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I just wrapped up a 12 session campaign of Mythic Bastionland and I want to start off by saying we really enjoyed it. I agree with all of the positives that have been laid out in other reviews: the fantastic art (to my taste, the best of any RPG book I have seen), the concise and elegant ruleset, the strange and evocative knights and myths, and the combat system that manages to make fights even faster than bare-bones OSR games, while offering more tactical depth.

That said, by the end of the campaign I was struggling. I felt like I was fighting against the very systems that so impressed me at the start of the game. The rest of this review is going to sound very critical, because my issues with the system are what I wanted to talk about, but I want to reiterate that we enjoyed our time with Mythic Bastionland and I would encourage anyone curious to check it out for themselves.

A part of me worries that this review pulls back the curtain a bit too much, and it might spoil some of the magic for new players. If you intend to play (not GM) a game of MB, I would probably encourage you not to read further.

The core system

At its heart, Mythic Bastionland is a hexcrawl. Hexcrawls have several big issues that can make them difficult or awkward to run. One, which MB handles excellently, is resource management. Quinns covered this well in his review, so I won’t repeat him. But another issue, arguably the biggest issue, is that hexcrawls just have a lot of hexes! If the choice of which hex to travel through is going to be a meaningful one, those hexes need to be different, which means either a ton of preparation (the majority of which will never be used), using a premade hexcrawl (which won’t be to everyone’s taste), or using randomly generated content (which can feel, well… random, and isn’t the most conductive to storytelling).

MB’s solution to this issue is its Myths, which provide six short events each (called Omens), along with a couple of stat blocks, a random table, and a gorgeous illustration. While travelling, the party has a chance to encounter the next Omen from one of the six Myths active in the realm. Myths and Omens vary wildly, from unexpected weather, to an undead tyrant subjugating the entire realm, but they all have a coherent narrative, which will be experienced in order. Of course the PCs will usually steer the course of events, but the GM will always have an Omen ready to go, no matter where the PCs decide to go. This provides interesting content that tells stories without needing much prep and still giving the GM wide latitude to create a world.

Though this system can be slow to get going (early Omens are often quite vague and lack the hooks I would want to inspire my players to action), a few sessions in I really started appreciating it. The amount of prep it would have taken to balance six competing stories in parallel would have been significant, and my players started getting invested in the narratives. I liked how varied the Myths felt, in tone, content, and pacing. But as time went on I started to have more and more problems with the system.

First off, is it really a meaningful choice which hex to travel through if what happens is mostly random? Are Myths just “quantum ogres” that randomly pop out, independent of player agency? The book suggests using its spark tables to generate content while travelling, which can provide flavor, but does it make the players’ decisions meaningful? Also, as more Myths are introduced the number of bread crumb trails started to overwhelm my players and they began to lose track of the various threads. The narrative felt scattered and random.

This is probably where I should reveal what I meant by running the game “wrong”. At my core, I am a “trad” GM. If one of my players has a long-lost father or an obsession with ancient tomes, I want to reveal the villain is the PC’s father or tantalize them with a hidden library. The Myths in the book are fascinating, varied, and great at sparking the GM’s imagination, but I found myself desiring a unified narrative, woven to draw in and interact with the PCs specifically. MB tends towards the OSR end of the RPG spectrum: random generation is core to play (the majority of the book is in fact, a giant random table of knights, myths, creatures, moods, dwellings, etc) and the core motivation of the players gets one sentence that provides a pretty unambiguous direction: knights want glory, glory comes from Myths. More and more I started tweaking Myths, changing the results on the exploration table, and trying to come up with ways to steer the ship. By the end I wasn’t even rolling the die. I was using an OSR-style system to run a trad-style game and I felt it.

Balance

MB doesn’t provide any tools for balancing encounters, or even hints at how dangerous its various foes will be when taking on PCs. Quinns brought this up in his review and a pretty common response I saw was that Quinns is just a trad GM looking for balance and fairness in an OSR system that is mostly unconcerned with those factors. “Combat as war” means that the world isn’t balanced around the players, and they need to learn how to deal with it. With the admission that I am another trad GM experimenting in the world of OSR, I have to say that I just don’t buy it.

The desire to understand how threatening a creature is doesn't mean everything in the world must be fair and balanced. If I want a big horrible monster to be terrorizing the realm, but a junior knight PC kills it handily, not only is that unsatisfying gameplay, it's a narrative issue. If the monster was that much of a pushover, how was he such a threat?

If this sounds like an extreme case, know that throughout my campaign I never once felt like a group combat challenged my players. They went toe to toe with some of the biggest threats in the book (with some additional buffs improvised to make them more dangerous) and always came out victorious and often with 0 vigor damage. My read was always that the combats were balanced around 2-3 PCs and my group of 5 was simply too powerful to be threatened.

In MB in particular, I think power scales very fast with party size because of how Feats and strong gambits work. While I think I was getting close to figuring out how to balance a combat by the end, I really wish there had been something in the book that saved me the time. The frustrating thing is that combat in MB is excellent, but at my table it only really shined in one on one duels where 5 knights weren't bullying some hapless monster. Once again, maybe this is not the OSR mindset, but to me being able to craft a threatening encounter without a ton of trial and error is important.

Conclusion

Mythic Bastionland pulled me in with its art and evocative Knights and Myths and impressed me with its tight systems and snappy combat. But I do think that the core of MB is OSR, while I prefer the trad style of GMing. I enjoyed my foray into a style of gaming I hadn't really experienced before, but for now, I will probably be returning to systems more aligned with my personal style.

