Latest / My First Dungeon / Mythic Bastionland | Interview (ft. Chris McDowall)

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Mythic Bastionland | Interview (ft. Chris McDowall) · My First Dungeon

0:09
[SPEAKER_02]: Hello and welcome to another season of My First Dungeon.
0:13
[SPEAKER_02]: The tabletop role-playing podcast that helps game masters learn new games and make each one better than the last.
0:20
[SPEAKER_02]: And this season, we are off to seek the myths, honor, the sears, and protect the realm.
0:29
[SPEAKER_02]: In mythic, bastion land.
0:40
[SPEAKER_02]: My name is Brian Flarety and I will be your host for today because I am not gonna be the GM this season Indeed, I'm gonna be a player in this game, which I am super pumped to be So allow me to introduce your game master rather your referee for this season none other than the one the only Elia Davis welcome to hell hello hello hello I am re-taking control of the podcast and you can't stop me.
1:04
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh no
1:05
[SPEAKER_02]: I, I'm just like control.
1:06
[SPEAKER_02]: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no
1:30
[SPEAKER_01]: six episodes and that is a tragic and a tragedy that should be corrected in general, but I'm glad we can correct it a bit here.
1:36
[SPEAKER_02]: I am so pumped to dive into a a chunky like 10 plus episodes season, but as always we want to get you set up for success because you have never run mythic bash in the end before.
1:49
[SPEAKER_02]: No.
1:50
[SPEAKER_02]: And the best way to set you up for success is by giving you access to the very best resource possible, and there is no better resource to learning the game of mythic bash and land than the creator of mythic bash and land.
2:02
[SPEAKER_02]: Chris, McDowell, welcome to show.
2:04
[SPEAKER_02]: Hi, thank you for having me.
2:05
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you so much for being here.
2:06
[SPEAKER_02]: We are huge fans of mythic bachelors and also all the many other games that you make.
2:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I'm feeding off the enthusiasm that you guys were staring at the game.
2:18
[SPEAKER_00]: It's cool to hear that you're so, so much looking forward to running it.
2:21
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, yeah, cannot wait.
2:23
[SPEAKER_01]: It's just oozing with all the good stuff I like.
2:28
[SPEAKER_02]: As I'm sure a lot of people have, uh, I got to throw a little bit of extra love to Queens for first, like, getting me really pumped about this game and the second I finished that video is like, great.
2:37
[SPEAKER_02]: Bye.
2:38
[SPEAKER_00]: I was there, was there a Queens Quest video?
2:40
[SPEAKER_00]: No one's mentioned it.
2:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
2:41
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, it didn't get a lot of play.
2:43
[SPEAKER_02]: Just a little YouTube video.
2:45
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
2:45
[SPEAKER_02]: It's kind of like, shunted to a small corner of YouTube.
2:48
[SPEAKER_02]: But, uh, yeah.
2:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
2:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I hope his video takes off and gets him a bit of attention.
2:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
2:53
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I don't think it's gonna happen, but I think we'll find a nice niche audience, you know what I mean?
2:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's a really small experience.
3:00
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, he should just cover D&D instead, that would probably help him out.
3:03
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think we should.
3:05
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, we'll tell him that.
3:06
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, as as a niche tabletop role playing game podcast that only does indie games every little while I get a silent song being like when this be easier if we just did D&D, but it wouldn't be nearly as fun because we need to play.
3:20
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, no, find it.
3:25
[SPEAKER_02]: So Chris, as we kind of get started, for anyone who isn't already aware of mythic bashing land, can you in a sentence or to tell us the types of stories that mythic bashing land is trying to tell?
3:35
[SPEAKER_00]: So in mythic bashing land you are a company of knights and you are going out to do three things and you've already mentioned the oath in your kind of intro.
3:44
[SPEAKER_00]: You are going out to seek the myths
3:50
[SPEAKER_00]: In general, you are going out and discovering weird things, having weird encounters and sort of as you uncover these myths, your nightwalk, gain glory and reputation, and you have the potential to play through their entire lives.
4:06
[SPEAKER_00]: see what kind of exploit your night tool get up to and your night is also weird as well.
4:11
[SPEAKER_00]: But that's a very messy pitch, but it's kind of a messy game at times, you know.
4:15
[SPEAKER_02]: The nights are, we're going to get into the whole thing, but like the nights are so, I got, I got to do this in order, I got to structure this, I got to structure this, I got to structure this.
4:25
[SPEAKER_02]: In a moment, I want to dive in with me in LA and about what we are nervous about running this game since our first time playing and running this particular system, but Chris just to kind of like also set this game in the landscape of TTRPGs, how would you define this game in terms of like, is this a OSR game, NSR game's story system, where does this sit on the spectrum of tabletop?
4:49
[SPEAKER_00]: So it a really unfortunate answer is it does kind of struddle the two a little bit.
4:54
[SPEAKER_00]: My background is very much in the OSR sort of design space, I guess.
4:59
[SPEAKER_00]: And the first game I did in this kind of series was called Into the Odd, which is very much an OSR game about Dungeon Crawling and...
5:07
[SPEAKER_00]: It taps into a lot of those OSR things about, you know, ruling over rules and I'm not going to rehash the whole OSR definition debate.
5:15
[SPEAKER_00]: But into the art sort of goes quite hard on that and electric bastion land as well.
5:19
[SPEAKER_00]: But this one, it's, while it is ostensibly a game about hex crawling, you know, which is a very OSR thing.
5:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Just sort of the mythic nature of the world means you have a little bit more freedom to
5:31
[SPEAKER_00]: use some of those maybe story game ideas and sort of flex the reality a little bit because it kind of is infitting with the mythic nature of this world.
5:44
[SPEAKER_00]: So as I say, it's definitely coming out of the OSR.
5:47
[SPEAKER_00]: in terms of its origin, but I can see why some people who traditionally like sort of more story game styles are also kind of latching on to it.
5:55
[SPEAKER_02]: And Elliot, as we're prepping for this season, we knew we were going to do Mythic Bachelors.
5:58
[SPEAKER_02]: What was it that drew you to this game like made you excited to GM in the system?
6:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, it's that kind of that exact idea of the mythic tone of it.
6:09
[SPEAKER_01]: Like I know it's right in the name, so that feels kind of obvious.
6:11
[SPEAKER_01]: But I remember like back when I first got into D&D,
6:16
[SPEAKER_01]: I like really wanted to run and I ran a short campaign in whatever the Greek kind of mythology inspired setting they had But just the idea of like where it was like hey, here's D&D, but you can make it epic and mythic and then I played that and I'm like Well, it's still it's still felt largely the same so I'm excited
6:33
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm excited for a system where like it's like it's really going to sell that mythic tone of like of running and then I mean frankly You just flip through this book and there's so many cool fucking nights and I I love you said their weird nights Chris I love weird in front of anything you take weird and put it in front of anything and I will probably be a big fan of it So getting to kind of play around with all of these different weird nights and and and everything like that I'm just very very stoked on
7:01
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm really excited, especially coming off of like the last time you jammed on my first dungeon was Wild Sea.
7:06
[SPEAKER_02]: And I would say that was probably our most like epic like capital E epic series just in terms of like scale.
7:14
[SPEAKER_02]: But Wild Sea isn't it is that but it doesn't like necessarily like isn't necessarily forcing you to be epic.
7:20
[SPEAKER_02]: It could be much smaller.
7:21
[SPEAKER_02]: This game is wanting to be mythic and epic on a larger scale.
7:25
[SPEAKER_02]: And I'm really excited to see your ability to, of what you did in Wild City.
7:30
[SPEAKER_02]: So they just like no longer have any bounds to it.
7:33
[SPEAKER_00]: You got them like, yeah, make it big, make it huge, make it myth, make it myth, make it myth, make it myth.
7:37
[SPEAKER_02]: So anyway, as we are going into this series and getting ready to session zero for Mythic Bacheland and going into session one, what are the things that you are most nervous about, or what are you approaching the system with the most trepidation?
7:51
[SPEAKER_02]: Because it is a very different system from stuff that we've run in the past.
7:55
[SPEAKER_01]: There's kind of two main things that I am nervous about.
7:59
[SPEAKER_01]: One of them strangely is also the thing I'm most excited about, which is like selling the tone.
8:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Like I want to make sure I honor and sell the tone of like the mythic nature of these stories and like dealing with things like scale and like when do we zoom in on the small moments, when do we zoom out and make the big impact?
8:17
[SPEAKER_01]: And then similarly to scale, this game deals with
8:20
[SPEAKER_01]: time in a way that is really unique versus other games that we've gotten a chance to play of like, you know, the day cycle and the seasons and the ages and kind of not only setting my own expectations for what we can do with a story when we're spanning over time, but also setting player expectations for kind of like,
8:40
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, you might play this character through, you know, many years of their life or this character might die and you might have to play a new character in a couple of sessions just like kind of that that idea of setting player expectations for the tone for the time for the scale.
8:53
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and then I always have a little bit of fear when something is deliberately low prep because I am like a control freak so I always have to like fight my impulse to let a game be low prep when it really tells me to just kind of let it do that.
9:07
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm just kind of thinking, I think of all of the seasons we've done.
9:11
[SPEAKER_02]: It like in world fiction, I think the longest game has been like 10 days.
9:17
[SPEAKER_02]: You know what I mean?
9:18
[SPEAKER_02]: Like the fiction is only lasted for a very short amount of time.
9:20
[SPEAKER_02]: It's always kind of like minute to minute role playing rather than let's zoom in on a scene, let's pull back, let's zoom in on a scene, let's pull back.
9:29
[SPEAKER_02]: Which will be an interesting
9:31
[SPEAKER_02]: change.
9:32
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm going to see how that looks.
9:34
[SPEAKER_01]: And then like, I mean, I'll flip it back to you, Brian, because you're going to be getting back in the player chair again.
