Streaming Bastionland

I. Dear Reader,

I got back from vacation and quickly became overwhelmed, which wasn’t helped by me catching a convention cold. The weekend had too many things happening all at once and hence, the newsletter is coming to you on a Monday. Two of those weekend things was a session zero for a new campaign of bronze age fantasy game, Defy the Gods, and the first session of a streamed three-shot of Mythic Bastionland.

The Mythic Bastionland game is happening over at twitch.tv/actualplay with Judd Karlman running and me and Jay as players. It was a lot of fun despite me being sick. Judd is an excellent improviser who asked good questions and wove his prep very deftly with the answers we were giving. My knight was in service to Jay’s knight and I kinda pushed him into confronting the threat head-on. So when his character died (yup!) in the ensuing fight, it was basically my fault. He’s rolling up a new knight for the next session and I’m rolling up a lot of baggage and guilt for my girl to carry.

I still don’t have coherent thoughts about the game’s design but here’s a couple things on second blush (this is my second time with the game).

First, like all rules-light games, there’s going to be a huge variation in play experience depending on the group. This sounds obvious but it’s still so hard to talk about. It’s not that the game isn’t opinionated. In many ways, it’s Chris McDowall’s most opinionated game. But there’s still a lot of empty space to be filled by prior experience and personal tastes. The GM will set the tone in a big, big way.

Second, the combat stuff is tense and fun! It’s a dice game, first and foremost. All the narrative and drama and tension comes from whether the dice roll well or not. Honestly, you don’t even really have to narrate your actions. It adds very little because the story of the combat is the story of how the dice fall. There was a brief moment in the session where both sides had nothing particularly interesting to do but grind each other down — but it was literally one round and because it plays so fast, it’s really no big deal.

Yours knightly but sickly,

Thomas

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II. Media of the Week

• RTFM had a really funny episode where the two hosts, Aaron and Max, give out awards (called the Effies) to games they have read. The results are maybe unsurprisingly similar because they clearly have similar tastes but it’s still an enjoyable ride to get there.

• Five Minutes, Not 5e is a new series where the host Daniel introduces indie RPGs through a five minute conversation with the designer. This one is about Weakless Universe, a worldbuilding game where you build a setting through “a conspiracy-board-style web of lore, starting with a mysterious central event“. I think worldbuilding games are always an argument about what makes a good setting and this one putting a secret at the heart of everything makes sense.

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III. Links of the Week

• Kieron Gillen writes on Old Men Running The World about companions in RPGs: “[The game] sees humans as individuals who have a fundamental capacity by themselves. Sure, other people can help them… but they are them, and their victories are their own. Through this filter, it’s one of the tells of the culture where Dungeons & Dragons emerged – American, the country where the all-men-are-an-island libertarian philosophy took root.”
• I really liked this Doc Burford essay about videogame criticism. I’m not sure how widely applicable the problem is but it’s about the idea that all criticism works best as a personal essay, i.e., the subject is actually the author.
• The Playful Void blog has some good advice on creating: don’t wait to create, don’t wait to learn: “You have to do the work of bad design to get to the work of good design. Don’t let anything stop you from your practice. And at the same time, you have to do the work of learning about game design.”
• I also caught up on the last two issues of Hendrik Biweekly. The latest one is a very good exploration of The Last Caravan, a game about surviving an alien invasion and journeying across a landscape. Basically, the game has a classic problem: when given the goal of surviving, the optimal play style is to take no risks ever. As Hendrik puts it, “There’s a big blank at the heart of The Last Caravan: not enough of its limits push the players into the exciting, dangerous scenes the game would like to see them in.”
• An interview with Michael Duxbury of Cubicle 7 about the upcoming Warhammer Old World RPG.
• I enjoyed this short tumblr blog about playing an RPG with family who have no idea what they even are: “we spent just a little over an hour playing Lasers & Feelings with my spouse, their mum and dad, and their aunt.”
• On the Dice Pool blog, a sweet blog about three times where the author cried at the table.

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IV. Small Ads

All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.

• Enter the cursed realm of Purple Reaping—a Dark Fantasy TTRPG and D&D5e setting. Unleash twisted magic, face ancient horrors, and shape grim destinies. Back our Kickstarter and embrace the darkness!
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• SHIVER Corporate. A TTRPG all about when capitalism goes really really bad 📌 Sharpen your pencils and load up your stapler, this workplace is a warzone Launching soon here on Backerkit.

This newsletter is sponsored by the the wonderful Bundle of Holding. Check out the latest bundles below:

• Battlezoo Bestiaries for 5e with resources for harvesting monster parts and crafting with them.
• Hearts of Wulin, one of my favourite PbtA games and a great engine for melodrama and wuxia.

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Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend or buy one of my games from my itch store. If you’d like to say something to me, you can reply to this email or click below!