Friendship is important to Mythras. Not only do the Players need to come together - so do their Adventurers.
This article explores the nature of team friendship, and what it means to the success, or failure, of a Mythras adventure.
Beginning with Session Zero, when the Adventurers are being generated together, the Games Master should bring the characters together, finding what is common to them or creating connections if they do not seem to have anything immediately in common.
Bac
Sooner or later, it is going to happen. Your Players' favourite Adventurers are going to enter a battle too far, and one of them will receive a critical injury, which turns into a fatal one when they fail their Endurance check and bleed out on the cold, unforgiving ground.
And you, as the Games Master, are going to have to tell your tearful Player that their beloved character has died.
Character Death
There are many ways a character can die. They can suffer a Serious or Major Woun
Let's play "spot the difference."
Intro 1: "You, er, enter a room. There are ten orcs sitting around a table, playing some sort of game of chance. They stop what they are doing and charge. Roll for initiative."
Intro 2: "You follow the sounds of arguing to a room behind a closed door. Opening the door, you see a group of orcs in a room. They are arguing amongst themselves. They look like Greykin's orcs, and their armour bears the sigil of that foul wizard, your greatest rival.
"Yo
Poison and Treachery
The old Roman city of Verulamacæster was decaying. Many of the buildings had collapsed and had been replaced by Saxon buildings. Some of the most impressive still stood and it was possible to imagine what the city had looked like in Roman times.
In the old days the British tribe, the Catuvellauni, lived in the area of their chief city that they called Verulamium. It was said the Romans had built the city to make the Catuvellauni more like them. They had succeeded
This blog post goes back to the topic of hypnosis, and its use in roleplaying games - and not merely Mythras, but many other roleplaying games. In this post, the focus falls once again on the Games Master, and on the fine art of telling a story, through which they can guide the Adventurers.
Engagement
The blog has already covered the topic of immersion. This time, the emphasis is on engagement. How can the Games Master draw in the players and make them feel involved in, and engaging in
Over the years, I have only used one avatar for soltakss for all my profiles on various sites.
However, once I started publishing Jonstown Compendium titles, I have changed my profile picture to be one of the faces from the illustrations in the supplement.
I am so glad that I could change it from the Spiderling picture from Holiday Dorastor: Spider Woods, as that picture always creeps me out when I look at it.
My current picture is the Book Wyrm from Secrets of HeroQuesting.
Skills are important to a Mythras game. Yet there is an opinion that some skills are less useful than others. Skills such as Acting, Bureaucracy, Customs, Ride, Swim, Seduction, and even Teach are regarded by some as being unnecessary, and only a handful of skills - Athletics, Brawn, Combat Styles, Evade, Endurance, Willpower - are essential for play. Even Unarmed has sometimes been neglected in the rush to make Adventurers as skilled as possible in an exceptionally narrow range of skills, suite
Taxes, Re-building and the Ale of Alnoth
Wulfhere decided that when he returned he would travel his lands to see what changes had occurred over the year. He was met by delegation after delegation of Farmers on his travels. Many complained that there had been a bad growing season due to adverse weather conditions and many of the crops had rotted in the fields which left them with little surplus to pay their rents for the year. Others said that they had been forced by Aldfrid the Hlafweard1 t
In my previous post, the creation of magic items was addressed. Various mechanisms were looked at, from the use of the sorcery skill Enchant (Object) through to the creation of religious artefacts and relics, and spirit fetishes.
This blog looks at the magic items themselves, and the impact they have in game.
Significance
No enchanted artefact should ever be insignificant. Every artefact carries with it the power to affect the outcome of an Adventurer's skill checks, if not the st
With this article, we begin a look at the artefacts of magic, and their influence on the cultures of the settings of Mythras. The Core Rulebook places the emphasis on the player characters, their native wit and their acquired magical powers or connections to the spirits and/or gods, rather than on magic items and enchanted treasures.
