& The Order

Session Notes (08/14/22)

Game: Mythic Bastionland

Module: n/a or maybe "& The Order"

Players: 4

Moving from the midwest to the east coast took a long time, but I was super happy to sit down and play online.  We played the most recent Mythic Bastionland playtest.

Characters:

Brya, the Moss Knight

Yaw the Bull, the Tourney Knight

Harold, the Snare Knight

Sanguine, the Bloody Knight

Session:

After 10 minutes of character creation, we discussed “start” and “scope” from the book, and settled on Petty and Open.

The knights were introduced to the Domain:

And told that they were seeking Castle Achnam, the seat of power in the domain, where they would find powerful seers, and hospitality from the king.

They approached from the west, and found a great forest.  In a sunlit clearing, they saw a vassal, holding a pitchfork, keeping a wild horse at bay.  He shouted in his commoner’s tongue for help.

The four knights cautiously approached and spent some time observing.  Brya spoke to a stone to see what was happening and Harold turned their wild eye upon the horse.  They found it was a draft horse, come astray, angry and frothing at the mouth.  The knights’ dithering led to the horse kicking the vassal in the jaw, breaking it and knocking him to the ground.  So they sprang into action.  Intervening scared the horse off into the woods.  They lifted the poor vassal up, who although addled, and less a few teeth, was alive.  Unable to speak, he gestured at a forest trail.  Brya eased him into the saddle of her pale horse, and led the company along the path.  Sanguine passed his fermented milk to those that wanted a little grog, as their supplies had run out.

The morning ended, and they came upon miles of shire land, which ended at a village called Brink, on the shore of a lake.  Yaw spent a great deal of time posturing and introducing himself in a very pompous fashion.  Other vassals took their injured comrade, and brought the knights to the village elder.  There was no seer about, but the old woman shared her rumors and gossip about the Order of knights that had been harassing them.

She said that their village had been raided by a group of knights.  They would come at different times and in different numbers and seize their food and supplies, and run their horses off into the woods.  The knights split up and stayed in various hay bales and vassal’s cottages for the evening, being fed what little food was still available in the village.  Yaw and Sanguine spent their time roaming the countryside, speaking to villagers, and learned this order had no leader: they all wore the same armor and kept the same charge on their tower shields (a red field with stags running).  Brya found an old Ash tree and pushed it for information: a secret trail in the woods that led to their meeting place.  Harold sent their exiled squirrel in search of answers in the woods.  In the morning it returned, intimating it had found the order deep in the woods.

They struck off, intent to find the order and deal with them.  Traveling along the secret trail, the knights had to forage for supplies and camp.  Foraging was very scenic.  The Moss Knight and The Snare Knight gathered nuts, acorns, mushrooms, fruit, etc. while Yaw followed along trying to copy them by shaking the tree branches with his greatlance.  Sanguine disappeared and when he returned he had the carcass of some animal, now unrecognizable, and was covered in blood.  They didn’t go hungry.

After their evening camping their morning was disturbed by the sound of travelers.  They spied from the woods and saw one knight of the Order being followed by an apprentice, their horses laden with sacks of supplies from the town.  Yaw was positively foaming at the mouth to charge them, but the cooler heads of the other knights convinced him they should follow him to find the rest of the Order.

At the end of the trail, they came upon a clearing in a bog of willow trees.  There were 3 knights of the Order, and 8 conscripts.  The knights were in a circle, and the conscripts on the far end, milling about and leaning on their billhooks.  The arriving knight gestured to his apprentice to stand on the edge, while he approached the other three.  He threw down his sacks of goods and declared that he had no weakness, would anyone challenge him?  Again, Yaw was beside himself about wanting to get out and accept this challenge, but the other knights pulled him aside to formulate a plan of attack.  Brya pushed a stone for a secret, and the old boulder told her the Order were strong and excellent warriors, but were no leaders of men.

Sanguine helped Yaw don his tourney armor, in a bizarre ritual concocted by the two of them involving strange chants, and ritual blood applications.  When they were finished the four decided to split up: Yaw would enter and be a distraction, and hopefully goad one into single combat.  Sanguine would circle around and surprise the conscripts, hoping to cower them into switching sides or staying out of the fight.  Brya and Harold found positions to ambush from.

Yaw entered and offered a wager for arms and horses.  The order spoke, declaring that there was no first among them, that all were equal, each was master and student.  That Yaw’s lance and horse would ensure his victory over one of them, but that their numbers would ensure he could not win.  They accepted his challenge as a group, and egged him on to bring his lance to bear.

