Book recommendation for your campaign

The material provided in Mythic Bastionland is great and more than enough to power your campaign. However, when you look at the procedures for creating landmarks for your Realm, a lot is left open for interpretation. Sure, you can roll on the Spark tables and pull out aspects from the Myths to generate some rough ideas. But sometimes I find it hard for my content to feel fresh and creative without putting a lot of time into prep.

That’s why for my campaign, I also draw ideas from Into the Wyrd and Wild by Charles Ferguson-Avery. Here are some of the chapters I’ve found especially useful during prep & play:

Beasts of Branch and Bone

A plethora of monsters for the knights to encounter. As a system-agnostic book it doesn’t include any stat blocks, but Mythic Bastionland stats are very easy to note down in advance or come up on the fly. One article that helped me tremendously to keep the fights challenging is High-Impact Enemies in Mythic Bastionland by Rotten Pulp.

In my campaign, my players have encountered the lair of the Bramble Beast and the nest of the Cacophonous Crowmen. The Crowmen have a table with various gruesome effects that I let the players roll on when they heard the Crowmen’s screeching. One knight went deaf for 24 hours and another got a glimpse into the future at the cost of their Clarity.

As an added bonus, I can show the frightening artwork to my players during play!

Artifacts of the Wild Hunter

Fun OSR-style magic items for your players to find. The effects are practically never mechanical but rather strange and potentially useful – if the players are creative enough.

One of my favourites here are the Fey Jump Shoes (p. 162):

A pair of Fey Jump Shoes is assigned a single element upon their creation. Anyone who wears these shoes cannot set foot on anything that is NOT the assigned element, and upon donning the shoes are immediately teleported to the nearest source of such element.

The elements include stuff like Ash, Light, Gold, and Blood. Go figure how this might help you!

I’ve put several of these artifacts on a treasure table that I let my players roll on whenever I feel that they’ve earned it.

Hazards and Traps

Mythic Bastionland itself just gives us one paragraph on Hazards:

Hazards: Nature fights every step. Devise a
solution, push through (lose d6 in a Virtue,
usually VIG), or go back the way you came.

Into The Wyrd and Wild contains a collection of concrete hazards that players might encounter during their travels. I’ve just rolled some at random and placed them on the Realm map.

In our last session, my players have encountered a field of Hungry Lilies: flowers with tiny mouths full of teeth that attack anyone who enters their vicinity. They’ve spent a phase of the day to burn them all down.

A Hundred Weird Locations

A collection of landmarks for the Realm. Basically like the Hazards but less evil. I’ve done the same thing as with the Hazards: rolled up a bunch of them and placed them around the map.

In the very beginning of my campaign, the Company encountered the grave of Altioc, a warrior that fought the Elves in ages past. While looting the grave, Altioc’s spirit appeared and after a tense moment of negotiation the knights convinced him that the Elves went extinct and his spirit may now rest. This will certainly not be the last time the knights have heard about the Elves though…

Random Tables

At the back of the book, there are some random tables that can be used for quick ideas during play. Basically an alternative to the Spark tables if you need anything a bit more concrete:

• “I search the body”: my players LOVE to loot corpses so here’s (mostly) some junk that I can give them if a treasure doesn’t feel appropriate.
• “Random Trails and Paths”: ominous descriptions of routes through the woods. Something like “The path is mysteriously devoid of any life. It smells of sulfur and blood”.
• “A Walk Through the Woods”: Again, mostly moody descriptions. Also includes descriptions of smell and sound which experienced DMs recommend but also which I find hard to come up with.

All in all, I find that Mythic Bastionland and Into the Wyrd and Wild are a great match: the latter fills in the blanks where the former is deliberately more vague. This vagueness can birth creativity and opportunities for discovery during play but sometimes I just want a concrete, well defined idea that I can pull out on a moment’s notice.

I’m not affiliated with Charles Ferguson-Avery and don’t use affiliate links. Just use your favourite search engine if you want to get the book or PDF.