9:39
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that the same things that like are a little bit different from other games for me as GM, I think are different views player.
9:45
[SPEAKER_01]: Are you nervous at all like about anything on the player side of being a knight in mythic bastion land?
9:51
[SPEAKER_02]: I am, I think in the same thing, I am so, especially as a GM, I exist so in the, let's play like minute to minute kind of thing.
10:00
[SPEAKER_02]: It's the thing that I want to fix in my own GMing.
10:03
[SPEAKER_02]: And I'm interested to start playing with that as a player and fix it in that realm and then hopefully that can kind of like go into my own GMing.
10:10
[SPEAKER_02]: I've come to really love randomness and role tables and stuff and this, especially the character creation is very random.
10:16
[SPEAKER_02]: There's not a lot of player choice in it other than rolling for your night.
10:20
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm interested in living in that and having to build from pre-made blocks, which I'm really excited about, I think will be really fun.
10:28
[SPEAKER_02]: But then also being able to let go of the minute by minute and kind of look at a higher
10:34
[SPEAKER_02]: timeline and like see this character's whole arc and maybe even we haven't really had them any characters die, especially in the middle of a season where this is much more likely in this particular show, this particular season.
10:47
[SPEAKER_02]: So interested in how that looks of my arc is a player may be very different from the arc of the character because there may be multiple characters or this may be a very long character arc.
10:59
[SPEAKER_01]: So I guess Chris first question turning back to you for off of that is, you know, I feel like a lot of what I'm maybe worried about is about setting these player expectations for folks like Brian and our other cast when it comes to like running a session zero for mythic bastion land.
11:14
[SPEAKER_01]: Do you have a sense of like what all the best things we should accomplish in a session zero sort of pre play session is for for mythic.
11:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so it's just a sort of reflect on my own experience really in the game.
11:27
[SPEAKER_00]: The vast majority of times I've run the game have been either a very short campaign like three sessions or maybe like a one shot.
11:36
[SPEAKER_00]: So I've I've done a session zero before but I've not done very many of them and just just as a contrast, when I do sort of dive straight in,
11:45
[SPEAKER_00]: what I tend to do is just obviously the characters will generate their nights and will go over the oath and then I tend to sort of, I think it's a good starting point for the actual gameplay is to have the nights arriving from outside of the realm that you created.
12:01
[SPEAKER_00]: So I just kind of put them a random point on the border of the realm and say okay you've arrived here and and they
12:10
[SPEAKER_00]: sense of direction that they've been given by one of this seeers, let's say.
12:14
[SPEAKER_00]: So maybe they've been told to go and find the seat of power in this realm.
12:18
[SPEAKER_00]: And I give them a map that doesn't have all of the holdings on it, it just has a very broad map of the territory.
12:25
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm used to sort of throwing plays in
12:29
[SPEAKER_00]: at that end and I think so I'm thinking what would I like to have established in a session zero before that?
12:37
[SPEAKER_00]: I think there is an opportunity to have obviously the players can generate their nights and sort of work out a bit of the relationship with the nights.
12:46
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'd almost be tempted to run it like this is this is you traveling to the realm.
12:50
[SPEAKER_00]: from the distance around that you come from.
12:53
[SPEAKER_00]: And just sort of maybe throw a few questions there away of like to sort of try and establish some relationships between each of the nights to each other.
13:01
[SPEAKER_00]: And I personally would roll on some of the spark tables for this.
13:05
[SPEAKER_00]: So there is like a relationships spark table.
13:09
[SPEAKER_00]: We sort of roll 2D12 and it will give you a relationship too.
13:12
[SPEAKER_00]: It might say the first column might be like estranged, and then the second one might be, I don't know, mental.
13:19
[SPEAKER_00]: So then I would sort of roll that and say, okay, which of you two are an estranged mental to the other person?
13:27
[SPEAKER_00]: And I, I like, as you can gather from the book, I like that kind of improvisational play of like rolling some dice and then trying to make sense of that result, I think if you give me a blank slate and if you just asked me what's my relationship to your character, I would like freeze and like my brain just like goes blank because it's like that is the tyranny to black page thing.
13:46
[SPEAKER_00]: But having like a little spark like that will be quite good in terms of setting the setting the expectations.
13:52
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's the thing that I hear most about players.
13:57
[SPEAKER_00]: who have run into problems with this have been that they've, it sort of goes into the next thing you're talking about about the tone, the scale of the game, and the fact that you can die in the game.
14:06
[SPEAKER_00]: It's very easy for me coming from like an OSR kind of background to be like, oh, of course there's a risk that you might die, but depending on what your background is, you may not sort of be familiar with that in RPGs.
14:22
[SPEAKER_00]: sort of the idea of like the scale of the game that we, you know, it'll depend on what you're preparing but it may be that you're going to cover a night's entire life, it may be that you're going to move between seasons, sort of, it could be every session, it could be every few sessions and just sort of get them in the frame of mind of like we're going to be seeing like maybe we're seeing snapshots of this night's life.
14:43
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not the classic RPG thing of, like you say, you play a campaign for six months, and then you look back and realize it lasted about two weeks in my reinviction.
14:55
[SPEAKER_00]: It's much more like you're sort of by the end of that campaign, you might have little snapshots throughout their life.
15:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Like you zoomed in on the interesting parts, and we expect to go away from these characters and maybe come back when they're older or things have
15:13
[SPEAKER_00]: and sort of working on the relationships the nights will be the things that I'd probably focus on.
15:17
[SPEAKER_02]: And then for our sessions, you know, I think that's going to be interesting or different from indices and then other students is character creation isn't so much a thing in this game.
15:28
[SPEAKER_02]: Chris, can you tell us, friend, what who is an already aware of how mythic baschling character created?
15:32
[SPEAKER_02]: What does that look like in mythic baschling when you're rolling for a night?
15:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so a night will have three virtues, which are similar to a ability scores in other games.
15:41
[SPEAKER_00]: They've got their vigor, clarity, and their spirit.
15:45
[SPEAKER_00]: And these are used to roll for saves, so you might need to make a vigor save, for instance, and it turned to do that.
15:50
[SPEAKER_00]: You'll need to roll equal or below your vigor on a D20.
15:53
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you've got a vigor of 12, you need to get 12 or less to succeed.
15:57
[SPEAKER_00]: And your virtues will also be decreased by things like getting wounded, for instance, will reduce your vigor or getting tired or reduce your vigor.
16:04
[SPEAKER_00]: So obviously that will make it harder to pass those saves when they happen.
16:07
[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, the vigor, clarity and spirit are your three virtues.
16:12
[SPEAKER_00]: So you're all at D6 plus D12 for them.
16:15
[SPEAKER_00]: And then you'll have D6 guard, which is kind of your second little buffer before you start taking real damage.
16:21
[SPEAKER_00]: And that should kind of ability to avoid harm.
16:23
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that's all of your rolling, I don't know, and then there's obviously what more very important roles to do, which is which night I use.
16:30
[SPEAKER_00]: So that'll be a D6 and a D12, which you consult against the list of 72 nights.
16:35
[SPEAKER_02]: Let me just, let me just put a crit underline under about 72 nights in this book.
16:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it was too many.
16:42
[SPEAKER_02]: No, no, no.
16:43
[SPEAKER_02]: That was exactly there.
16:44
[SPEAKER_02]: It's, there's flip.
16:46
[SPEAKER_02]: I can't listen.
16:47
[SPEAKER_02]: Everyone needs to just go pick up this book.
16:48
[SPEAKER_02]: Just to flip through to look at all how cool these fucking nights are.
16:52
[SPEAKER_02]: Uh, I just want to give a, we have the barbed night, the emerald night, the whip night, the moat night, the boulder night, the forge night, the mule night, the mirror night, the violet night, the vulture night, I was able to flip around the pages and those are rad.
17:08
[SPEAKER_00]: I feel like one day I'm going to meet someone who says, oh yeah, the book's pretty good, but I really wish you'd had 144 nights instead of seven seconds.
17:17
[SPEAKER_02]: And when their day comes, you get to punch that person of the face.
17:19
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, or hire them to write 72 nights and see how they...
17:26
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you'll have a unique night for each player and that gives you some property, so you usually like weapons and a seed.
17:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Of course, you're very used to forget that you have a seed, even in a game about knights.
17:39
[SPEAKER_00]: So, I would encourage players to name their seed and really sort of remember that they have that seed.
17:44
[SPEAKER_00]: And you'd also get a special ability, which is like a weird power that your knight has.
17:48
[SPEAKER_00]: And yeah, and the knights are open enough that each one is illustrated, you know, fantastically by Alex Orinson, but I've tried to leave them open enough that like that doesn't need to be what your character looks like.
17:59
[SPEAKER_00]: That's just an example of how they could look.
18:02
[SPEAKER_00]: So I always encourage players to like use that as a starting point, but think about what they're what their knight actually looks like and who they are.
18:08
[SPEAKER_00]: And yeah, and that's character creation done.
18:10
[SPEAKER_00]: And I wanted it to be fast because if you're going to have a game where you can die,
18:14
[SPEAKER_00]: I think you need to be able to have another character ready in five minutes, and that's easily done with this game.
18:21
[SPEAKER_00]: So, yeah, it's not really character generation, I guess rather than character creation.
18:28
[SPEAKER_02]: It is interesting that there are a lot of games out there that kind of tout like very quick character creation.
18:33
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think they all succeeded in it.
18:35
[SPEAKER_02]: This is maybe the first game where
18:38
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm excited for the quick character, like I'm excited to roll for a new night, flip to the page and see what crazy cool thing I've got, whereas a lot of times other like quick character creation just ends up being like, I generated my stats quickly, but I haven't been giving like this much awesome cool stuff in just the role of two days.
18:56
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's often the blow a little bit that if your character does die, you at least feel like you get to pull the lever on the random.
19:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, you get a lot of shit, man.
19:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Just like, even if I really liked that courage, it's like, well, do you get to see when the one thing I'm going to get is the hope for any way?
19:11
[SPEAKER_02]: I do also love, I'm just, I flipped to random page and I found myself on the moat night, which is the pictures like a night like half submerged in water, and their special ability is the waiting stance, gain one armor and plus d6 to all attacks when fighting in at least waste high water.
19:27
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that tells me so much about who their character is going to be.
19:31
[SPEAKER_00]: It, like, just reminds me of what I've had that one a few times, actually.
19:34
[SPEAKER_00]: I've used that one in quite a few games.
19:36
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's always fun when you have an ability like that, where you know that certain players' minds are going to be like, I'm going to be always asking like, where's the nearest river?
19:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, where's the nearest pond?
19:46
[SPEAKER_00]: And then how deep is this, uh, this bit of water?
19:49
[SPEAKER_01]: As a love a a character that gives gifts to the GM, you know, of like when you don't know what else to do, you're like, oh, well, I know my Motonite once some water.
19:57
[SPEAKER_01]: So I'm just going to toss like a river over here and know that they're probably going to go drag everyone over there at some point.
20:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
20:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
20:05
[SPEAKER_01]: The other thing I was curious about is the actual hex map that you're using and like building the realm and like how much you recommend that being like a collaborative activity among the group sort of building out that realm or just like kind of randomize it ahead of time.
20:21
[SPEAKER_00]: So my kind of hot take with this is that I personally would do that separately to the players, and that's how I've always done it because as a player, I like going in and not knowing what's in the, it's so much a game about exploration and travel that I think it's really fun to discover that stuff through play and through the night's decisions.
20:40
[SPEAKER_00]: I think I think you could definitely involve the players in certain things, but I personally wouldn't want them to go into the realm
20:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Or, I mean, I guess you could, you could do that, but then they're still going to be exploring away from the holding.
20:55
[SPEAKER_00]: So the general kind of idea with the setting is it's kind of a medieval world-ish.
21:01
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's vast areas of wilderness with just like a few holdings scattered around.
21:07
[SPEAKER_00]: So there will be your sort of castles and wall towns.
21:09
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's the vast majority of them are always kind of unexplored, wilderness really.
21:13
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think you could have the players be involved with a compromise about you maybe they're involved with one of the holdings, so maybe they help to sort of generate the the ruler of the realm maybe and like the court in the seat of power and sort of those characters and some of the events that have affected the seat of power.
21:30
[SPEAKER_00]: But I always like to keep the players, I was like to keep the realm kind of fresh for them to go in and explore a person.
21:38
[SPEAKER_02]: Actually, I'm realizing we on this show have never done a hex crawl at all.
21:45
[SPEAKER_02]: We've done it a little bit with our last season of Paris and Princess, but it wasn't really a hex crawl.
21:49
[SPEAKER_02]: Just like a hex map.
21:50
[SPEAKER_02]: Can you talk through like eight just for anyone who doesn't know what is a hex crawl?
21:55
[SPEAKER_02]: And how do you approach it differently?
21:57
[SPEAKER_02]: Because that's not something we've ever really played on the show.
21:59
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm just interested to actually try it for the first time myself.
22:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so I guess a traditional hex crawl would be to use the kind of D&D starting point, I guess.
22:09
[SPEAKER_00]: You would have a map made up of hexagons and the hexagons might represent a very large area, so it depends what version you're using, but typically it would be like between three mile hexes, maybe up to like 12 mile hexes or bigger, so a hex is a very large space on the map.
22:24
[SPEAKER_00]: and typically in a kind of D&D context you'd be traveling around between points on the map, maybe going up to a dungeon to explore it, having wilderness encounters.
22:34
[SPEAKER_00]: I wanted to capture some of that feeling, so the mythic bastion does use like a hex map, and the area that each hex covers is called a hex league, but it's called a hex for shorts.
22:44
[SPEAKER_00]: You can just call it a hex in-game, which is handy.
22:47
[SPEAKER_00]: I was very proud of myself, but
22:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Dokey Jake, in essence, I wanted to use that to capture this idea of the focus isn't necessarily on the minute to minute, you know, you reach a clearing in the woods, do you turn left or right.
23:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Instead, you're talking about, you know, where are you going for the next few hours where you're going to be traveling through and where are you hoping to be by the end of the day.
23:09
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's rather than turns being a matter of seconds of your tracking time and phases of the day.
23:15
[SPEAKER_00]: So in the morning phase, you might travel one hex.
23:19
[SPEAKER_00]: in the afternoon phase you might travel one hex and then when it's night you don't really want to be traveling at all so you'll probably want to be setting up camp.
23:25
[SPEAKER_00]: The fun of it is you get that feeling of going out and like going for a hike and sort of traveling huge distances and maybe it's going to take you days to get to where you need to be and but then you get that feeling of when you you know you can see the settlements on the horizon and you know how far you've come.
23:43
[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, that's the appeal of it to me is the big field of it.
23:47
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like playing a game like Skyrim or something or a lot of the game was inspired by during the lockdowns here where one of the few things we could do was sort of go out for a walk in the woods.
23:57
[SPEAKER_00]: And just that feeling of exploring and not knowing where you're going to go.
24:00
[SPEAKER_00]: And sort of embracing that kind of, that I say wilderness, that the plate the woods that I were hiking in were definitely not wilderness.
24:08
[SPEAKER_00]: But it was still had that kind of feeling.
24:12
[SPEAKER_00]: but the traditional kind of hex crawl also tends to assume quite a lot of focus on resource management and like how many rations are you carrying and what type of horse do you have and you know different travel speeds for roads and stuff and I've tried to streamline a lot of that away because when we think about the kind of stories that mythic bacheland is inspired by we don't really think about like how much food was Lancelot carrying
24:40
[SPEAKER_00]: It's more about, you know, we want to know that they traveled this many days to get to where they were going and we need to know what weird things happened along the way.
24:48
[SPEAKER_00]: And it kind of tries to focus in on that rather than the minutia of turn again to a wilderness survival game, if you like.
24:55
[SPEAKER_02]: There's interesting parallel with our conversation with Ryan Lynch, who's the designer of Parals and Princesses, in that mythic baschling, because it is like mythic in scale, doesn't necessarily want to concern itself with those minute-to-minute tracking rations, whereas in Parals and Princesses,
25:11
[SPEAKER_02]: that could be more interesting because then it could create a heroic moment out of something minor.
25:17
[SPEAKER_02]: So like if you run out of food, it is now a heroic moment for one of these like princesses to be able to discover food or be able to like forage and like hunt or find something.
25:27
[SPEAKER_02]: But it is interesting to see like the scale of Paris and princess is very much a heroic scale.
25:33
[SPEAKER_02]: And so having some of that more minutiae is more in line with the game where it's mythic baschelin being unlike the mythic epic scale.
25:40
[SPEAKER_02]: Now that's the stuff that wants to fall away because it wants to focus on a larger scale.
25:45
[SPEAKER_02]: Just an interesting parallel I was seeing there.
25:47
[SPEAKER_00]: I think you mentioned before about the idea of scale and I think that's one of the thing that it's really important to understand going into the game is that you have this large scale of time and large scale of space because you're you know you're traveling across miles and miles.
26:00
[SPEAKER_00]: and you're going over days and days, and then over generations may be in the seasons.
26:04
[SPEAKER_00]: But when you kind of zoom in, it is when the interesting stuff kind of happens, because the main thing you're going to be encountering is you go through the wilderness are these myths.
26:13
[SPEAKER_00]: So you're going out to seek the myths, which are kind of essentially every myth is like a story that is sort of destined to become real.
26:20
[SPEAKER_00]: So it might be the myth of the goblin, and maybe you've always heard like a story about the goblin, maybe there's like a nursery rhyme about what the goblin does, and it is the lord of lost things, or whatever, and in this world that's sort of destined to become real, and the nights of swan to go out and seek these myths, so you might be going out to try and find the goblin, for instance, and you're going to encounter these omens of the goblin as you go around.
26:45
[SPEAKER_00]: But there's also going to be other myths in the realm.
26:47
[SPEAKER_00]: So you're going to encounter weird things, like maybe you encounter someone who's like, you know, a lost child in the woods.
26:53
[SPEAKER_00]: I actually can't remember which Omen was in, which was in business.
26:56
[SPEAKER_00]: But let's say you've encountered like a lost child in the woods and they're saying that, oh, my brother has been lost in the woods and I came looking for him.
27:04
[SPEAKER_00]: If you know that the goblin is out there somewhere, you might be thinking, oh, is this something to do with the goblin?
27:08
[SPEAKER_00]: But another myth might be, I don't know, the whole and maybe you know that there's this cave open somewhere.
27:14
[SPEAKER_00]: It could be all what maybe he's gone into the cave.
27:17
[SPEAKER_00]: So you still get those moments where you zoom in and you can have those kind of human moments and I think they're really important and sort of focusing in on the characters and what they're, what they are doing in that minute to minute decision.
27:28
[SPEAKER_00]: but it's, yeah, there is a skill to sort of that zooming in and out and sort of understanding how to do that without it feeling almost like you're playing a board game and then you zoom in for an RPG.
27:38
[SPEAKER_00]: You're trying to balance that is really key.
27:42
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, with the the myth specifically, like do you have any specific tips for selling those omens and then maybe sort of the pacing of like when the myth like when they're faced to face
27:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so each of the omens is pretty short, so it's maybe like two or three lines of text.
28:02
[SPEAKER_00]: So you know, I'll dig one out because I did open up the document.
28:06
[SPEAKER_00]: So let's look.
28:07
[SPEAKER_00]: So we have the worm here.
28:10
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's not really spoiler because this is the first myth.