Enchantments
Enchantment is defined as a feeling of great pleasure or delight, as well as the state of being under a spell or magic. This blog could focus
Restoration and Divorce
It took a week to travel from Anderida to Hrofnacæster. The Hrothgarsons had travelled along the Roman road using Way stations or staying at Steadings along the way. Northern Ceint was rich and fertile. Ruins of Roman houses were everywhere. Some had been scavenged for stone and others were intact apart from the roofs which had fallen in. Dunstan thought of himself as a builder and he was intrigued to see how the Romans had built their farms and dwellings. He discuss
[Image is "Summoning," by Joseph Springborg]
Here is how Mythras, page 113, defines sorcery:-
Sorcery is the manipulation of underlying laws that directly control the very fabric of creation. These formulae are complex equations: a mixture of mathematical, psychological, existential, and supernatural principals [sic] that allow the sorcerer to grasp a portion of reality and bend it to his will. Sorcerers do not need to rely on gods for their powers; nor do they need to engage with spir
The Disappointing Meeting
The Hrothgarsons returned to Hambladensted and set the lands in order. Dunstan’s steward, Aldfrid, had done a good job in collecting the rents and administering justice but he had been unable to convince the farmers to work on the fortifications. Dunstan said that he was concerned that the building of the stockade at Pontes was not going as quickly as he would have liked. He discussed it further with his farmers who said they would do what they could. Dunsta
This article is about spirits, and animism, and animists, and about animists in a Mythras game.
Here's what the Mythras Core Rulebook has to say about animism.
Animism is magic worked through communion with spirits and the spirit world. It is the magic of shamans and spirit walkers. Such practitioners do not treat with gods or learn their abilities from books or tomes; instead their powers come from the myriad spirits that inhabit the spirit realms, and interact occasionally with the m
Of all the rules of Mythras,the chapter on Theism has the potential to provide the greatest contention, because it covers the topic of the player characters' religion.
Devotion is one of two non-mundane skills used by theists. The other skill, Exhort, is used to invoke Theistic Miracles.
But what exactly is Devotion about, anyway?
Holiness
Can people really measure someone's holiness by a number? Could a religion's Pontiff really throw down some badass righteous smiting from
This article takes a look at an aspect of each Adventurer's makeup which is rarely used, except in dire circumstances as an "extra save roll" when the resistance skills have failed, and before the player uses up a Luck Point to make the problem go away.
This article is about Passions.
Core Rulebook
Mythras, page 282, has this to say about Passions. Bolded parts highlighted by me.
Throughout all kinds of fiction, and especially in fantasy, passion drives the plot. The desire t
[Cover image is from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b6/Atelier_von_Rahmenmachern_und_deren_Werkzeuge_im_18._Jahrhundert.jpg]
One of the more overlooked issues about Mythras adventuring is what equipment the Adventurers are carrying while out on a campaign. The basic tool lists on pages 60, 61 of Mythras and page 88 of Fioracitta are good guidelines as to what one could expect to take on an adventure, but there is still a need to plan in advance for the adventure.
The
Here we go, final entry for the Bardori campaign. This will be a long one, the Storm Season arc was something like 4-6 sessions, comparable to our Prax and Pavis episodes. The last few sessions occurred right at the beginning of the pandemic, so we had to adjust to online play.
After the horrible events of Dark Season, everyone's main concern was purifying the clan of the sins of Chaos and kinslaying. The Clan Ring and chieftain consult with Ynga the Rock, the Storm Bull representative on
The Adventurers are the core of all games. As games have developed, adventure modules have been less about pre-packaged mazes full of hazards and more about dramas and conflicts, with the Adventurers at the heart of driving the changes.
As adventures have developed from their implausible "mazes full of traps and horrors" to more nuanced scenarios and dramas, so too have Adventurers. Modern Adventuring parties now more closely resemble bands of roaming mercenaries, military units or hunting
Okay, so... my Dundealos campaign ended nearly 2 years ago. I might be starting a new campaign soon, and as I was thinking back on this one, I felt bad that I never did a recap for the ending. So here it is, nearly 2 years late! This is going to be pretty bare bones, because now I only remember the broad strokes.
My players and I went through 2 more seasons of 1626, and decided to wrap things up at Sacred Time. I've saved our old character sheets in case we want to revisit them, but I don'
[Featured image taken from Monster Wiki - https://monster.fandom.com/wiki/Dragon?file=DragonRed.jpg]
This post is a hard one to write, and not for the reasons you might think.
Dragon slaying, noble questing knights, castles ... they are all such staples of fantasy, it's hard to get away from such tropes. From Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern, through to more modern incarnations in popular media such as Kilgarrah (voiced by the late, great John Hurt) in the TV series Merlin, the dr
