11 Players is taxing for most systems, some are absolutely not manageable with so many. Mythic Bastionland is explicitly built for a maximum of five, maybe six.
And yet.
And yet, circumstances dictate that I have to give it a shot and herd no less than 11 cats … I mean, run for 11 young Knights Errant, a short campaign in the Mythic Bastionland. Sounds crazy? Well… I guess it is. But the group has recently struggled with arguments about the finer points of rules and their interpretation, and I felt that they needed to get out of the rut, for example by being thrown into a new game with new rules that none of them know?

I have experience with the earlier Odd-Games, namely Into the Odd, Playtest Electric and finished Electric Bastionland, so I feel pretty secure handling the system. However, I am very new to Mythic Bastionland, and it does have some new wrinkles that need adjusting to. On the plus side, I love it. There were some parts of the move from ItO to Electric Bastionland that I did not fully like, but Mythic Bastionland addresses my issues with these changes and develops the system in new and exciting ways.

Emerging Story

I shaved off the process of Knighting itself, assuming they all got knighted a short while ago and are now called to board a ship and move to the northern realm, because. I leaned into the fact that such a large number of Knights is unusual, and downright unbelievable to have them all come off one ship. They are a force, strong enough to topple the gouvernment and take over, if they were so inclined.

Who could stop them? Even a Seat of Power can only field three, in a pinch maybe four Warbands to defend the realm, and 11 motivated knights with their Feats of Smiting (attacking just such groups of lesser fighters) and Denying (voiding dice) can make mincemeat out of such a ragtag pile of poor guardsmen.

Luckily that is not why these knights are here! They have been called up and they don’t even know why, but they have sworn an oath to Protect the Realm.

First of all I introduced the players to the combat system by challenging one of them to a non-lethal jousting match. The waiting knight offered that he, if successful, would win and keep the loser’s horse and armor; while if defeated, he would offer the whole party sustenance, good cheer, and free lodgings. The player agreed instantly and boasted that he would drop this challenger fast. Alas, the two were almost evenly matched, with the NPC bringing even higher Vigour to the table than the player character. And so it came to pass that the challenger won and the PC had to relinquish his beautiful armor and helm with the family crest.. the horse, there the strange knight showed courtesy and let the young opponent keep his steed.

So the group met with the local ruler, who likewise had no idea why the Seers had seen fit to throw eleven young, untested Knights into his lap. But he saw the opportunity: He had an issue in his household, where his wife had been caught in a less than ideal situation with one of his subjects and had even attempted to get rid of his lordship. He had already ordered his wife to stay in the north tower from now on (basically the maximum sentence for a woman of noble blood), and would see her companion killed, but it was a bit difficult to get that done, with the man not strictly guilty of more than besmirching the lord’s honor. Luckily these fresh knights had an idea: an honorable duel! So the freshly beaten Jouster had another chance to get back on his proverbial horse.

The next day he confronted the too good friend of the ruler’s wife, made sure that the odds were honorably even (he chose to forego all his advantages) and happened to win, killing the offender in melee on foot after he had unhorsed him in the joust.

On the way they had already met with one omen, now the second omen came on and the party decided to confront the myth behind it: Undead walking the land up north, potentially threatening a holding in that direction. The Lord also felt that this myth in the north may be the reason why the seers had sent this company his way. Alas, on the way north the party split up (!) and one of the three subgroups made a quick detour to one of the seers: The Buried Seer, lying underneath the old menhir of a historical hero’s cairn. On that way, they encountered an omen from another myth, the Citadel, which the seer felt very strongly about, and alerted these young knights in exasperated terms. Until the three subgroups re-joined, they had already encountered a third omen from the Dead and a second omen from the Citadel, so now they were wondering how to prioritize, and which one was the “real” myth, and which was a “lesser” one that could wait a bit?

Learnings

The players leaned into their new roles as Knights with excitement. The big rules issues they had before this new game were almost exclusively about magic rules, and so it was fantastic to have everyone a Knight and no-one with magical powers that need interpretation.

Interestingly, the players have bought into the identity as knights very keenly. Even to the point where they have slain an undead and decided that the creature should be burned — but none of them felt it was the job of a knight to do so. They looked around to find a common farmer whom they can order to do it, but nobody was there, so with a heavy heart they had to get off their horses and pile up the wood themselves. Cinema!

That the rules are very simple made it easy for them to get into them – also, most of these players have already played Into the Odd or Electric Bastionland with me, so they recognized the main tenets quickly. Both of these factors combined helped tremendously in running for 11, because they needed no big explanations … except for one.

The players are all used to collecting experience points and levelling up, and they always have a hard time with systems that don’t do that. Mythic Bastionland doesn’t do that. You can gain Glory, but you won’t get stronger or smarter from that. And you can’t skill up, because you are already skilled up. All the development that is to be had is in the fiction. That’s a struggle. They are adapting, but there is a deep sense of some important thing missing. I am tempted to invent some extra thing that they can earn through experience points.

For me, the learning curve is steep and I struggle with populating the world fast enough for 11 players’ questions. That is a pretty strong stress factor, so I tend to agree that five knights is plenty. On the other hand, steep learning curves are growing opportunities, so I shall take it as such. I’ll just have to crank up my quick-thinking and improvising to, literally, eleven.

— image ai generated, then manually edited for corrections