28:13
[SPEAKER_00]: The first moment of the worm.
28:15
[SPEAKER_00]: So in this one, you know what, this is very similar to the example I gave.
28:19
[SPEAKER_00]: So the leech collector weeps in a nearby swamp.
28:22
[SPEAKER_00]: The colossal things snatched her sister away with a bite that bone grinding noise haunts her.
28:28
[SPEAKER_00]: So here you've got an instruction with a character who's saying that their sister was snatched away by some colossal thing in this one.
28:35
[SPEAKER_00]: And obviously that's
28:37
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a number of ways that can go.
28:39
[SPEAKER_00]: It could just be a very short conversation, and the players ended by going like, all right, well, we'll be careful, see ya.
28:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Or it could be that that player, that that character ends up coming with them.
28:48
[SPEAKER_00]: It could be that they decide, right, we're gonna find this missing sister right now, and suddenly they get like hyper-focused on this, which will happen quite often.
28:55
[SPEAKER_00]: And I try to just, I try to present the situation to the players, and then just follow their lead on it.
29:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Because if I go into it thinking, oh, they're really gonna care about this,
29:07
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't want to be the one that makes that decision.
29:09
[SPEAKER_00]: I want them to tell me whether they care.
29:11
[SPEAKER_00]: So I just tried to present it in a matter of that kind of way and then follow their follow their lead on it and try to sort of trust the process.
29:21
[SPEAKER_00]: I guess of like the collaborative experience and let the story unfold actually rather than sort of shifting them and saying, right, here is your quest.
29:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Go and find this missing.
29:30
[SPEAKER_00]: each collector.
29:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Because I really, with this game wanted to capture that sandbox field, if you can, you can pull on certain hooks, or you can go into the directions, and you can just, the players can kind of do where they want.
29:41
[SPEAKER_01]: So it, I guess this naturally transitions into, it feels like, so seek the myths of the O's is like, what are those levers to pull?
29:48
[SPEAKER_01]: How do the other two kind of come in like, like, when I'm like lost in a moment, I'm like, I want, like, they're not making a decision, and I want to
30:00
[SPEAKER_01]: uh, these other two ideas play into that as well.
30:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, the three of them were sort of designed as it took a long time to get they oath right because I wanted them to all be things that would push the plays in a certain direction.
30:12
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's kind of ended up being a bit like a triangle where if you imagine the players are in, let's say they've been wandering around this swamp.
30:19
[SPEAKER_00]: They found this leech collector, but they're not particularly interested in what's going on, and they think right with, we're kind of a bit directionless, what do we do?
30:27
[SPEAKER_00]: The three parts of the oath kind of point them towards three different directions.
30:32
[SPEAKER_00]: So, seek the myths.
30:33
[SPEAKER_00]: The myths are generally found out in the wilderness.
30:35
[SPEAKER_00]: So, if they want to seek the myths,
30:38
[SPEAKER_00]: you basically go towards a bit of the map that you don't know and go into the wilderness.
30:42
[SPEAKER_00]: The second part is honour the seers, so the seers, as far as the night to concern, the seers sort of are the closest things, like an ultimate authority.
30:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Like the seers are the weird beings that knighted you and told you to come together as a company and made you take this oath.
30:58
[SPEAKER_00]: So you have sworn to honor them and they kind of know everything about the past, the present and the future in theory.
31:05
[SPEAKER_00]: But each series is different and has a gender as well.
31:08
[SPEAKER_00]: So they pretty much always live in sanctums, which are usually outside of a holding.
31:14
[SPEAKER_00]: So to honor the seas, if they're ever stuck, I always say, well, you should try and find the seer.
31:19
[SPEAKER_00]: So you should go out and seek one of their sanctums, ask anyone you bump into if there's a C nearby and usually people will at least be able to point you in the direction of where this C might be.
31:29
[SPEAKER_00]: And then the third part of the oath is to protect the realm and this sort of tends to
31:34
[SPEAKER_00]: manifest as knights want to go towards the holdings, which are these settlements.
31:38
[SPEAKER_00]: And sort of see if they need help, see if they can serve the realm in some way.
31:43
[SPEAKER_00]: So you've got this triangle of like, seek the myths, send you to the wilderness.
31:46
[SPEAKER_00]: On at the sea there's send you to a sanctum and protect the realm, send you to a holding.
31:50
[SPEAKER_00]: So you'll often see players kind of jumping back and forth between those three places.
31:55
[SPEAKER_00]: If you ever want to get really blunt with them, a really blunt trick that I have sometimes used is, if they are completely directionless and they don't know where a seer is and they want guidance from a seer, I will sometimes have them have a dream about the seer.
32:11
[SPEAKER_00]: And have the seer give some sort of guidance
32:14
[SPEAKER_00]: through the dream.
32:15
[SPEAKER_00]: It's never as blunt as like, oh, here's where you need to go.
32:17
[SPEAKER_00]: But the sea are giving kind of cryptic guidance through a dream and that fits within the sea as a gender as well, because the sea is where it always be outright helpful.
32:27
[SPEAKER_00]: That can be a nice blunt kick for the players.
32:31
[SPEAKER_00]: If you feel like they're just like, they want a little bit more information about what they, about where they could be going.
32:36
[SPEAKER_01]: Which feels also super of the vibe to have like a
32:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and there's a lot of that that's getting the tone allows a lot of things that would feel like nonsense in other games like if something doesn't make sense.
32:53
[SPEAKER_00]: There's one of the bits of guidance in the book is to just say, oh yeah, we're right like.
32:58
[SPEAKER_00]: And it could be because you messed up a rule or something or it could be that you.
33:02
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, you forgot that they'd already met a character and then they meet that character again in another place.
33:06
[SPEAKER_00]: It even for things like that, that you're a mistake.
33:08
[SPEAKER_00]: You can kind of play into it a little bit.
33:10
[SPEAKER_00]: But the way that the omens kind of emerge in the myths revealed themselves, it is a little bit kind of, it can be inconsistent and a bit confusing because of the way they kind of randomly pop up.
33:20
[SPEAKER_00]: But the yeah, leaning into the mythic field does sort of allow a lot of leeway with that.
33:25
[SPEAKER_02]: we just played a for our Patreon, we just played a game of die and a Kieran Gillacle, GM did for us.
33:33
[SPEAKER_02]: And he had a move that I think I'm gonna add to my GM repertoire.
33:36
[SPEAKER_02]: That I think it's like a master level move, which was there would be times when one of us would say, like, he's describing a ball or something in it.
33:44
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it smells a little weird.
33:46
[SPEAKER_02]: And so it would say like, does it smell like cinnamon and like kind of giving an idea from something?
33:51
[SPEAKER_02]: And he would say, you know what?
33:53
[SPEAKER_02]: Now that you mentioned it,
33:55
[SPEAKER_02]: it does.
33:56
[SPEAKER_01]: I was like what a fucking great move.
33:59
[SPEAKER_02]: What a fucking great move of now you mentioned it it does now that you mentioned that and it's like that's just the GM saying yes and but as if they planned it all along and it was I've never clocked in anything like that was the best move I've ever seen
34:16
[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, weirdly, I've sometimes done the opposite because like I like this idea that the world is kind of consistent, not consistent.
34:25
[SPEAKER_00]: I guess that the world exists and the players are going out to explore it.
34:29
[SPEAKER_00]: And as a player, if I come across something that I've suggested and then it becomes real, it feels more like I'm being the GM rather than the player.
34:38
[SPEAKER_00]: So I have used the opposite trick on my players before, and if they've said something like, if they've made a suggestion,
34:45
[SPEAKER_00]: I kind of try to apply the opposite, because then they think, oh, well, it must be real.
34:49
[SPEAKER_00]: So if they said, I'll just smell like cinnamon, and I was like, no, it's more like, and then I look at my notes, and I say, no, it's more like vanilla.
34:56
[SPEAKER_00]: then it sounds like there's a mixed plan and it sounds like a present in the L'Aromen, and what does that mean?
35:05
[SPEAKER_02]: All right, anyone listening to this?
35:06
[SPEAKER_02]: You have all of the GM notes you'll ever need.
35:09
[SPEAKER_02]: As you say, no, actually, or you say now that you mentioned it.
35:13
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is just going to be a big deal between those two.
35:16
[SPEAKER_00]: You're 50, 50, and it works.
35:18
[SPEAKER_01]: you will look like a genius.
35:20
[SPEAKER_01]: Is it been I love in the odd pocket for like having read a bunch of them that there's there's several times where the the GM the referee character.
35:28
[SPEAKER_01]: You you have them open like flick through the book or look at their notes even if they're not using something directly from their notes or from the book just as like a little bit of the showmanship of like.
35:40
[SPEAKER_01]: No, this is coming from somewhere.
35:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's that thing where because the world can feel kind of mythic and like a story, I try to make it, I like the balance where it feels like it could be from a story, but it feels like a real place as well.
35:53
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think if you go too far either way, you know, I find it doesn't work for me, but getting that balance in the middle is what really appeals to me.
36:02
[SPEAKER_02]: I do want to just take them up to shout out the back of the book has a section called the odd pox for that L.A. just mentioned.
36:08
[SPEAKER_02]: And the rules for the entire rules for this game.
36:11
[SPEAKER_02]: And this is like a pretty thick, you know, hard-to-ground book.
36:14
[SPEAKER_02]: The rules cover about 20 pages.
36:16
[SPEAKER_02]: And the rest of it is 72 nights and 72 dooms.
36:20
[SPEAKER_02]: But then at the back, there's a section called the odd pox for which is like play examples from the game.
36:25
[SPEAKER_02]: And you format it this in a really cool way that I always have a,
36:30
[SPEAKER_02]: I always want to love examples of play in role-playing games, and I very rarely actually do.
