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Oathmaking: Beyond the Three Oaths in Mythic Bastionland

 In my current, sort of weird "one shot" of Mythic Bastionland, I situated the Three Oaths as the central tension within the limited setting. All the major characters exhibit or foil or make demands of an Oath, and this puts the players' Knights in conflicts with the other two of them. Even when I ran Mythic Bastionland longer form, I found each Knight's relationship with the Three Oaths (how they interpreted them, how they weighed their importance, if the order they were sworn mattered, if being a Knight meant anything more than them alone) to be the most interesting source of drama. And it, so far, has worked really really well. Mythic Bastionland is already a fantastic game for randomly getting a character and discovering who they are; I think this has just given a really good reference point to support it. So that's been great. What I did not expect, though, is everyone would start making new Oaths all over the place. I think at an average of once per session,...
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NPC Knights for Mythic Bastionland

I've run Mythic Bastionland as a general campaign once before, and I had fun rolling up some Knights for NPCs to run the Holdings, but I was also stressed out that one of my players would roll up the same Knight and one of us would have to change. It didn't happen, of course, and led to some interesting stories that were inspired directly from the results of the Knights I rolled. Still, when I rolled up a one shot (more of a four shot, at this rate), I didn't want to roll for Knights from the player list. It didn't seem worth the risk of having duplicates: I wasn't about to ask my players to re-roll Knights they might be excited about just because I had done so first, and I didn't think we would have time for such duplicates to create an interesting narrative. Ultimately, I just thought about some adjectives that would make for an evocative but straightforward Knight, and voila, the Grey Knight and the Fury Knight were born. However, there was a chance other Kni...
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Local Heresies (or how there is no one religion)

Local Heresies  When running Outcast Silver Raiders, I found I wanted to make the world feel more real AND strange at the same time. Simultaneously, I began to do a bit of research into the medieval world (more than my interest in fantasy tabletop RPGs had already led me to do, that is) and in fact our world in general and came across a lot of information about religion at the time. One thing in particular that stuck out with me is the idea that there is no such thing as a "normal" Christian. Yes, even today we might be aware that Christianity is divided into sects and denominations and that in the past, many traditions were born out of local customs during conversion to Christianity itself, but even beyond that, people practice religion as it applies to them and think of it as the way everyone does. If this sounds at all odd or strange, well, good, that is the goal, but let's see if we can ground it in reality too.    A good example, I think, is a widespread belief and p...
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