A Mythic Bastionland Jam by Gnomestones, Part 1

Domain Play meets War Game meets Hexcrawl

My first Mythic Bastionland post went very well, so I was already planning another when the Mythic Bastionland Jam was announced. Will I be able to fit my obtuse and abstruse regional mapping techniques into the jam format? Will the MB resources have enough replayability to give me a second unique feeling map? Can the gnomes play well with others? Only the dice will tell; that’s how you play Gnomestones.

Get Mythic Bastionland here

There was one section of Mythic Bastionland I couldn’t stop thinking about. A vision from which I couldn’t turn away. It wasn’t the exploration and travel rules, though that’s usually the first place I look, and it wasn’t the knights and myths, excellent though they are. No, it was the Dominion section on page 20. I need my players to become vassal lords. I’m not sure why, but something had to be done.

It’s time to build a realm. Like last time, 12x12 hexes is our grid, roughly the regional landmass of Connecticut. Here’s the workstation:

We’re going use the Creating a Realm resource on page 14 and the spark tables on pages 20-25, adding knights, myths, and landmarks as we go. We’ll start with the land rolls. As we noted in our last Mythic Bastionland map, if we want to fill up the whole map with landmass using a d12 per type, we will need 15+ rolls. This time, we’re going to split the land rolls in terms of Holding.

Lands Organized By Four Holdings

Here we’ve unlocked something great: the concept of rolling up a holding for each player. Rolling someone’s kingdom in front of them and compared to others feels like gambling in the best way. Now we’re going to go through the Civilization, People, and Combat Pages in the same way. We’ll roll on each chart four times total, building the setting for the four different holdings.

Each holding gets one towncenter, one important person, a knight, a myth, a combat narrative, and a landmark. Also a lot of misfortune, through crises rolls but other ways too.

Rolling is fun! That’s a lot of data points, more than enough to generate several creative holdings. If you look through rolls carefully, you’ll see that several layers of intrigue and conspiracy are haunting the four vassal stastes.

Holding 1 is hosting a farewell tournament for their old warrior-king with ambitious successors plotting in shadows, while their ongoing crusade against the forest-dwellers is looking increasingly unsustainable and potentially malevolent. Holding 2 celebrates a trial for a long-sought murderer, but copycat killers panic the commonfolk and threaten to destabilize the relationship with Holding 3. While Holding 3’s leaders obsess over legends and fables, their people face ongoing raids and mysterious murders, and doubt for allies grows. Finally, in Holding 4 a blind savant sits on a throne of bones. His hammer-fencers are formidable, but several notable people have gone missing, and people whisper of witchcraft. Meanwhile, a royal marriage between Holdings 3 and 4 has been put on ice. Through it all, a new rumor rings bells of alarm across the land: warriors have been spotted in the East.

This is excellent flavor, and more than enough to create our four realms. Let’s get drawing! We’ll start by drawing the land types in pencil, adding the keep and other landmarks, with rough borders between the holdings.

It was like a puzzle to fit it all together!

Now my vision is starting to take form. Four holdings stand next to each other against the great beyond. Each one holds wealth and power, but risk losing their hexes to each other. Perhaps a greater threat will give them a common enemy. Time to add pen and shade with colored pencil.

Here they are! The land claimed by the four holdings are indicated with the colored borders, and each stronghold is colored as well. You can imagine how each player could take one holding, with the potential for trades and squabbles.

My goal isn’t to make a PvP game however. Instead, I want the players to fight against a greater enemy, who threaten to take all their hexes by conquest. My thought is that roleplay and land strategy can be interspersed with encounter battles, the way that Star Wars Battlefront 2 ran single player campaigns. Each holding will get a certain amount of army units, which they’ll be able to move around the map to claim and protect hexes. When needed, hexes can be zoomed in for encounters, and players can engage in battle and diplomacy as needed.

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I think we’re getting somewhere interesting, but this will require more thought. I’d like to envision some overland encounter rules a la Risk, and the missing portion of the map need to be filled on. Mysteries await, and so will we, until next time on Gnomestones.