Mythic Bungalow Prep - Beardmancer Bungalow

A few folks on the Bastionland Discord asked about how I run certain elements of Mythic Bastionland. This is a synopsis of the discussion and an attempt at presenting my approaches to a few portions of the game in a more coherent way.

Did you just start your players in a random hex or did you provide an initial task?

The players started west of the Seat of Power. I picked west since I’d been reading some UVG and felt inspired to work eastwards for a change. I rolled some dice to see where exactly they’d start out west in the realm. Each of their Seers had indicated the company ought to report to Lord Ribbel at Castle Fangrir, each for their own reason.

How did you handle Seers in your game? That’s a bit I particularly struggle with. Generally, how do you handle the Seers providing info? Do they always ask for a task/quest to be completed beforehand? How clear do you make their information?

Each starting scene in the first session with each Knight’s Seer had a different flavor to it. Some Seers want to dethrone Lord Ribbel, the current ruler of the Seat of Power. Some want to help him, while others could care less who he is since they’re more interested in what’s inside or below Castle Fangrir.

Some Knights use their Seers as the source of their entire backstory. Others see them as distant, respected mentors. Others intertwine with their Seer because they share some strange deep primal magic with them that they can’t escape. One even hates their Seer (the Loathed Seer) and wants to kill them to be free of them. To make this part easier for me to run, I usually just ask the players questions which leads to the core bits of their connections to their Seers.

The key takeaway here I think is that Seers want things. They start in motion, just like the players, in the middle of whatever’s going on with them. The messier, the better.

As far as players interacting with and utilizing Seers, I make it clear that there’s always an x-in-6 chance that a Knight can speak to their Seer. Sometimes, Knights can even turn those odds into summoning their Seers. But they’ve learned very quickly that the Seers’ are weird. When Seers show up, they ask for weird, obtuse stuff that might be more trouble than it’s worth and that might conflict with the Knights immediate goals (ideally, in interesting, unpredictable ways that are fun to explore through play.)

As far as the information Seers provide to Knights, I follow the GLOG principles and Chris McDowall’s guidelines for Seers from p.13 and p.19 in the current MB preview. No information from a Seer is ever too helpful or too vague. It always has a price. The price is always related to one of the Seers’ bullet points from their description. And it’s almost always weird.

No matter what, I always use the bullet points from the Mythic Bastionland source material to guide what the Seers do. I try my best to make sure the players understand the Seer info so they can make informed decisions about how they connect to their Seer. Once it’s clear we’re on the same page, I ask the players questions about their Knight and about their Seer that I then turn into spark tables. Usually no more than 2 columns of 4 sparks each. Though if I have more time and energy, I usually prefer Chris McDowall’s 4 sparks method. Combining 4 elements creates 6 unique spark combos. AB AC AD BC BD CD.

As an example, the Unnamed Seer was the first Seer the group met properly. They found him submerged in a floral cave beneath his tower. And his attendant warned them that the Seer would grow angry unless the Knights could offer stories and rumors about anonymous individuals (since he’s always trying to learn more about his past, and since he doesn’t know his past, any tale could be relevant to his past.) The Moss Knight caught onto this and told him some stories they’d picked up from Corin, a witch that the company had caught a ride with down the river on her barge. As soon as they’d finished the tales, they asked for information in exchange. And I gave them useful information about 3 myths, all of which were connected to the Unnamed Seers own connections with the realm.

As another example, the Jawbone Seer and the Loathed Seer have been more selfish than other Seers in my games, just due to what’s happened over the course of the game. Their info comes in objects which I telegraph the danger of frequently.

The Moss Knight ended up receiving a “gift” in the form of a prickly seedling, thrumming with weird primal power and creepy vibes. It was clear to the player from my description that the Loathed Seer wanted them to use it in front of them (likely to be hated and loathed by the knight) so the Moss Knight had to bluff their way out of ingesting the seedling in front of them to avoid whatever danger was on the other side. They can tell it’s powerful and dangerous and the power inside the seedling may be the only way to win their current battle, but right now the Moss Knight is scared to do it because it’s unclear what the cost will be for the power the seedling will give.

Again, helpful info that’s not too helpful or that comes with a risk.

Mind sharing a spark table you’ve made?

Sure thing! Here are some from the knights. Typically, I organize sparks into On-Screen and Off-Screen sparks. That way if an On-Screen spark plays out to some kind of conclusion, I can swap an Off-Screen spark in its place, eventually bringing the old On-Screen spark back in a new way.

