I have always wanted to love Pendragon.
On paper it should be my perfect game: doomed knights, big feelings, generational tragedy, Britain drenched in rain and prophecy. In practice, the Pendragon Starter Set and I parted ways somewhere between the tournament rules and the very polite railroad of The Sword Campaign. The tourney and mass battle subsystems were a lot, the adventures felt like being a capable extra in “The Early Years of King Arthur,” and I never got further than running the first couple of scenarios before quietly shelving it.
Then I ended up playing in a campaign of Mythic Bastionland, same broad conceptual space (knights, myths, visions of a shining City), but through Chris McDowall’s Into the Odd lens and found myself thinking: oh, this is what I was looking for.
It turns out I don’t actually want to lovingly recreate Malory. I want the feeling of mythic knighthood: misty hills, bad omens, weird hermits, and real freedom to blunder into the wrong valley and make poor life choices. I want combat that feels dangerous and dramatic without consulting four tables. Mythic Bastionland delivers exactly that, with a gratifying lack of fuss.
Knights without a Syllabus
Mythic Bastionland bills itself as “Before Into the Odd” and wears its influences openly, including Pendragon and Prince Valiant. You play a Company of Knights in a misty, broken Realm, all united by an Oath and dreams of the distant City that no one has yet reached. Seers knight you, send you out together, and that’s it. The world doesn’t particularly care what you do next.
Characters are built around three Virtues (VIGOUR, CLARITY, and SPIRIT) plus Guard (GD), which is your ability to avoid real injury. You roll a couple of dice, assign them in order, grab a Knight template that gives you Property, a special Ability, and a Passion (a personal way to restore Spirit), then swear the Oath:
SEEK THE MYTHS
HONOUR THE SEERS
PROTECT THE REALM
That’s your job description. No lifepaths, no fifteen derived stats, no shopping list. Every Knight also gets the same three Feats (Smite, Focus, Deny) which are special, once-in-a-fight bursts of extra effort that might fatigue you if you push too hard.
On paper it’s almost suspiciously simple. In play it gives you exactly enough to hang a personality on. My Willow Knight felt distinct because of his Passion, his scrap of backstory, and the situations he blundered into, not because I’d spent an hour allocating points.
Pendragon, by contrast, gives you a much richer psychology out of the box (Traits and Passions, Glory, Honor, lineage) but in the Starter Set all that colour is largely harnessed to get you into the right place at the right time to watch Arthur pull swords out of unlikely objects. Mythic Bastionland shrugs and says: “Here’s a Virtue score and a doomed dream. Off you go.”
Myths, Realms, and the Hex That Awaits You
Where Pendragon nails the longitudinal myth, decades of Arthur’s Britain, year-by-year, Mythic Bastionland nails the lateral one: a single Realm full of half-remembered stories that might kill you.
The Referee builds a Realm on a hex map, typically 12×12, with a handful of Holdings, a Seat of Power, and six scattered Myth Hexes, places where reality is fraying under the weight of some big story. There are also Landmarks hiding in the wilderness: Sanctums where Seers live, Dwellings, Ruins, Hazards, Monuments, Curses. Spark tables help you quickly sketch “what’s here and why it’s odd.”
A Myth is not “a module.” It’s more like a pressure system: an Omen, some forces at work, a sense of how things might go horribly wrong. Everyone’s version of the myth is a bit different; all of them are true “in some way.” The Knights wander, meet Seers, get glimpses of these Myths, and decide which ones to pursue or ignore. When the group feels a Myth has been resolved, everyone involved gets Glory.
Glory is how you climb the Knightly ladder:
- At 0 Glory you’re Knight-Errant;
- At 3, Knight-Gallant;
- At 6, Knight-Tenant, and so on, up to Knight-Radiant at 12, “worthy of the City Quest.”
It’s a beautifully clean way of tying big-picture goals to emergent play. There’s no pre-written “campaign” in the Pendragon sense; your saga is literally the list of Myths you chose to tangle with.
In the campaign I’m playing in, this feels like an enormous amount of possibility. Every hex is a potential disaster we haven’t yet caused. The Seers feel like weather forecasters for story: they can tell us a storm is coming, but not what we’ll do in it.
In the Pendragon Starter Set and the other published books I’ve seen so far, by contrast, you’re working in a very structured railroad. The Sword Campaign is explicitly a tutorial. One that can take a half-a-dozen sessions to play. Each year has a scenario that teaches a different subsystem (tournament, battle, enchanted forest, and so on) and many scenes are there to be witnessed as key beats in Arthur’s story. The text tells the GM, quite reasonably, not to linger on the cutscenes.
Mythic Bastionland has no cutscenes. If something dramatic happens, it’s because you walked into it. It doesn’t need a campaign long tutorial before you can have player agency to shape the story.
Combat: Chess with Hammers, but Fast
The bit that has really sold MB to me, though, is the combat system.
Everything revolves around Guard and the three Virtues. When you get hit, the Damage first comes off your Guard. If you still have at least 1 GD left, you’ve “evaded”: bruised, but fine.