36:36
[SPEAKER_02]: This one I really do love, and it's just divided out into very sections, like section of character creation, section of exploration, combat, et cetera.
36:45
[SPEAKER_02]: And there's two columns.
36:46
[SPEAKER_02]: One is a column that has like a transcript of an imaginary play group.
36:51
[SPEAKER_02]: And this other column, the right column is like your designer thoughts on what happened in that imagine scene.
36:58
[SPEAKER_02]: And it even goes into place where like the referee will make a mistake or the players will make a mistake.
37:03
[SPEAKER_02]: And you will comment on like how the mistake happened, how what they could do to fix it and where they went wrong.
37:09
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a really, really valuable section, especially for a rule set that is relatively tense in the way that's written.
37:16
[SPEAKER_02]: I've got to the end of that.
37:16
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't have a question.
37:17
[SPEAKER_02]: I just really like it.
37:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, the whole point of that was to kind of, well, it was a couple of things.
37:23
[SPEAKER_00]: It was sort of demystify it because you often have these examples of play where it's either, sometimes it's just like the perfect example of play.
37:31
[SPEAKER_00]: And I feel like that can sometimes set the GM up to think, oh, I've got to be an absolute machine here.
37:36
[SPEAKER_00]: I've got to be, I've got to internalize every bit of the game, I just know it all.
37:40
[SPEAKER_00]: So I wanted to have it be realistic.
37:43
[SPEAKER_00]: So you've got, like you say, you've got things like, the Athens one example where
37:47
[SPEAKER_00]: like later on in a session, a player realises their character had died and they realise, oh, I could have, I actually didn't, I shouldn't have died.
37:55
[SPEAKER_00]: We got the numbers wrong or something.
37:57
[SPEAKER_00]: And like how to deal with that, because that's the kind of thing that can happen in the game, like you can get a rule wrong and then realise later and it can make this all-quite situation, if like, well, do I, do we undo what happened or do we just honour it and I sort of go into that a little bit there?
38:12
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'd also a character dying is something
38:16
[SPEAKER_00]: and it's something that a lot of games say can happen but and it will just say something like or making a character but you know I know that a lot of people find that a very scary concept to have a character die and I've seen like GMs saying like oh I had a character die I feel really guilty I feel like I messed up because the character died.
38:34
[SPEAKER_00]: So I wanted to talk about situations like that and sort of say like, no, no, this can be a positive part of the game.
38:40
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is going to make a cool moment.
38:43
[SPEAKER_00]: And here's how I would deal with it.
38:45
[SPEAKER_00]: But here's a few other ways of dealing with it.
38:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Rather than trying to create like, here is the perfect canonical example of play.
38:51
[SPEAKER_00]: I wanted it to be like realistic with some thoughts on the side.
38:55
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that one in particular really loved was the example, the, the, the ad parkophone, the character death because it was like the, the player was bombed like in like you let that kind of let that kind of emotion sit there that is how it goes at the table and then.
39:11
[SPEAKER_01]: There was a great line and there in the then designer commentary where it was like you didn't kill the character like the arrows did or something like it's like yeah the system did and like and that's something that you all sat down and make sure that person's comfortable and like get them playing again as soon as possible.
39:27
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I really really enjoyed that as an example.
39:29
[SPEAKER_02]: also, you know, not for nothing.
39:31
[SPEAKER_02]: I've never read a play example and also been kind of sad at a character death in a play example.
39:38
[SPEAKER_02]: By the time we, this is, this is kind of dumb, but by the time we got to the point in that bit of the adpaca, I read a bunch of stuff about this character playing this imaginary game.
39:47
[SPEAKER_02]: And when they died, I was kind of like,
39:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, I was a little bit there.
39:51
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, yeah.
39:52
[SPEAKER_00]: It was just a really messy.
39:54
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that's fine.
39:54
[SPEAKER_00]: It's, I think obviously there's a threshold.
39:57
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't want people to be like distraught and not having a good time.
40:00
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think, you know, if you read a book or watch a film or play a video game there's moments when you're like, ah, this is really hard.
40:08
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's moments when you're like, this is great.
40:09
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think it's good to have those in an RPG and sort of embrace that.
40:14
[SPEAKER_00]: Because I think that what I'm always looking for is by the end of the sort of either the end of the session or the end of the campaign.
40:20
[SPEAKER_00]: As it has been overall positive and as they've been like a kind of an arc of like a story.
40:26
[SPEAKER_00]: I always like the stories that emerge when you look back on the game rather than the story that I already knew was going to happen at the start.
40:35
[SPEAKER_00]: So things like character death are a really good example of that.
40:38
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like no one, no one plans for their character to die, but often at the end of a campaign, that can be like a moment that everyone remembers and was really kind of a turning point to the game.
40:47
[SPEAKER_02]: I also do want to just kind of mention that
40:50
[SPEAKER_02]: TTRPG books or like core rule books have so much to do like that they have to get done.
40:56
[SPEAKER_02]: You've got to convey the rules.
40:58
[SPEAKER_02]: You've got to show, because they have to play and tell people how to build their characters and also convey tone and just give people excited about the game through like the layout and the art.
41:07
[SPEAKER_02]: And what's so great about this game is that
41:10
[SPEAKER_02]: The rules at the beginning are like very tertent, easy to reference, but then if you ever need more, there's that oddpock from the back.
41:16
[SPEAKER_02]: It really dives into specific moments.
41:18
[SPEAKER_02]: So then now this rule section that could have been meteor now is this very like tertent, easy to reference thing during play.
41:26
[SPEAKER_02]: And then even the the nights and the doom, the nights and the dooms, like those pages are so chalkful with like
41:35
[SPEAKER_02]: essentially like random tables at the bottom that you can turn to if you ever need hazards or curses or dwellings or names of people or like years related to this is just so much in the book that acts as a reference and a tool in a way that some of the books don't necessarily hit that they end up being a great reference but not a great mood board they end up being a great mood board but a really hard to reference
41:59
[SPEAKER_02]: This ends up doing it all pretty well throughout.
42:05
[SPEAKER_02]: I really love the way this book came together.
42:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, the idea was I always like books that feel like they're almost like it's one big random generator.
42:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, like a like a like a giant random table.
42:15
[SPEAKER_00]: So the I guess the at the bottom of each page like below each night page and below each myth page.
42:20
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a list of little prompts and that the one that people always say to me that they're really great for for is the names prompt.
42:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so you can just flip to a random page and you look at the bottom and they'll be a name.
42:31
[SPEAKER_00]: because how many times will we come out with a terrible NPC name?
42:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Because we've been put on the spot.
42:36
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm like, what's the name of this person you just met?
42:40
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's like, oh, she's called the name is very rarely good.
42:45
[SPEAKER_02]: I've told this story on a bunch of things, but the first time I ever GMed, I was running it for a bunch of friends.
42:50
[SPEAKER_02]: I literally told this story last night, so let's be here really again.
42:54
[SPEAKER_02]: It's all good.
42:55
[SPEAKER_02]: I was running D&D for the very first time.
42:57
[SPEAKER_02]: I built out the world, you know, had names and places and all this stuff.
43:00
[SPEAKER_02]: And I was describing a Dragonborn dock worker and his like assistant.
43:05
[SPEAKER_02]: And I was like, oh, this Dragonborn, you know, here's red scales and all this, you know, here's the cloak and then whatever, all the detail is named Zindar, the magnificent, to whatever.
43:15
[SPEAKER_02]: And the first thing my players said after I did, you know, two minutes of describing this beautiful Dragonborn character was, hey, so what's the name of his assistant?
43:24
[SPEAKER_02]: uh, uh, Charles and they go, oh, Zindar the Magnificent and Charles, and from then on, that works.
43:34
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, it definitely does, but then from then on, every character we met regardless of station, they were like, what is your first and last name?
43:42
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, they made me feel that's kind of a good transition Chris to the thing I want to ask you, which is like for the players Like we've talked about the levers I can pull, but what are the like fun levers you would like tell Brian as player or like our other cast members that like
43:59
[SPEAKER_01]: with so that the story is like driven by their choice and everything um what are what are some of those things that they can keep in mind to to pull as levers or to like throw me curve balls that let that are fun and like lead to that fun collaborative story.
44:14
[SPEAKER_00]: I think just leaning into that idea of the oath, the character sheets that I always used always have the oath at the bottom in big letters, because I think there's like, I sort of overdo it when we've got new players, I'm always like, there's your oath, that's what you saw to do.
44:29
[SPEAKER_00]: And I make the say it to the start of the session, like everyone together say the oath have to try and they'll do a little say, on other, seek the myths, on other fears, protect the realm.
44:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Like I said before, any time you're like not sure what you should be doing, looking at those three and thinking, is there a way that I can do this like I have sworn to do?
44:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Is there a way that I can do this in the current, please I'm at, or if not to which one do I feel at my night will be most passionate about doing?
44:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, and that's the other thing I've got to mention about, so you get like a equipment and a special ability as your nights, but you do also get a passion,
45:05
[SPEAKER_00]: which is that the mechanical side of it is that it used when if your spirit gets depleted, if you indulge your passion, so you're, I don't know, let's say your passion is pedantry, and it says you can restore your spirit whenever you correct someone.
45:20
[SPEAKER_00]: So that will be a way to restore your spirit if you get an opportunity to indulge your passion.
45:24
[SPEAKER_00]: And some of them are like more like vices and some of them are more virtuous, but I really enjoy when players take that to heart,
45:34
[SPEAKER_00]: they will sort of look at their passion and use that as a little bit of a prompt for what would their character do.
45:39
[SPEAKER_00]: So don't forget your passion.
45:40
[SPEAKER_00]: That's really a fun little hook for roleplaying your character.
45:45
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think just be willing to embrace that.
