The (Subtle?) Brilliance of Mythic Bastionland’s Time

The high value put upon every minute of time, the idea of hurry-hurry as the most important objective of living, is unquestionably the most dangerous enemy of joy.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Mythic Bastionland 📖 , in particular time. And serendipitously this aligns with the September 2026 RPG Blog Carnival Roll for Initative… Next Tuesday at 7pm? – of Dice and Dragons.

I’m thinking about Mythic Bastionland — 3d6 Down the Line, in which they skip a season between episode 6 “The Black Boar of Darkholt” and episode 7 “Croylehenge.” I like that they skipped to the next season. Yet I bristled a bit as to what all they packed into that skip.

But I digress and don’t want to linger on other people’s approach. Instead, I’ll pivot to my First Session of Running Mythic Bastionland for Others.

I didn’t ask the group at the end of the session how we should advance time, though I recall my initial inclination was that they would pursue resolving the curse. But, as I sat with it, letting some actual time pass, I think the better approach would be to advance time a few weeks, moving to Sceptermass.

Keeping Modernity out of My Myth

From a narrative perspective, it’s hard to envision the host of a tournament heading out the next day to address the curse. There’s petitioners to hear, business to tend to, and that general erosion of time that all “leaders” experience.

Second, the imposition of Sceptermass, and the ritual of renewing vows of loyalty imposes a subtle conflict for the knights. Renewing vows of loyalty does not directly conform to a knight’s oath. Yet one can perhaps see a line that to those oaths by way of the solidarity of renewing vows of fealty. That is having many aligned that have sworn to protect the realm.

The unasked question becomes: “Do you take direct action to protect the realm” or “Do you take what you hope to be indirect action by way of giving legitimacy to the state?” Do you want to operate in the arena of action or influence?

Then running as an even subtler undercurrent is character oath’s interplay with the myths we the players know from our real world. And how in agreeing, as players, that our characters will “Seek the Myths“ that we, as players, will consider our real world myths.

That is are we, as players, bringing into the game our shared desire to quest for Camelot? In which King Arthur is a steward and protector of a noble ideal? And what lurks in our ancestral memory? And how does this game invoke those memories?

Where There’s a Whip

Moving directly (in campaign time) from one activity to another mirrors an “always on” life style. I’ve witnessed Dungeon and Dragons games that are played out over the course of a year or two, but the elapsed in game time was less than a month. Not even enough time for the blossoms to bear fruit.

Instead everything was full of earth shattering changes and rapid character “build” advancement.

The underlying in-game driver feels like urgency and scarcity; move quickly to solve the world shattering apocalypse. Which feels like the whip of neo-liberalism lashing at the back of the characters.

Perhaps we do this in those games because we don’t have rules and guidance otherwise? Perhaps we do this because temporal continuity is easier to handle? Or maybe its the thrill of always being in motion? Or maybe the corporate nature of the production of the game is telling us something about labour?

Of note, I see that games are (again?) tending towards including downtime activities. But I’m wondering about procedures that move characters into that subsystem; and more importantly that move explicitly move the campaign calendar. That is to say many of the Dungeons and Dragons games I’ve played in and witnessed were run as though no one gets any downtime. (Sidenote: How very American?!?)

There’s a Way

To my knowledge Mythic Bastionland is rather unique in that it has a Session procedure for Advancing Time. The procedure is as follows:

At the end of each session, or during a natural break in their journey, the group decides how much time will reasonably pass:

• None: Pick up where you left off.
• Weeks: Continue to the next significant seasonal event.
• Months: Move to the next Season.
• Years: Begin a new Age in Spring.

If uncertain roll a d6:

• 1: Season or Age turns now.
• 2–3: Season or Age turns after next session.
• 4–6: The Season or Age continues.

The procedure then leads into simplified pursuits that can be somewhat quickly adjudicated. These pursuits are generally not unique compared to other games with downtime activities.

Another benefit of advancing a season or age, is that the characters restore all of their Virtues, which are a reflection of their ability to endure and accomplish heroic tasks.

Perversion of Gygax’s Admonition

Consider Gygax’s often quoted and referenced passage: “YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT.” (Sidenote: Emphasis Gary’s, in fact this is the only place in the Dungeon Master’s Guide that uses all caps. Perhaps not then meant as screaming, but let’s pretend it means that now.)

I think Mythic Bastionland ’s section on Time (p17) addresses the admonition in a slightly askew manner. First, it provides a campaign calendar, of 3 seasons, each with 3 events, which creates a year with 9 milestones. This concrete calendar does fantastic heavy lifting.

Each of those events have campaign significance, which relate to other aspects of the game. For knights errant, the collection events ending each season are of little consequence, but they become more important as those knights become rulers of a domain.

