When a game is all gas no brakes. Some early thoughts on Mythic Bastionland after a breakneck first few sessions.
1 Like
Great writeup, thank you. I’m glad someone experiences this game as “fast” as well. For me, this is probably the only real gripe I have with it. Triggering Omens every phase combined with the concept of Barriers meant that I had games where players burned through 5 Omens 3 hexes after landing. I’m on the fence if I should just keep rolling with this, since players had the feeling they had no opportunity to really engage before the Myth basically resolved itself, or came to a head.
1 Like
For my table it’s actually a huge plus. It means a lot gets covered in a shorter session which better aligns with our schedules. I look at the time limit on myths as a part of the challenge. They can resolve very quickly but really depends on how players engage with them. I think it’s fun to lure them away from myths from time to time with factional interplay. I like that myths sneak up on the players and throw them off-guard, but I can understand how that may lead to frustration.
Also seems like its worth letting some Omens spill over into the rest of the game. So characters can recur or certain situations develop off on their own. That way myths can be resolved but their fallout won’t be. So their effect on the world is continually evolving.
I can see the appeal of it certainly, and maybe I just got unlucky in that one game, where my player did not have a chance to find anything out about the Colossus before it simply expired. I disagree that this depends on player engagement, since Myths progress by simply moving around on the map. In most secondary Arthurian lit I read, the knights actively pursue Myths as part of quests, and I think this is the element that I personally miss. I would not know how to mitigate this without breaking the overall engine. Maybe I should just roll with it.
I definitely see how it can come across that way at first but the ruleset is explicit about sometimes needing to put the players’ goals before the mechanics of the myths. So if players are chasing a particular myth you can just let them chase it to the resolution. At first I really struggled with this in particular because I felt like I was breaking the myth, but at the end of the day I can’t force the myth to happen at the expense of their agency, which I kind of did in session 1 when I felt like they were going to solve it too soon.