45:50
[SPEAKER_00]: that larger scale of time because again I hear a lot of tables who have said let's say the referee has said I've set up the game and we wanted to do so the game has these things called season turns where you can move to the next season between each session and a lot of referees will say oh well I wanted to do it but my players we ended on a cliffhanger so we wanted to come back to exactly where we were at the next session.
46:15
[SPEAKER_00]: and I'm not saying you need to have a season skip every session, but I would encourage the players to embrace that.
46:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Even if it means putting things off a bit of the cliffhanger because we can come back to the night's a season later, and we can see where they are now, because I think it's blowing around during different seasons feels different.
46:34
[SPEAKER_00]: And also, it leans into that vibe of it being a mythic thing where this quest might take you over a year to sort of reach to completion.
46:44
[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, so embrace the season, turns in the age, turns, and remember your own, then remember your passion, I guess, at the three pieces of advice I would give.
46:53
[SPEAKER_01]: And then when it comes to like, because you know, there's this thing we've said throughout the session where it's like, you might see the whole lives of these characters when like there's the season turns, but then thinking about time skips larger than the season turns.
47:05
[SPEAKER_01]: So how do you kind of use that as a tool and when does like finding when it feels right, my story.
47:12
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's the, yes, so there's three seasons, you know, there's spring harvest and winter, the three seasons in this world and then there's three ages that someone goes through.
47:22
[SPEAKER_00]: So you start off young and then you move into maturity, which is, I don't know, probably like 40, let's say, and that's when you hit your prime.
47:33
[SPEAKER_00]: And a lot of games have mechanics where you start to deteriorate when you hit around the age that I am.
47:40
[SPEAKER_00]: So this was my way of saying, like, well, I think I'm actually going to recreate.
47:45
[SPEAKER_00]: So, the ages are left quite vague, so you go from young to mature to old.
47:50
[SPEAKER_00]: And then when you become old, the ability starts go down, and I am feeling that lately.
47:56
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you kind of have a natural arc to your characters where you'll start off maybe with mixed virtue scores, and then they will get better probably when you become mature, and then they will deteriorate when you become old.
48:08
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's part of it, but for the GM, it can feel like a lot of work as well because you've got to think well.
48:14
[SPEAKER_00]: We're coming back in age later, it's been, let's say it's like 20, 30 years in an age.
48:19
[SPEAKER_00]: How do I change the round to show that all this time has passed?
48:22
[SPEAKER_00]: And what do I do when my players ask what what's happened in the meantime?
48:26
[SPEAKER_00]: And I tend to just go around the round.
48:28
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a very simple role in the game.
48:30
[SPEAKER_00]: There's just a D6 role for like ongoing situations.
48:34
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think it's if you roll a one, then it's like a crisis.
48:36
[SPEAKER_00]: If it's two or three, things are getting a bit worse and if it's four plus things are fine.
48:40
[SPEAKER_00]: So I roll for each of the holdings,
48:42
[SPEAKER_00]: and each of the NPCs that I've sort of established ahead of time to see how things go for them.
48:48
[SPEAKER_00]: And it just makes some little changes around there and then when we come back to the realm, it's always fun for the characters to kind of discover what's happened to these places.
48:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Then the two ways of handling that are, I'm still torn on which option I prefer.
49:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Option A is to say, oh, well, during this time, your nights were sent away to another realm.
49:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Or maybe you had to go back to your home room.
49:11
[SPEAKER_00]: You were called back to sort of serve there.
49:15
[SPEAKER_00]: And you can add that there's some decisions in the book for what players can decide what their character has done in that sort of downtime.
49:22
[SPEAKER_00]: But I do also like leaving them in the realm and saying, yeah, you were just doing regular nights work.
49:28
[SPEAKER_00]: it's detailed in the book for each season what and like doing it.
49:31
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like, yeah, you were you were collecting taxes, you took part in some border skirmishes and maybe you, you know, you found a successor and you raised a successor.
49:39
[SPEAKER_00]: So I, I've lost my train of thought slightly.
49:42
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the, I'm moving, you can tell I'm moving into the old age because my dream I thought, this has gone.
49:49
[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, it can feel scary, but I think it has a lot of potential to explore.
49:54
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think if I was running a campaign,
49:56
[SPEAKER_00]: longer than a couple of sessions.
49:58
[SPEAKER_00]: I would definitely make sure I had at least one age skip and I think doing a longer campaign, like say 10, I think it's a real opportunity to sort of to lead into that and say, yeah, we're going to start off young, by the end of the campaign we're going to be old nights.
50:12
[SPEAKER_00]: And you can even, you can even go like another age past old, at which point you might die of old age between sessions, which can be fun to explore.
50:21
[SPEAKER_00]: But I really love the idea of a campaign ending with like you're the old nights now, and you're going out on like one last, one last quest.
50:28
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
50:29
[SPEAKER_01]: That really appeals to me like from like just a storytelling perspective, the idea of getting to see the whole lives of these characters is just so different than anything we've got in a chance to do.
50:38
[SPEAKER_01]: We often get to like epilogue out later parts of the lives of characters from where we are, but getting to kind of see windows into all that is very exciting.
50:47
[SPEAKER_00]: And I guess the other big thing that changes I should mention is, although your virtues will change, Mithi Bastion doesn't have like a traditional leveling system, like it's not like, oh by the time you're at the end of your nightly career, you're now a level 29.
51:01
[SPEAKER_00]: The only thing that really consistently goes up is your glory.
51:06
[SPEAKER_00]: and glory doesn't really mechanically do anything.
51:10
[SPEAKER_00]: It's entirely a sort of social thing.
51:13
[SPEAKER_00]: And glory shows how you are perceived by other people in the realm in terms of your worth in a certain things.
51:21
[SPEAKER_00]: So, for instance, when you've reached, when you've reached three points of glory, you are considered worthy of taking a seating council or court.
51:29
[SPEAKER_00]: When you've reached six glory, you're worthy of ruling a holding now.
51:32
[SPEAKER_00]: And when you reach,
51:34
[SPEAKER_00]: nine glory you could potentially be the ruler of a realm and eventually when you've reached twelve glory you're worthy of the city quest which is kind of the ultimate quest that every night dreams of and I think really leaning into that can help make that make make it feel like there's a progression across the course of the campaign as well and you know you started off as unknowns and they're maybe about a time to campaign finishes
51:57
[SPEAKER_00]: You're all tied up and involved in the realm itself, whether one of you is a ruler or you've been leading, you know, armies into battle and stuff like that, so yeah, the deglories you're the thing to remember.
52:09
[SPEAKER_01]: Is there a world where like you you transfer you get to this final age and I'm just imagining like with the sears and they're different like agendas and stuff that you might get to a point where you have two nights in the party that have entirely diametrically opposed feelings on things by the time you get to the end does this game ever turn into like
52:39
[SPEAKER_00]: I've heard of this happening in some players games.
52:42
[SPEAKER_00]: I've heard of them having essentially having two night, two of the players might be at war, essentially with each other.
52:47
[SPEAKER_00]: I think the cool thing that is a really useful tool to remember.
52:51
[SPEAKER_00]: There are two really useful tools to remember to help sort of keep that under control if you don't want to sort of go full hog into that.
52:59
[SPEAKER_00]: The first one is that you were told to, you know, you swaned to honor the sears.
53:04
[SPEAKER_00]: and the seers have said, you, three or four nights, you're going to be a company of nights, you're going to travel together.
53:11
[SPEAKER_00]: So you could remind the nights that if they, if they were to break the company, that would be dishonoring the seers.
53:16
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's no does no mechanical penalty for breaking your oath, but I found players generally, they really don't want to break the oath.
53:22
[SPEAKER_00]: or they will only do it if they feel like it's really an important moment for them to do so.
53:26
[SPEAKER_00]: And the second one is a really useful trick is if things are ever getting really heated, a dual can be a really fun way to sort of settle an issue.
53:36
[SPEAKER_00]: And if rather than it's turning into a full war, I would sort of say, well, a traditional way to do this might be to have a dual.
53:44
[SPEAKER_00]: And you could set that ahead of time, you could say like maybe by the end of the next season,
53:48
[SPEAKER_00]: you've agreed to have a dual at this place and here are the stipulations and you can build up to that as an event and then the dual will hopefully settle the feud and you can move on from there.
54:01
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think it's good to have that conflict but if you want to keep the players essentially together those are a couple of little tricks.
54:08
[SPEAKER_02]: cool.
54:08
[SPEAKER_02]: We've been talking about a lot of like big picture GMing stuff.
54:12
[SPEAKER_02]: I do think there is one specific bit of like rules thing that I do think we should get into, which is the combat mechanics for this game.
54:19
[SPEAKER_02]: Because they are very different from anything that we've played on this show and I think it's worth diving into.
54:24
[SPEAKER_02]: Can you break down like the core combat mechanics and then talk to us about what feats and gambits are and how they will interact in this world?
54:32
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a handy little, because yeah, combat is quite unusual, it's very fast and it's simple once you've done it a couple of times, but it can be counterintuitive, but it can feel very different the first time you do it.
54:45
[SPEAKER_00]: So in the basic rules page of the book on page eight, there is a a checklist of seven steps.
54:51
[SPEAKER_00]: And essentially, when you have combat, you're going to be going through those seven steps.
54:56
[SPEAKER_00]: And what are the big differences to other systems is it's
54:59
[SPEAKER_00]: There's no individual initiative, you kind of have side initiative.
55:03
[SPEAKER_00]: So it might be like, now it's the night's turn.
55:05
[SPEAKER_00]: The player nights turn, I should say, and now it's going to be the enemies turn, and then we go back and forth.
55:09
[SPEAKER_00]: And it doesn't really matter who's acting first out of the players, and then who's acting first out of the enemies, you kind of all act together.
55:17
[SPEAKER_00]: And I really like that because
55:19
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, you haven't got that moment when you're sat waiting for your turn.
