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Showing posts from June, 2025

A Quick Look at a Big Book: Mythic Bastionland

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  After two iterations of the age of Industry, and once in the age of electricity, Chris McDowall, AKA Mr. Bastionland, has decided to tackle the age of heroic fantasy , of the Arthurian persuasion. Rather than the explorers of Into the Odd and debt-ridden failed careerists of Electric Bastionland, Mythic Bastionland concerns itself with Knights on a Quest. Like previous games set in the world of Bastion, the rules are light as they come, though with a little bit of added complexity in combat in the form of Feats and Gambits, as well as wrinkles related to weapon types, mounted combat, and mass combat. You know, knight stuff. Besides that, it's just the usual three-stat roll-under and no to-hit roll. It all sounds cool and fun. In total, all of this ends up filling a total of sixteen pages, including the GM advice for running the game. At the end of the book are 30 pages of play examples with commentary (the "Oddpocrypha"), with the rest (the majority of the book) are ...

A Songbirds Campaign Retrospective: Part 1

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  This week, I did something that is probably rarer than it should be in the tabletop RPG sphere: I ended a campaign, rather than let it fizzle out or changing tracks and leaving it hanging. I have had a few people ask me about the campaign and my thoughts, so I figured I would write it up as a blog post. I have previously written my thoughts on the game, Songbirds 3e , and my overall thoughts on the game haven't changed much, so if you're more interested in review-like thoughts, that's the post you should be reading. In this post, I'll rather instead be focusing on the campaign itself, taking a bit of a bird's eye view on how it ran, the choices I made, and a write-up of the general story. I'm not very good with keeping session notes (read: I don't take or keep any notes), so I will be relying on my memory for this, as well as looking at the prep I did. Relying on the adage of "prep situations, not plots", many of the situations I prepared are ga...