Further, the procedure moves the register of time from the mundane into the epic poem. That is where the time lapse between one stanza of a poem and the next can be a moment, season, year, age. And it is for the reader to puzzle through and derive meaning.

A Sort of Homecoming

Games that involve dungeon exploration often seem to have a home base, and as such create a place for downtime. And dungeon problems that stay in the dungeon foster conditions for downtime outside the dungeon. Letting the world breath at its own pace.

Consider that starting characters in Mythic Bastionland likely lack a home base. Nor are they heading into the dungeon, though mechanically traveling in the realm mechanically behaves as the dungeon (that is the random encounters happen there).

Once the knights enter a dwelling or holding, the realm’s exploration procedure halts.

I’d be hard pressed to say “Yup, we’re out exploring the realm and the session ends, let’s randomly advance time.” But I could see that while exploring we advance to the next event of the season, and have found the thing.

But “We’re in a holding engaging in politics” seems like a ripe moment to consider advancing the season or even the age. In part to highlight that as much as we try to exert control and influence, time and entropy also have a role to play.

The Advancing Time procedure is a nod towards having a discussion at the table, one that asks “Are we having fun with the current moment?” As the realm play is a different kind of game compared to the exploration.

A Brief and Incomplete Survey of Tracking Time

I want to briefly look at a few other games, lets first look at some of the Selected Inspirations of Mythic Bastionland , namely Cairn and Pendragon 📖 . There are others but I’m less familiar with them.

Cairn provides downtime activities and places them as character facing; namely if they want downtime, they need to seek it.

Pendragon provides an entire mini-game for downtime, namely the lauded Winter Phase in which characters check to see what all they advance by way of what all they did during their adventure(s) for the year. Part of Pendragon is providing a framing for the year to year ebb and flow of fortunes and family.

Moving very far afield, there’s Burning Wheel Gold 📖 , which includes guidance on how long some skill checks might take, how long it takes to train for a test, and how long wounds take to recover. There’s an implication that character recovery will necessarily create the conditions for the passage of time.

And there’s The One Ring 📖 , which moves between Adventuring Phase and Fellowship Phase; where the completion of an adventure means the characters get their necessary respite and recovery.

Finally, we have Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition, in which a complete recovery is achieved after a full rest. Which, I think, does a lot to inform the broader play culture of always being on, moving from one urgency to another. And I wonder how much the corporate nature of the “caretakers” of Dungeons and Dragons informs/necessitates that play style.

Also consider that Dungeons and Dragons has very much eschewed the more granular time tracking, namely random encounter checks each turn in the dungeon. It is as though the overhead of tracking time gets in the way of the urgency of jumping from one crisis to another.

All Your Bases Are Belong To Us

The flow of time in Mythic Bastionland functions as a home-base, one in which the troubles of the world do not directly interfere. It is a place where we, the players, should not spend long. (Sidenote: We are, after all, not playing Papers and Paychecks.) And that place is for mechanical recovery but not without cost: aging and events moving forward.

Those events progressing should not do so at a punitive rate but instead at a point where the mechanical cost of time advancing plus the player internalized cost of advancing time is less than the perceived benefit.

Once the Number Three, Being the Third Number, Be Reached

Mythic Bastionland , as a game, operates in a different register—the poetic—than most other games I’ve read and played. It moves with its own logic, that of fairy tale. In which time is of vital importance but behaves as its own character and meaning maker.

Mythic Bastionland operates in threes, an oft used number in myth and fairy tale. We can look to Bastion’s Triple Rule and see its influence in Mythic Bastionland ’s design. Consider the following threes:

• Seasons per Year (e.g. spring, harvest, winter)
• Events per Season
• Phases of the Day (e.g. morning, afternoon, night)
• Speeds of travel
• Character ages (e.g. young, mature, old)
• Rarities (e.g. common, uncommon, rare)
• Often table results (e.g. results for 1, 2–3, and 4–6)
• Virtues (e.g. Vigour, Clarity, and Spirit)
• Feats (e.g. Smite, Focus, and Deny)
• Oaths

There is also the Knight, Seer, Myth triad.

I consider this reinforcement of the number three to be a load-bearing pillar of Mythic Bastionland .

Conclusion

I’ve written this before, and will continue to write this again: I regularly think about Milan Kundera’s quote from Slowness: “There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting.”

When I want to remember something, I’ll go more slowly, pulling out paper and pencil, going for a walk, daydreaming for a bit.

I’d say Mythic Bastionland implies that we, as players, seek our collective myths (e.g. exhume our collective memory) and thus the game must support a slowness. One in which character’s accomplishments and actions roll out slowly across the fabric of time which is the ages unfurling.

And in that slowness, there is a speed, at which calendar time moves fast. One in which we the players never see all that is not important.