55:22
[SPEAKER_00]: You had that moment when right now it's our turn, we're all going to decide what to do.
55:26
[SPEAKER_00]: So the procedure is like a say seven steps and I'll I'll gloss over some of them.
55:30
[SPEAKER_00]: But the first one is you're going to pick up all the dice for anything that you're attacking with.
55:34
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you have a axe that says D8 next to it, you can pick up a D8.
55:40
[SPEAKER_00]: If you have a shield in your hand that says D4, you can take a D4 because you can also bash with the shield at the same time.
55:46
[SPEAKER_00]: If you're on a, if you're on a steed that has a trampled damage, if it's a charger, you can, that might add another die for everyone who's attacking the same target.
55:55
[SPEAKER_00]: So if we're attacking one giant monster, let's say all of the players will pick up those dice and we roll them all together.
56:02
[SPEAKER_00]: And then we can spend some of those dice to perform gambits, which I'll come back to.
56:08
[SPEAKER_00]: After we've spent them to perform gambits, we're gonna take the single remaining die left and that's gonna be the damage.
56:14
[SPEAKER_00]: So we are all these dice and the highest die is an eight.
56:17
[SPEAKER_00]: It's gonna be eight points of damage.
56:19
[SPEAKER_00]: The gambits are a way to help with that.
56:22
[SPEAKER_00]: So if a die is a four or higher, you can discard it.
56:27
[SPEAKER_00]: to perform a gambit.
56:28
[SPEAKER_00]: And the most obvious gambit is bolster, which is going to increase the final damage by one.
56:33
[SPEAKER_00]: So let's say in those bulls of dice who you're rolled, we rolled, the 8 was the highest die, and then there was a 6 and a 4.
56:40
[SPEAKER_00]: We could spend the 6 and the 4 to increase that 8 up to 10, and now we're doing 10 damage.
56:44
[SPEAKER_00]: So you get like diminishing returns, but people can kind of all chip in to feel like they're adding towards the damage on this attack.
56:51
[SPEAKER_00]: If you don't want to bolster for extra damage, you can also use gambits to do things like trying to disarm the enemy, trying to push them around, stop them getting away, to move yourself into a different position, so you could move into your attack and then use the gambit to move away out of range, or like I said, you could use it to try and impair the weapon, and the enemy will get a save to avoid this.
57:13
[SPEAKER_00]: But this can be really useful for, especially against the bigger enemy, trying to kind of balance between doing damage and protecting yourself and your allies.
57:23
[SPEAKER_00]: And then when you've got that highest remaining die left, you're going to take the final amount you've got for your damage from the from the highest die and a bolsters that you've added and then you subtract the targets armor and that's how much damage you do.
57:34
[SPEAKER_00]: And it comes off their guard first and if they run out of guard it's going to come off their vigor.
57:41
[SPEAKER_00]: And if an attack ever takes away half the figure in one go, that's a mortal wound and they're going to be down and dying.
57:46
[SPEAKER_00]: If you ever take them to vigour zero in one go, they are slain, like instantly.
57:51
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's quite easy to get down to a point where someone's dying on the ground, but it's quite rare to have someone just be out right, slain in a single, single go.
58:00
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's kind of the basic sort of it.
58:02
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's getting used to this idea of all rolling together and then you're spending those dice to do gambits
58:11
[SPEAKER_00]: You do have feeds which do interact with that as well.
58:14
[SPEAKER_00]: So every night knows the three feeds you have smite, which you can do before you roll damage, you can say I'm smiting, and you could just add a D12 to your dice that you're rolling.
58:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Or you can make a blast attack, which means it's gonna hit like a group of people in one go.
58:28
[SPEAKER_00]: You also have focus, which means you can do a gambit without needing to spend a die, and you have deny is the other feed, which means you do as a reaction to being attacked, which lets you remove a die from the enemy's attack pull.
58:41
[SPEAKER_00]: And after performing a feed, you're going to make a save, depending on which feed you've used.
58:46
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you fail that save, you are fatigued for the rest of the combat, and you can't use any more feeds.
58:50
[SPEAKER_00]: And yeah, that's kind of the, that's kind of the entirety of the combat.
58:54
[SPEAKER_00]: So nights may also have like a special ability that let's have do something weird.
58:58
[SPEAKER_00]: But in general, everyone is every night is using the same set of tools.
59:02
[SPEAKER_00]: So even though there's some complexity to it, after a combat or to everyone knows what to expect and people, people will get used to thinking, oh, I don't want to smite because I want to, I don't want to be fatigued so that I can use my
59:19
[SPEAKER_00]: You can spend a diet that's an eight or higher to do a strong gambit, which is even better.
59:23
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a little bit of kind of system mastery to it, which I like, because it feels like you're learning to fight like a knight.
59:29
[SPEAKER_00]: But you're using this same set of tools rather than always having like a new power to use.
59:34
[SPEAKER_00]: It's learning to use these tools that you've got.
59:36
[SPEAKER_02]: the feeds are really cool because they're almost, I don't want to say they're like overpower it like it feels like super heroic nights, but it is the thing where you only get to use it until you fail that save.
59:46
[SPEAKER_02]: If you roll great, you might be able to be epic and heroic the whole time just denying every attack and taking like little or no damage or you might fail that save the first time and now you don't have this like mega ability to help you.
1:00:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, like when you've got, when you're not fatigued, it can feel almost like you're in a Vince's with because you're like, on your turn, you're like, I smite, so you're doing like an extraditist for a damage.
1:00:07
[SPEAKER_00]: And then when they attack you, you say, I deny so you're parrying their blow away and you've removed the OD die they've got.
1:00:13
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's great, but it's then you get that moment of when they fail the save.
1:00:17
[SPEAKER_00]: And they're like, oh, right now, I can't deny, and I can't, I can't, I can't, I'm now, they always become like mortal again.
1:00:28
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's always fun to see that moment, especially if like the whole group gets over aggressive enough, I had a recent game I played.
1:00:34
[SPEAKER_00]: It was only with two players, but they both ran in and they smited immediately, and the first one always works, so they got to do their smite, but then they both failed their saves, so they were both fatigued, and they hadn't quite managed to kill this very powerful thing they were fighting, so now they're like, we've, we've given this thing everything we've got, and now we're like, oh, and now it's, it's turned to attackers.
1:00:54
[SPEAKER_00]: and it creates these really fun moments.
1:00:56
[SPEAKER_00]: It does feel a bit kind of super heroic where it's like often you're either you're either smashing through a combat or you're in a real desperate situation.
1:01:04
[SPEAKER_00]: I like having the extremes sort of pop up as well as those kind of more balanced encounters as well.
1:01:09
[SPEAKER_02]: I've talked about this on the show a bunch that like I feel some kind of way about days for systems.
1:01:14
[SPEAKER_02]: I like them but I don't love them sometimes I love them and sometimes I hate them.
1:01:18
[SPEAKER_02]: This one is really exciting to me because we hadn't interviewed recently where someone described a game as DIC not Matthew.
1:01:27
[SPEAKER_02]: And this is a DIC combat system.
1:01:30
[SPEAKER_02]: You get to pick up a whole handful of different size polyheatuals rolled them down and then get to like...
1:01:35
[SPEAKER_02]: play with all of the tools, all the toys that you've rolled to make the cool thing happen.
1:01:41
[SPEAKER_02]: As a player, I'm excited about a handful of chuck and dice, just laying about.
1:01:46
[SPEAKER_00]: And it creates those full moments because sometimes you'll, generally, the different weapons have different dice obviously.
1:01:52
[SPEAKER_00]: So, like I say, axe might be a D8 and your shield might be a D4.
1:01:56
[SPEAKER_00]: So, if you're fighting on your own and you roll a 1 on the D8 and a 4 on the D4,
1:02:01
[SPEAKER_00]: you get a kind of narrative moment because you're like oh I guess my axe isn't doing much so but I can bash them with my shield and then when you get sort of the much bigger weapon and you're rolling like a D10 or swords are actually really rare in this world I wanted swords to feel like not many people will have a sword, most night start with like a mace or an axe or something and if you when you get a sword those are the only weapons that really have multiple
1:02:28
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's like, oh, this weapon is so fancy that I can like stab someone and do a gambit, even just with a sword, whereas then you look back on like, it makes an axe feel very cumbersome that you only have this one die.
1:02:39
[SPEAKER_00]: And I like that kind of tactile feel of like your kind of like you're very aware of what your character is holding because you're picking up the dive for each of those things.
1:02:48
[SPEAKER_02]: It feels like just the right amount of tactical.
1:02:50
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, because every time you're rolling then you like great.
1:02:53
[SPEAKER_02]: I have these set number of choices.
1:02:54
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm not gaining or losing things as I level up or whatever.
1:02:58
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm really excited about the combat system in this game.
1:03:00
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to roll a shotgun hand full of dice, baby.
1:03:05
[SPEAKER_00]: I think I'm going to outsource a bit of advice as well.
1:03:08
[SPEAKER_00]: There's actually really, really good blog posts.
1:03:10
[SPEAKER_00]: There's been lots of good blog posts about mythic bastion and the people are written.
1:03:14
[SPEAKER_00]: But there is one.
1:03:16
[SPEAKER_00]: It's by Elmcat and if you just search for Elmcat running mythic bastion and, in fact, you know, I'll find the actual address because I should give them a shout out.
1:03:25
[SPEAKER_02]: And we'll put the link in the show notes below as well.
1:03:27
[SPEAKER_02]: So people can look at it and find it.
1:03:29
[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, if you just look for Elmcat running mythic Bastionland, they go through sort of like a whole, everything they did to like prepare for the game, little tips of running the game.
1:03:40
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's really interesting because I agree with a lot of people.
1:03:42
[SPEAKER_00]: There's lots of stuff that isn't in the book, because it's like someone else's viewpoint on it.
