambling. So was my second. And so was my third. I thought of re-rolling, but the fact that three of the four leaders in the land are gamblers feels like the seed of a story. These sorts of connections bubble up as you work through the tables. I think our brains are just wired find a way to make everything make sense.
I need to actually play Mythic Bastionland, so will try and avoid being overly effusive, but even in this lonely fun of prepping the game it feels like Chris has made something really spectacular. I don’t consider myself particularly creative, but the book will make sure you can build something weird and interesting. Making a realm and figuring out what’s going on before the players show up was fun. Will it all work in play? I gotta assume so, since everyone else can’t shut up about how great the game is. Stay tuned!
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26
November
2025
While we are on the topic of Chris, I really enjoyed his recent career retrospective. I shared it on BlueSky, but need to get better at just posting stuff here. It’s easy to look at Chris’s recent success with Mythic Bastionland and ignore the slow burn that brought him to this point. I have mentioned many times now that when Into the Odd came out I really wasn’t paying it much attention. For whatever reason Electric Bastionland captured my attention. (Likely Alec’s part play’s a big role there.) As time has moved on from the early 2010s, Into the Odd feels like it has become one of the most influential games to come out of the scene. It’s funny you can be right next to something important and just not pay it any attention, because you already have OD&D at home.
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06
December
2023
The Mythic Bastionland Kickstarter is wrapping up today. For those unfamiliar this is the Arthurian take on Chris’s games Into the Odd and Electric Bastionland. I’ve been excited about this game since he first started talking about it, as it ties into my interests in this genre. (You may recall my aborted attempt to create a vaguely Arthurian / Dark Souls setting many months ago now: The Misericorde.) Chris is working with Alec Sorensen, and the art they have shared so far looks really incredible. My friend Alex was running the playtest version of this game when it was first announced, and we had a fun time questing around the hexcrawl he created. The game works well, and I assume knowing Chris it’s only been tightened up and improved upon since first announced. He’s one of my favourite game designers. This will be great.
