The greatest brainstorming document of all time.

[AmICoolYet?]

People are saying that Mythic Bastionland is the greatest brainstorming doc of all time. Game wise its so loose to not have any super clear or coherent systems. But all of the entries are so evocative, and exiting to read, that I want to run them and put them in my games, even if I am not playing Bastionalnd. When I open the book, I'm not actually looking to play game, I am looking for all the cool monsters that Mr. McDowell came up with so I can steal them for games I run other systems.

[JimMonsoon]

I’m prepping Mythic Bastionland right now and can say it is a lot of work, and requires some extra-curricular work pulling in resources online - both from Chris himself and others. But once I got the tools in place it becomes a bit of a magic trick in how a beautiful and weird and poetic realm emerges from these concrete steps and spark tables.
This is exactly what I want for generating a dungeon as well… maybe an expanded version of the sites tool he includes in the book.
Having fun in any case.

[sam_the_bold]

I think there is a real divide in RPG books, especially sort of oldschool-adjacent RPG books, between those that are "books to help you prep" and "books that do your prep for you." Mythic Bastionland is clearly in the former camp, as are basically all catalogue-style books: bestiaries of monsters, treasuries of items, grimoires of spells, and all the rest. They're books that you use in the days and weeks before the session to stock your maps and so on. 

When I was just starting out in RPGs many years ago, these kinds of books were often my absolute favorites—Veins of the Earth held its place as an all-timer in my mind for many a year—but as I've gotten older, I find myself valuing them less and less. I've said it before, but any prep the GM ~gets to~ do is prep the GM must do. And increasingly I find that if I'm going to prep, I want to prep my own work, not somebody else's. If I'm going to run something out of a book, I want that book to do my work for me. Cracking open a new RPG book that seems to expect me to do hours and hours of prep just to get the game to the table (like Mythic Bastionland, or Veins, or any of the others) feels like I'm buying myself homework.

[misha]

Game wise its so loose to not have any super clear or coherent systems.

I know this is a place I disagreed with my cohosts, but I actually don't think it's lacking in these ways. The game has a core loop of play that's extremely self-complete (to the point that I've seen some storygame types describe it as basically a board game), but that feel to me like a great starting point to build rulings on top of.

It doesn't have a lot of simulation rules baked in, but I generally don't like crunchy simulation rules; common sense, table discussion, GM rulings, and simple die rolls can handle more diverse situations with more nuance and less slowdown than any crunchy sim RPG ruleset. The page 16 Action Procedure honestly is all I need for that side of things.

Probably the place this gets most fraught is in the places where some small sim rules exist, like the Crisis Roll (pg 20). I can see why they bugged Sam in the episode, but I think even those work okay if you just lean them significantly into the existing fiction; rolling a crisis is almost like a test on how play has progressed so far. If you roll a Doubt crisis and you were already in tension with your council, they betray you. If you were actively in their good graces, there's mild grumbling and a cooling off. If your relationship had simply never come up with them before, you introduce a thread of danger that needs to be resolved but is more mild than active betrayal. I dislike these types of mechanics when they ignore the fiction, but they're honestly so vague that you're going to be pulling from the fiction to interpret them anyway.

[JimMonsoon]

I find myself pulled in two directions with Chris McDowall’s work:
1. I am massively impressed with the clarity of thought and commitment to his unique point of view on how games should work, part of which is “my job is to give you the setting and rules framework and tools to create a fully fleshed out game world”
2. Frustration at the lack of finished content. Iron coral is beloved, and he’s got a few other ItO and EB adventures tucked away in ancient blogposts, but it’s like let me pay you $$ guy.

[sam_the_bold]

Yes, I feel quite similarly. McDowall remains an extremely talented rules-writer—I think I mentioned it on the 'cast, but his little wargame, "Grimlite" (published by Osprey as The Doomed) is one of my favorite indie miniatures-agnostics. The combat rules in Mythic Bastionland rock, too, definitely an improvement over most of the Oddlikes out there. But the lack of ready-made playable content is tough.

From the conversations I've had with him (and I think he's probably even said this publicly, somewhere or other?), McDowall in general does not run published adventures written by others. My sense is that the overwhelming majority of the stuff he runs at his own table are things that he came up with himself. Which... makes sense? I guess? If you never run adventures, I can see how you'd reach the conclusion that despite making rulebooks with quite intricate and specific settings and events, adventures are not the ideal medium to support play. My hunch is that this is a fairly prevalent mode of thinking across lots of other scenes, and circles, too—"I never use adventures, so why would anyone else?"

[JimMonsoon]

I think that’s right, there’s a perspective that making your own adventures / dungeons is the “right” way to play, and I do think he’s done a great job making the tools to get that done as smoothly as any out there. But writing dungeons is a skill that I haven’t honed, and frankly letting experts put their time and effort into it makes more sense than all of us fumbling around semi-successfully.
Just the adventures Chris has sitting in a folder somewhere reminds me of George RR Martin saying to burn his unfinished books if he dies…
Not only adventures though - Chris has written enough supplementary material on his blog for all of his games to put out decent supplements for folks who want to give Chris money, but he’s got some anti-sellout Gen X thing going on

[Idraluna]

I think this got brought up in the episode, but there's a level of specificity to some of these "toolkit" games that feels like it undermines itself -- how much of my own creativity am I really going to inject into a Mythic Bastionland sandbox?

I tend to prefer running my own settings for the simple reason that I like writing my own settings, but games like MB or Vaults of Vaarn occupy this weird middle ground where I don't think I'd feel much ownership over the end result -- I'd rather save my effort to build an original setting from a more open-ended set of building blocks or play a pre-written adventure.

[sam_the_bold]

Yes! The weird level of specificity feels very accurate.

Increasingly, I come to the conclusion that I think my preferred use-case for the kind of half-specific-toolbox book—not just Bastionland but also, say, Veins or Vaarn or Songbirds—is to pair it with another similar-ish adventure. Will Jobst, for example, has tweeted about running Mythic Bastionland with Valley of Flowers, an Arthurian-ish adventure, and that feels like a very plausible pairing. Use Valley as the main bulk of the adventure, but then salt in the myths and random table content and custom content from Bastionland in as needed, and use its knights and things for the player-facing rules. It'd be more work, but I could sooort of imagine doing the same thing with Vaarn and UVG, as another example.

[KurlyJ]

I think Electric Bastionland's tools for making a borough were pretty unhelpful, and to my mind, MB does a much better job of giving you the material to riff off of, while mostly fitting into usable tropes (which the material in EB did not).