Review: Mythic Bastionland
O'er the mountain or through it, we will earn glory and quest toward the city...
Welcome to the Glyph and Grok - A weekly blog-letter exploring design, execution, and culture relating to anything played on a tabletop. See the other Reviews from the Glyph and Grok here.
Introduction
Chris McDowall created one of the most lauded OSR books in existence with "Into the Odd". I have the PDF of that, but it has long been on my list to own as a physical book, someday I’ll get around to picking that one up. That book was created before my wading into the OSR all the way in till the waters were above my head - but anywhere you look in the space, you will find inspiration and discussion stemming from from Chris' work. I was very excited to finally get in on the ground floor of one of his projects by backing Mythic Bastionland on Kickstarter last year. There's a timelessness and a style to his "Bastion-" world lore that I have always found interesting and I am certainly a fan of the products Chris puts out, but to date I havn’t felt specifically pulled in by Into The Odd or Electric Bastionland's more modern settings. Enter Mythic Bastionland - inspired by Arthurian Legend and British Folklore and is awash with bands of Knights on epic quests - Mythological fantasy stuff I love with the McDowall "Odd" touch - yeah I'm in.
Aesthetic
This book is gorgeous. Let's just start there. The aesthetic feels pitch perfect. a limited color palette that highlights the dynamic and cinematic works of Alec Sorenson immediately transmit the feeling of an epic story. Like most great TTRPG books, picking it up and flipping through it feels like finding a forgotten tome of arcane magic, but this book takes it to another level. Every two-page spread of the Knights, Seers, and Myths is a story begging to be told - wrapped in elegant wrapping paper.
The images leave me with a feeling of dark fantasy fever dream that has been steeped in the most evocative media from books, video games, movies, and anime that has left me somber and thoughtful. Flashes come to mind of Kingdom Death, Full Metal Alchemist, The Green Knight, Dark Souls, Shadow of the Colossus, and the Once and Future King.
Layout
It is immediately apparent the time and care that has been put into the layout of this book. Coming in at 209 pages and only 30 pages of that are what I'd call the "rules of the game" - but none of this book is fluff. This is a complete TTRPG game in a single artifact of a book. Everything you'd need to run as a "referee" or play as a PC is in this book and it's front loaded with a complete "rules-light" system that is reminiscent of Into the Odd with some interesting bolt-ons that give the play flavor that matches the theme of knightly questing.
(More on that in the mechanics section below).
As expected, the digestibility of this book is very high. Into the Odd had a little more artistic sprawl that seemed to sacrifice ease of consumption for expressions; Mythic Bastionland strikes a balance that feels streamlined while still pushing plenty of artistic style. Every thing is broken down for simple transmission to the reader:
The headers are flowery and majestic while being readable
Each concept under a header has a page devoted to it and sub-concepts within are broken down further into sections with numbered bullets, bolding, and spacing that is easy on the eyes.
Game concept words are doing double duty, by design, so that when you see words first explained as rule, they are bolded, but they are also defined with meaning so that when you see that same word anywhere else in the book, it sticks in your brain as a game term - Specifically anything related to the virtues (attributes), actions, and conditions stick in memory.
The flow of the book follows what you'd expect for any reader trying to grok a new game for the first time. Starting with the first choices a referee and their players should discuss, scoping the length of the game, defining the broad strokes of those different lengths, and then going into what it means to be a Knight in this world. I noticed my thoughts following the direction the book topics were taking me (as a forever GM) and when I thought to myself “where is this piece of the game puzzle” the rules were on the next page. This went from basic rules, to attribute test and damage, combat, warband warfare, inventory items, refereeing, keeping game time, travel and exploration. It was even a great surprise to run into the realm generation system, an entire hex-map region area generator is in this book across a single two-page spread that could be used in any game that wanted to have knightly exploration of an area like what this game suggests.
After a slew of spark tables that have a very simple yet very effective design to them that breaks up the page and groups the smaller portions of the tables, the book goes into the real achievement of the Layout - The 72 knights, seers, and myths going from page 26 to 171.
Each spread has an evocative piece depicting each in turn, a knight, a seer, and an omen with corresponding text that in combination with the streamlined system design packs a lot of dense information in easily digestible payloads to empower the players.
The Knight: Proprerty, a unique ability, a Passion (way to restore Spirit), a 2D6 flavor table
The Seer: Stat line for use in play and three bullet points to seed the referees usage in game
The Omen: A series of short paragraph omen events, associated NPCs with stat lines, and pertinent randomization tables if applicable.
One major extra that anyone will notice at the bottom of each of these two-page spreads, is that you can use the book as a random table if you flip to any of these pages at random you can get a result for the following usable tidbits: Person, Name, Characteristic, Object, Beast, State, Theme, Dwelling, Sanctum, Monu ment, Hazard, Curse, or Ruin. Its easy to miss there, as it doesn’t draw the eye, but it’s definitely an awesome feature to give the players ANOTHER way to interact with the book and generate something that will fit the setting in any case.
Mechanics
At the heart of it, this is a form of older D&D but anchored so well in a setting that it evokes a specific play style. I personally have never been a big fan of D20 “roll-under”, I just enjoy rolling a natural 20 and having it be awesome, but I can see the benefits in reduction of number crunching in just having a stat, and rolling under that stat to succeed. If you lose the attribute, then the checks become harder. If one goes to zero, something bad happens. I noticed that I’m less inclined to think it’s horrific to lose these values i’m checking against compared to how it would feel to say - loose 6 strength playing D&D - as in having an attribute drained, but it’s effectively similar. The attributes of this game are called virtues: Vigour / Clarity / Spirit. And they act as a little more combined and abstracted version of the classic stats, and their drainage is assumed to be commonplace but renewable with rest or by performing specific tasks (each knight has a different passion they must fulfill to restore their Spirit) I really love this idea as it just pushes the players to roleplay by default. This game really takes some ideas from all over the scope and creates something interesting with them. Guard is like HP and Armor reduces incoming damage rather than making you harder to hit and it can be piecemealed.
To flavor this further, Knights can perform Feats, a set of moves available to knights but not lesser persons - giving them an elevated heroic privilege, and Gambits, a set of moves that dice can be spent on if they’re value is high enough to make combo moves possible and more interesting at the table. Finding multiple uses for dice and equipping the players with more interesting choices in combat is definitely a plus. This feature feels like a crazy D&D home brew you’d see but it really works well.
There’s just top-notch referee advice for running this game, including a massive fleshed out gameplay example in the back of the book that has a side by side of design thoughts directly effected by what’s happening in the example play. It’s thorough and quite useful I thought for wrapping ones head around any specific part of the play that hasn’t clicked yet.
Getting Your Own Copy
Finally
The 2025 Ennie award ceremony occurred during Gencon this month, and Mythic Bastionland took Golds in "Best Art, Interior" and "Best Layout & Design" and a Silver for "Product of the Year"
I really love this book and am very happy I backed it. I will be studying this one for quite a long time to come I feel.
Thank you, dear reader!
Please like, share, and comment your thoughts.
Till next time!
Great review! Agreed on all points. I am trying to make it work for me solo. My first excursions "revealing" Myth aspects etc seem to be missing an aspect of mystery or wonder. Just need to alter how I approach it a bit.
The whole book is too gorgeous and incredible for me not to want to dive in.