I recently made the jump from running D&D 5e for a few years to trying out other systems, and I keep running into the same experience: the rules are fine, but my brain keeps defaulting to D&D assumptions in ways I don't even notice until something breaks.

For example, coming from 5e I kept expecting every system to have some equivalent of advantage/disadvantage, or assuming that higher numbers always mean better. Running something like Blades in the Dark or Call of Cthulhu felt genuinely disorienting at first, not because the rules were hard to learn, but because I had so many bakedin habits from years of D&D.

I'm curious what adjustments other people found hardest when moving away from D&D, or any system they'd played for a long time. Was it purely mechanical, like learning a different dice resolution system? Was it more about shifting your GM philosophy, like moving away from encounter balance as a concept? Or did the fictionfirst versus rulesfirst divide trip you up?

I ask because there's a real skill in unlearning a system, not just learning a new one, and I don't see that talked about much. Would love to hear specific examples from people who made a significant system switch.

We've been having a lot of discussion at our table about 5E's "bouncing characters off 0" with potions.. and then some discussion about 3.5/PF and negative hitpoints.

Has a game ever had a death mechanic that felt like the character's life was in the balance, and not just "you hit 0, you died"? It just feels a bit sudden.

I played on at Garycon, where dead characters became "ghosts" that could help or hinder other players, so they weren't completely out of the game.

I've had a lot of conversations with friends about "oh I can't wait for this game to come out" only to be the one to say, "it's already out".

Thought maybe some people could mention some games they've had that moment with.

I've had friends say "I wish there was a Fallout RPG" and I'd point to modiphius's game. Or if that's not their cup of tea lvl to xps' DnD homebrew version.

Just started playing Slugblaster with a newish group a month ago. We are about 4ish hours in.

For those that don't know, it's based on Blades in the Dark. There are basically 2 phases . . . a "sesh" where characters jump through a portal into another rhelm and skate, do tricks, and try to look cool without getting eaten by a giant metacentipede.

Then there's the downtime where they go back home, are teenagers, dealing with teenager stuff like parents and school. They also level up their gear.

We started with them on a "sesh" where they were in a different world, skating. I treated it like a tutorial. The did some skate tricks, earned some style, got to play around, got chased by salvage crabs and met a snotty 12 year old.

Today we did their first downtime. We played out two of the home life stuff . . . one character trying to impress his distant dad and the other stranded my his mom over burnt nachos with an annoying little brother.

At the end of the game today, one of my players said, "wow . . . that downtime, the at home stuff, was almost more intense and more fun that the part where we were skating around and doing tricks."

I think we might be hooked. This is a really great game.

A bit more detail?

Sure.

During the sesh, one of the players biffed it during the "disaster roll." He bit his tongue, hard, making is swell and bleed. He has to talk with a lisp and I put a 3 box timer for it to be cured.

Back at another player's house, he got a cup of ice for it to bring the swelling down, but he filled in a box.

At home, when I asked him what was for dinner, I he wasn't sure, so I had him roll a D6 for it.

He rolled a 1.

Dinner was overcooked nachos. He had to take a bite. He had to erase the filled in "tongue healed" box.

Tomorrow is the big party . . . will his tongue be healed?

Who knows.

This is both a self-promo and a crowdfunding post. Mods, if I need to change the flair, I'm happy to.

FORGOTTEN ODYSSEYS is the new tabletop RPG from Adam "Badeye" Bradford, a tabletop industry veteran, the founder of D&D Beyond, and the writer and designer of the Invincible Superhero Roleplaying Game. You play as soldiers traveling home from the Trojan War when Eris, the goddess of chaos and strife makes it her personal mission to stop you from getting home.

Inspired by Homer's The Odyssey and Greek mythology more generally, the game uses the Mork Borg system to create a perilous journey for the players to overcome. Will you survive the journey home?

Full disclosure: I own and operate the publishing company behind the project, Broken Door Entertainment.

There was a post a couple days ago here about reasons game groups fail and a common reason people offered was passive players who “just want to be entertained”.

I’m not sure I’ve experienced this - what does a passive player problem look like?

I’ll often have a quieter member of the group who lets the more assertive players take the lead, but as long as they make a positive contribution to the game that’s not a problem for me.

Admittedly I’m not a 5E guy and this feels like 5E-centric problem.

UPDATE: Thanks all, you’ve helped clarify it for me.
I would probably just remove a player that consistently added nothing to the game like that after a few sessions - so I guess that’s why I don’t have this problem often.

Does anyone else have a completely different experience when sharing their RPGs or asking for feedback in English-speaking communities compared to their own country's community?

This has happened to me twice now. In English communities, I've received constructive criticism, detailed feedback, and even some praise. In my local community, the response was mostly downvotes. 🙃

I'm curious if this is a cultural difference, a difference in community size, or if I've just been unlucky.

Has anyone else experienced something similar?

I'm reading "The Ellusive Shift: How Roleplaying Games Forged Their Identity" by John Peterson at the moment. An RPG from the 1970s called Legacy keeps cropping up, but I'm struggling to find it anywhere online.

Partially this is because 2026 search engines are terrible, but it also seems like it fell into obscurity pretty quickly. Does anyone know if copies/pdfs (or just more information about it) are available anywhere? I'd love to read the actual text, the design decisions described in The Ellusive Shift sound pretty wild.

I've been working on a kinda depressing TTRPG concept, a campaign that is based around minimising the damage of unavoidable failures, rather than any sort of traditional success. No idea if it will work, but it is the idea stuck in my head, so here I am.

To that end, I am wondering if there are any systems you have played that have supported a more depressing tone? I'm looking for systems that help develop a feeling of connection and then loss, rather than just relying on the GM to do all the work. Any recommendations or advice is appreciated.