Sanguine emerged from the woods, covered in blood, and spoke with the conscripts.  They were startled and afraid of him, so they answered his questions.  They were poor, and the order paid them, and they would wait to see who won before they intervened.  Sanguine walked past them, ready to ambush from the rear.

Yaw charged and the first knight dodged.  Sanguine, came up from behind and swung, missing.  The Order realized they were attacked from all sides and circled up.  In the next round, Brya hurled a cudgel and Harold swung their ax from the saddle, charging in.  Yaw turned about and charged again.  Yaw’s lance mortally wounded one of the Order, while Sanguine attempted to hook one with his ax and grapple his foe.  The Order retaliated: one swung their sword upwards at Harold, and mortally wounded him, knocking him out of the saddle.  The Order knight was not grappled by Sanguine, and instead scarred Sanguine with his sword, rupturing his guts in a bloody display.  Yaw was struck and wounded by another knight’s sword, but not mortally.

Brya distracted the Order by hurling sticks at their helmets, giving Yaw the upper hand, who drove himself into a frenzy, wounding a second member of the Order.  Sanguine beheaded the mortally wounded knight and brought the dead knight’s head into the air in a bloody show.  This cowered the 3 remaining knights into surrendering.  They begged for succor, which yaw granted.  Sanguine’s bloodlust overcame him, and he attempted to execute all three of them, but Yaw was able to stop knight’s bloodlust with a calm word, and convinced him to tend to Harold.  The conscripts surrendered, but the Order apprentice had fled in the chaos.

Gamemaster Notes:

My immediate thoughts on mythic bastionland are:

1. I love it

2. It is very dependent on GM improvisation at the table

3. The game is so moody and evocative, it is easy to improvise in play, as long as you have the right pdf page in front of you!

Prepping this game was interesting.  I drew up the domain, and followed the guidelines.  Which went really well, but when I started populating the myths I made myself read every single omen in order to get a feel for each myth.  I was immediately struck with “The Wall” which I couldn’t really grok, so I rolled and replaced it, getting “the order”.  After reading the order I decided they seemed like a combination of Bandits, Knights of the Round table and SPECTRE, and I went with that.  For the start of the session, I placed this omen directly in the path of the knights from the edge of the map.

All the players brought their A game to this session, really leaning into the weird, evocative, proto-mythic genre.  Everyone had this baseline understanding of what a Knight was, and was wholly unfamiliar with anything beyond that, which honestly worked perfectly.  The procedures for hexcrawling did seem a little dense.  I found myself actually explaining to the players “ok so every time you leave a wild hex we roll on this table, and every time you enter a wild hex we roll on this other table.  We all sort of enjoyed it, and it I suspect because it seemed novel.  The very first roll indicated they lost all their supplies, and then when they encountered the village, the omen indicated that the village supplies had been taken by the order… so this was actually really great.  Suddenly every character in the game was on the brink of starving!

It was at this point that I realized I had placed a castle full of seers, a cave with a seer, and a ziggurat with a knight and a seer very far away from this village, so I accidentally made it hard for the knights to seek out a seer for guidance on the order.  If I was going to make this domain map again I’d of sprinkled the seers to be more accessible, so the villagers could direct the knights about.

The players also really leaned into that foraging task.  They didn’t have to, but they each gave a bespoke description of how they foraged.  After the game, a few of them gave feedback that they didn’t really know how to play their character based on their Saves, but I suspect that they had absorbed a lot from the fictional description of their knight, especially from their little d6 tables and the unsettling AI art.

During the bloody melee at the end, they were introduced to the hard and fast rules of Bastionland combat.  After the first round Sanguine was scarred and Harold was mortally wounded, I realized I hadn’t given them all a little primer on just how quickly combat in this family of games is over, and we had a brief review of the feats.  In the second round, there was a lot of talk about which feats to use!  It was tense and I honestly thought they were about to all bite it, when Sanguine almost unknowingly attacked the Order knights’ weakest save: their CHA.

Overall, just about every single moment of the game was improvised on the spot.  This was largely possible though because I simply had “The Order” page open, and whenever I didn’t know what to do, I just took an Element or I used the next Omen in sequence on the list and added it to whatever was currently happening.  It worked really well.  I got a lot of specific feedback from the players at the end as well, and we’ve decided to continue.  I’m personally very keen on seeing the seasons/ages/ruling a domain rules in play, so hopefully we will get to test drive those.