Big Companies

I've had a few people ask about playing Mythic Bastionland with larger groups of players. I've found the game flows at its best with 2-4 players, but getting up to 5 or more starts to raise a few noticeable effects.

• As discussed previously, Knights are powerful, so this effect is compounded when you've got six of them riding into battle. With so many gambits and smites and denies they can be tough to challenge, martially. Whether this is a problem or not is open for debate, but it certainly creates a different feel to playing with smaller groups.
• Combat often involves everyone throwing their dice into a pool and working out what to do with their dice. The larger the group, the more chaotic and crowded this can feel, sometimes even sluggish, so I think you lose a bit of the dramatic effect it usually causes.
• With so many Knights in the group it's less appealing to have additional characters tagging along like squires or other NPCs, and they can create some interesting contrast to the Knights.

So what do I recommend if you want to play with, say, a company of six players?

First of all, you don't need to change anything. I think the game still works, it just feels different. But if you want to try something new I have two options.

Rookie Knights
Everyone makes a Young Knight as normal, but apply the following changes:

• Virtues are rolled on 2d6 instead of d6+d12
• Each combatant can only be targeted by a single gambit from any given attack, no matter how many attackers were involved.
• Bolster is the exception to the above, and can be applied multiple times to the same target.

So the end result is more fragile characters with fewer Feats and Gambits being thrown around in combat, while keeping those systems intact.

Grand Company Setup
Tear up nine scraps of paper and label them as the following:

• 3 x Knight
• 3 x Squire
• 3 x Raider

Each player draws a random character type. Now personally I'd rig the draw so that there's a guarantee of at least one of each type to keep things interesting. So build a pool with one of each type, then randomly add the other types until you've got a pool of character types equal to the number of players.

Knights roll a character as a normal.

Squires roll a squire as detailed in the book, also rolling here to get an extra detail.

Raiders make a character using this method, representing raiders who have been converted to the wisdom of the seers, but have not taken the Oath. They still track Gold, not Glory, but they're more inclined to mercenary work than raiding the holdings of the realm. Ignore the stuff about the ship, you have a pony instead and an axe (d8 hefty), shield (A1, d4) , and 3 javelins (d6).

Players pissed off about being a squire and not a Knight? Is it weird that there are semi-converted raiders lumped in here? Yeah, I guess, but lean into it. Give the Squires some sort of path to Knighthood, play up the philosophical conflict between Knights and Raiders, maybe the company hate that one player who got to be a cool Knight so much that they consider murdering them.

Have fun!

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