1:03:47
[SPEAKER_00]: But especially with prepping the game, they talk about like,
1:03:50
[SPEAKER_00]: how they prepared for it and how they worked out how much stuff to prepare because I think there anything was to want to lock everything down and like prepare everything in detail.
1:04:00
[SPEAKER_00]: But finding that balance of feeling like you have enough prep of the realm that you can run it but not that you've had to like think about what's in every single hex in the realm.
1:04:09
[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, that's Elkats blog.
1:04:11
[SPEAKER_00]: If you look for running method bastion, that's a really cool resource.
1:04:14
[SPEAKER_02]: We'll put that link in the show notes below.
1:04:16
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm excited to go read that.
1:04:17
[SPEAKER_02]: I've been ready yet.
1:04:19
[SPEAKER_02]: As we start winding into a close here, I think we could easily talk about this game from another like two hours.
1:04:23
[SPEAKER_02]: And we're going to be playing it for a long, heck and time, but I think we should start winding this interview down to a close.
1:04:30
[SPEAKER_02]: Elliot, I kind of want to turn it over to you.
1:04:31
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
1:04:32
[SPEAKER_02]: Now that we've talked for this past hour with Chris about this game and about how time works and how all these different things are working within mythic passionate, how are you feeling going into our session zero and soon going into session one?
1:04:46
[SPEAKER_01]: I feel good, honestly, I feel more excited by the time Horizon of the game than I was then nervous, which I was at the beginning.
1:04:55
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, I was nervous about that, but then kind of talking through the story potential of getting to play across like an entire lives of these characters is really fun.
1:05:05
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm starting
1:05:06
[SPEAKER_01]: I get excited about a game when I can start imagining just like little bits and pieces of things I might say like at a table just like that's when I know I'm really excited to run it and that was I could feel that starting to happen as we talked about some of the time stuff but in this call so feeling a lot better about it
1:05:24
[SPEAKER_02]: Honestly, Chris, you mentioned like a player getting to old age potentially like dying between sessions.
1:05:29
[SPEAKER_02]: I immediately had a flash of like wanting to have my character die between sessions and then have like a funeral.
1:05:36
[SPEAKER_02]: And you want to mean like that feels nightly and epic to like you open a session with like the grand funeral for this like fallen night or hero of a realm or something.
1:05:47
[SPEAKER_01]: I think Brian's going to break our heart.
1:05:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Hopefully, by that point, you'll have, if you don't have a successor, I think it's fun to, like, then be able to, even if you're rolling a brand unite, that could be a fun change of pace.
1:05:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, this, this stranger coming in to the funeral baby and they're like, oh, I was sent here to take their place or the more traditional, you know, your, your squire becomes a night or your, your air sort of takes over.
1:06:11
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's a lot of fun potential there.
1:06:13
[SPEAKER_00]: And I do have a D66 table, sub somewhere on my blog.
1:06:16
[SPEAKER_00]: I have a D66 table for how you died between sessions.
1:06:21
[SPEAKER_00]: So that was cool.
1:06:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that's horrible there.
1:06:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Because they're really horrible because I looked up like medieval courses of death.
1:06:28
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's not many nice peaceful ones in there.
1:06:31
[SPEAKER_02]: That's really good.
1:06:33
[SPEAKER_02]: It does say something about a game that I could be excited about dying off screen.
1:06:37
[SPEAKER_02]: I cannot think of another game where that would be interesting to me.
1:06:40
[SPEAKER_02]: This game I'm like, that fits the tone in the world.
1:06:44
[SPEAKER_02]: In a way that I could be excited about playing.
1:06:46
[SPEAKER_02]: I just want to toss one more question to you, Elliot.
1:06:48
[SPEAKER_02]: What is the thing that is, after, at the end of this conversation, what is the thing that you are most excited about about running this game now?
1:06:58
[SPEAKER_01]: I am I'm really excited for what like what you guys are going to throw at me as the night's like I really want like I want you to be these like very specific passionate nights and like kind of surprise me with your reactions to things like I can think of like ways I'm excited to throw you know the myths that you and the exploration but I'm really excited for what that kind of character then gives me as a GM to play around with which and I think based
1:07:29
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm excited to play this game.
1:07:30
[SPEAKER_01]: It's going to be good.
1:07:32
[SPEAKER_01]: Chris, I have a sort of QT question that you may not have an answer to or you may be being asked.
1:07:40
[SPEAKER_01]: Do you have a favorite night or a favorite myth in the book?
1:07:44
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I got, I got asked this sort of, um, at a convention when I was selling the book and I sort of panicked because I thought oh, I actually haven't really thought about a favorite night because, um, obviously it took a long time to write all the things so like I've sort of got up and down and then throughout the months that it took to write them.
1:08:00
[SPEAKER_00]: And the one that always comes back to me and this is what I said last time someone asked is, I really like the, um, the tiger night.
1:08:12
[SPEAKER_00]: if they defeat an animal in a contest, befitting that animal, then all animals of that type will respect the tiger night.
1:08:21
[SPEAKER_00]: So we think that we'll run a horse, then all the horses will respect you.
1:08:25
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's a very silly ability, and it feels a bit like a joke, but I think as a player to get an ability like that,
1:08:33
[SPEAKER_00]: You might be thinking, well, that's useless.
1:08:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, how am I going to do this?
1:08:36
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's not how we even useful is it to that they respect me in this way.
1:08:39
[SPEAKER_00]: But then there might be a myth, like say, the spider, which is a giant spider.
1:08:45
[SPEAKER_00]: If you can somehow justify that you defeated a spider in a, I don't know, a climbing contest or a weaving contest, that all the sudden you can show up to the spider and you can demand respect from the spider.
1:08:56
[SPEAKER_00]: So I like nights that have these abilities where you have to get a bit creative and you kind of have to think with fairytale logic to understand how it can be useful.
1:09:05
[SPEAKER_00]: So I always like those ones as a sort of contrast to one to nights that have a more straightforward, you know, ability.
1:09:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Like we talked about the mode tonight earlier, where it's very much like just make sure you're in water when you're fighting.
1:09:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Which is put in a different way, but I do like this kind of weird fairy tones.
1:09:20
[SPEAKER_00]: In a favorite myth.
1:09:22
[SPEAKER_00]: It is an early one in the book, but I'm always very fond of the worm, who is a giant worm.
1:09:29
[SPEAKER_00]: And again, without going too much into it, there's lots of ways to sort of suggest that the worm, as well as being a horrible monster that's eating people.
1:09:37
[SPEAKER_00]: The worm is just like a real, I don't know how much I can swear on this, but you can swear on us.
1:09:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, the worm's just a real dick, like there's just ways to be like,
1:09:48
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a table to roll on, I think, for their behaviours and they've got all these really toxic behaviours.
1:09:52
[SPEAKER_00]: So I like the idea that you've got this big and mythic creature that's also just like performing, let's say, toxic behaviours that you might recognise from real people.
1:10:03
[SPEAKER_00]: That is always a fun moment when the players actually get to speak to the worm and they're like, oh, you really is the work.
1:10:09
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not just facing people.
1:10:11
[SPEAKER_00]: He's also like the worst guy.
1:10:12
[SPEAKER_02]: He's also just kind of a bummer.
1:10:14
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, there's just a lot of, I'm going to find the table now, because you've reminded me about this one, I need to check, so the worm.
1:10:22
[SPEAKER_01]: I have found the table, it's pretty, it's really for me.
1:10:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so they might, like, you roll 2D6 and like you get like a conversation and trick and then a combat trick.
1:10:32
[SPEAKER_00]: So the conversation things they do, that's right.
1:10:34
[SPEAKER_00]: So they might spout hatred, they might spread fear, they might aggrandize self, I think that's the one that I had when I used the worm.
1:10:40
[SPEAKER_00]: So they're just all about like talking themselves up.
1:10:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Install enemies, seek submission, or entice fieldy.
1:10:46
[SPEAKER_00]: So as well as being a monster, they can just be like a real social pain as well.
1:10:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Really good.
1:10:56
[SPEAKER_02]: Chris, thank you so much for joining us for this start of our season of Mythic Bachelors.
1:11:02
[SPEAKER_02]: We're so excited to dive in.
1:11:03
[SPEAKER_02]: I think for both of us and for anyone listening are even more confident and comfortable like getting into a brand new system.
1:11:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Damn, I'm really excited to hear about where it goes.
1:11:13
[SPEAKER_02]: You too, man.
1:11:14
[SPEAKER_02]: I want to play some nights and roll some dice.
1:11:16
[SPEAKER_02]: It's going to be a lot of fun.
1:11:18
[SPEAKER_02]: Chris, do you want to let people know before we get out of here where they can find you online, if they're looking for you?
1:11:21
[SPEAKER_02]: And also just let them know where they can purchase this wonderful game, I think, bash and land.
1:11:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, if you go to Bastionan.com, that has links to all of my socials and all of my games and stuff in the cyber.
1:11:32
[SPEAKER_00]: If you want to buy this, if you're in the US, you can buy it from plus one XP.
1:11:36
[SPEAKER_00]: If you're outside of the US, you're probably better buying it from BastionanPress.com, which is direct from me.
1:11:42
[SPEAKER_00]: But you know, buy it from wherever's cheapest for you in whichever country you're in, it's all good.
1:11:47
[SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, Bastionan.com is the place that has all of those links, all of your dates on what I'm working on next.
1:11:53
[SPEAKER_02]: And that is all for this episode of my first dungeon, Mythic Bastion Land.
1:11:59
[SPEAKER_02]: Join us next time for our session zero as we meet a group of nights ready to seek the myths, honor the sears, and protect the realm.
1:12:10
[SPEAKER_02]: And remember, if you're having fun, you're already doing it right.
1:12:15
[SPEAKER_02]: Bye bye everybody.
1:12:16
[SPEAKER_01]: Bye bye.