If it drops you to exactly 0, you gain a Scar, a lasting injury like a smashed rib, concussion, or lost finger that shaves off some Virtue.
If the damage exceeds your remaining Guard, the excess spills into VIGOUR as a Wound; if you lose half or more of your VIG in one go, it’s a Mortal Wound and you’re dying on the floor unless someone patches you up. Hit VIG 0 and you’re dead.
Guard comes back quickly after a moment of peace; Virtues and Scars do not. You can restore Virtues with specific Remedies (feasts, stimulants, sacraments) or actions (staying in warm hospitality, seeking a Seer’s guidance, indulging your Passion), or just by time passing to a new Season. This makes every fight a kind of psychological as well as physical stress test.
Attacks are where the system feels genuinely novel. You don’t roll to hit individually. Instead:
- You take the Attack dice from your weapon, shield, and any bonuses (like a charging steed or an ally helping).
- Everyone attacking the same target rolls at the same time.
- The defender can use Deny to drop one of those dice if they want to risk Fatigue.
- Attackers can spend any dice of 4+ on Gambits: push the foe back, stop them moving next round, dismount them, disarm a shield, boost the final damage, and so on. A really high die in melee can fuel a Strong Gambit that does something nastier or ignores a save.
- Whatever highest die remains, plus any Bolster, minus the target’s Armour, is the Damage.
There are no to-hit rolls, no AC, no long lists of situational modifiers. The interesting decisions are after you see the dice: do we burn this 7 on a brutal disarm, or do we keep it to punch through their armour? Do I Smite for extra damage and risk exhausting myself, or save that Feat for the thing lurking behind this knight?
Pendragon’s combat isn’t exactly cumbersome (opposed skill rolls, success levels, chunky horses) but by the time you layer on mounted charges, shield parries, mass battle rules and so on, it starts to feel like revising for an exam. Mythic Bastionland keeps the tactical texture (formation rules, spearwalls, shieldwalls, warbands, sieges are all in there), but you can run a fight, on the fly, without your brain filing for industrial action.
At the table, fights feel short, sharp and dangerous. Someone takes a Scar and the players wince. A Deny that drops the only high die feels like a cinematic parry. Bonus dice from set-up and positioning matter more than build optimisation. It’s satisfying, not crunchy.
The Drama Between the Duels
Outside combat, the game runs on simple Saves: roll a d20 under the relevant Virtue when the outcome is risky or uncertain. Failures don’t always mean “you don’t do the thing,” just “you do it and now you have a problem.” The Referee’s Action Procedure explicitly encourages trading Virtue loss or new complications in return for success, which puts the weight of play on fictional consequences over mechanical nudges.
There are rules for Seasons and Ages. You can run anything from a single adventure to a chronicle with Winter and campaign turns, all the way up to a loose, open-ended saga where the company ages along with the Realm. But the book never insists on a particular way to do it. It offers a scaffolding, not a syllabus.
One of the fun and perhaps challenging aspects of campaign management is that players decide when a myth is dealt with and how much time passes inbetween sessions. It could be you pick up exactly where you left off and continue exploring the challenge posed by the current myth your group is engaged with. Or it could be a week, a month, or years later when your characters are older with just memories of that time they dealt with the grumpy dwarf who saved them from the earth giants.
That’s the enduring difference for me. Pendragon is brilliant at giving you a way to play: one scenario per year, Winter Phase, Glory and family and estate management over decades. It just happened that the way I met it, via a very linear starter set that had to teach me everything from tournaments to battles in a few fixed adventures, felt constrained.
Mythic Bastionland, by contrast, constantly gestures outward. It gives you a Realm and says: “You know where some things are. Everything else is rumours and hills. Go annoy a Seer until something interesting happens.”
Who Mythic Bastionland Is (Not) For
If you want an Arthurian game where you faithfully follow the literary timeline, hobnob with canonical characters, and fight lovingly detailed mass battles while tracking every Passion, Pendragon is still your champion. It revels in that. Mythic Bastionland cheerfully does not care what year it is, and your King is only important if you decide he is.
If you love build-craft, deep tactical subsystems and clear mini-games for social situations, Mythic Bastionland will probably feel a bit bare-bones. You get a handful of Feats, some very clean procedures, and a lot of “make a ruling that feels right.” It assumes you’re happy making interesting fiction out of simple tools.
But if you want:
- Knights defined more by what they do than what’s printed on page 87 of the Great Campaign;
- A mythic landscape that feels open and a bit uncanny rather than tightly plotted;
- Combat that is fast, dangerous and tactical without being a second job;
- The option to die ignobly in a ditch after refusing a Seer’s perfectly sensible advice…
…then Mythic Bastionland is very, very good.
For me, it scratches the Pendragon itch I actually had, not the one I thought I was supposed to have. I still love the idea of Arthurian generational tragedy. But when I sit down to play, I’d rather be a slightly confused Knight-Gallant tromping through swampy hexes, picking fights with myths and occasionally surviving, than the polite spear-carrier at the back of someone else’s legend.
Mythic Bastionland lets me do that. And it never once asks me to learn the tournament rules.
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