For the Bloody Knight, here are his current active on-screen sparks. I’ll just throw 2d6, combine the results, and usually that’s enough to run an entire encounter or intrigue multiple sessions back to back.

The call of life blood, ringing constant and coagulant in the ears.
Rumors of Yaw, the Bull who hunts Lord Ribbel night and day
Scars from old wounds and the ache of the Red Reed Seer’s cold punishment

Collectors of blood, thirsty for new rare strains
Unjust enforcers and thugs, heckling and harassing to assuage their fears
Young mercenaries, desperately hunting first and last kills

For NPC’s I do a similar thing. Here’s the sparks for Odibran the Pale Light in Darkness, affectionately dubbed by the players as “Sodabread the Curmudgeonly”

Moonlight radiating from their equipment and hands
Whispering to mischievous moon sprites
Tracing lunar patterns on any available surface
Dark stories of Pragen

Sharpening Odibran’s Moon Blade in preparation to kill Duwelon
Stories of the recent happenings in 03 - The Forest
Terrified of 04 - The Spirit
Hopeful stories of Finyan

Odibran’s is a little different, since I wanted to make sure she stays actionable in game. Most of her entries are things she could actually be doing at the moment anytime I reach for a spark combo. To be clear, there isn’t much accompanying text to go with each of these characters. Maybe a paragraph tops to cover their core elements.

If sparks come out a little different from location to NPC to encounter, that seems to suit my style just fine. Usually I can just randomly roll a verb or interesting twist to convolute the combinations into an entirely plausible and believable moment to implement in play.

What kinds of questions do you ask your players to generate their spark tables?

If we’re using the Bloody Knight as the example, I asked these questions.

How does your Passion manifest itself?

His passion manifests in his profoundly strange literal connection to his own blood, the blood of others (whether through battle or healing), and the call of the realm’s Life Blood, a sort of spiritual river that runs through everything (a bit of worldbuilding I did beforehand knowing he’d likely lean into the weird). As you can see, there are a bunch of sparks that just pull a few examples of what “blood” could mean to him.

What are you ashamed of?

For his shame, he indicated that he failed a mission in the past and that the Red Seer (or Reed Seer? I think early in playtesting I accidentally jammed them together, so now those two seers are two sides of the same Jekyl and Hide coin) had never let him live it down. So I figured that his shame literally follows him, both in body, spirit, and the talk and actions of others.

Who do you miss?

For who do you miss, this was a bit self indulgent. He’d made this character when we play tested with another GM, and I got to play his brother, Yaw the Bull. He loved the character so much that he was adamant that the Bloody Knight’s main goal, all oaths to the realm aside, was to find out what possibly could have happened to Yaw, since Yaw didn’t start as an NPC in their group. I’ve been hinting at him since, so that spark gets a lot of mileage with him anytime it comes up.

To me, the process of asking a player questions is like playing simultaneous chords or superimposing two images over one another or duct taping two objects together. The fun comes from synthesizing the two into one, rather than building something entirely from scratch myself. The more I can turn to the player or a table for the raw building block, the more I can focus on how those elements hook together and move during play.

So for NPC’s, do you use the sparks to generate what they’re doing when players encounter them? For PC’s, do you use the spark tables to generate encounters related to them specifically? If so, do you basically add an entry on the encounter dice?

Both! That’s just how these two turned out specifically. Since the NPC was new, I figured I’d need a lot of stuff she could be doing off the cuff without me having to think about it too much.

As for the encounter system, I usually hook an individual knight’s spark onto an Omen result of the Wilderness Roll, or onto the All Clear result if it feels like an appropriate moment (or if the players seem hungry for something weird to latch onto.) I played around with other entries, but I didn’t want to mess with the Omen and Myth rollout since it’s worked so nicely for the games I’ve run.

Did you fully plan out all the faction relationships and secrets before starting play?

A few. I just made a basic relationship map and wrote a couple lines for each connection.

The myths are in pink. Green and yellow indicate alliances between factions. The grey are independent factions, individuals, and characters mentioned in Omens. The blue connections are alliances or peaceful relationships. The orange connections are hostile or tense relationships.

Fangrir Relationship Map

Did you decide from the outset to have a rival realm?

I did! I figured that could provide some interesting leverage the players could exploit if they wanted to, for the good or ill of the court of Castle Fangrir.