Okay my first design article to accompany my Woland submission. I had originally intended that the first one would cover the journey from inspiration and concept to final ideas and product… but I think I’ll take a different approach and highlight a single thread of consideration.
Let's start with a region
When world building you can break areas down into different categories to make designing them easier and compartmentalised. Mythic Bastionland uses Locations (or Sites) as its smallest, followed by Hexes, and then to Realms. However between those last two it can be useful to insert Regions. Project Woland has a lot of explicit regions baked into it, thanks to how it is made of a tapestry of hexflowers. However even a regular realm in Mythic Bastionlands will generally benefit from using a number of regions as part of its building blocks.
So what is a region? Well, a region can be defined by many different things, but what they all have in common is that they feel distinct from their surroundings. They, in effect, have their boundaries defined by what they are not. You may define a region by something simple such as geographic similarity or political influence. So for instance in MB you may have a region for each Holding, or simply for each cluster of hexes sharing the same terrain type.
However I wish to discuss a more subtle but fundamental aspect of region definition, one that is more relevant to a project like Woland - the degree of interconnectivity any given area has with itself.
Proximal interconnectivity
An interconnected space is one that is in conversation with itself, features of it are influencing and informing what’s going on around it, and vice versa. You generally want to design a world like this, as it keeps areas feeling distinctive and stops the world becoming homogeneous - which in turn encourages exploration.
Isolated pockets of high interconnectivity will feel like a region purely because encountering any single part of it will quickly draw out many references to other parts of it that are nearby. Those more distant places still feel like extensions of the same place though, and so are grouped together.
Woland as a project will have a lot of these islands of interconnectivity, little bottle universes which are largely (or entirely) ignorant to what’s beyond their borders - simply because they’ve been designed independently (and quite often before the other places existed). There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, it gives a rich and varied world for players to move through… it does however pose an interesting design question…
What is the reason to visit this place?
Now with a game like Mythic Bastionland, your players will be venturing forth into random corners of the world seeking out myths regardless of what is there. However I’d still say if you want players to engage with all parts of the world, and not treat bits of it as gas stations where they stop by to refill some virtues or get some quick seer guidance before swiftly moving on then you need to bake in more glamour and utility to your hexes.
A good thing to consider when designing utility is renewable resources. Luckily I’ve got a seer to work with, but fun NPCs do the same job. They provide a constant supply of interaction for players, stopping by an old friend to collect gossip is always useful in MB (if nothing else to learn about new local myths) but it’s also just fun RP for any game. Other useful things are services, but also goods which are sourced here and nowhere else. Mythic Bastionland loves a good fetch quest for bartering purposes, so be sure to prepare lots of stuff in advance that is already baked into areas so you can then glance at the list for a distant hex and have someone demand something from it.
One of the things I’ve got in every hex of my region is a What can you find here? list of six generally useful and renewable things you can collect that are unique (mostly) to that specific hex. This means both when players are there they can load up on quirky objects they might find a use for later on, but equally the inverse, the GM can at any point just pluck out something and send the players over to this corner of the world to go get it.
A hook and an identity
You want a place to have an immediately obvious identity, stuff that can be woven into any scene there and will bleed into the collective memory of your players. You generally want to avoid situations where your players forget where they met someone or found something, you want to keep reminding them where they are so those other memories have context clues for where they are in the world.
I decided the Short Sea would be such an impactful feature of the landscape that it would easily work its way into the lives of the people who live there, and the players' actions and imagination once they get there. With residents of Brackenham always out on the sea fishing and Arfrith the musician using the sea as a muse there’s all these little ties back to the sea.
The other feature I lent heavily on was the smoke and fog in the region. The ruins in the Ashen Wastes are a core part of the identity of the area, they inform superstitions for interesting NPC behaviour, and give the place a grim past and a possible mystery to solve in the present. Its pervasive nighttime fog keep its presence always felt across the whole region, drawing attention back to itself constantly.
It also helps to have a gimmick, or a few…
It also helps when your area offers something nowhere else does. A reason for specifically going out of your way for more than trinkets and baubles. For Burntburh I decided I’d bake in a few.
One would be a very peculiar and unintuitive form of “fast” travel. I like it when players realise they can exploit odd connections in the worlds, discovering new options because of it, so I always try to bake in a few. The Wendwoods are at the heart of this little puzzle, being ordinarily a place you want to avoid, however once you find its centre and have obtained the wandering curse you may find it’s not such a terrible burden after all. You see the Weorpan Seer has a unique power at their disposal, they can drop you off to any hex of the realm - a useful feature when you’re literally tucked away into the far corner of it and want your will enacted. However, combined with being able to immediately travel to the Wayward Monolith by just getting lost from anywhere, players can (at the somewhat unpredictable cost of getting lost for an unknown length of time) effectively go from anywhere to anywhere. It’s not a perfect option for most things (which is intentional, its stops being an optional choice if it’s always the best thing to do, so it needs downsides), but as the seer only really wishes to disrupt the status quo, it does have a lot of flexibility to be used decisively for many myth resolutions.
The other big gimmick would be the reliquary, a place to go pick up some powerful items - a library of magical gear. It’s conveniently en route between the Wendwoods and the seer too… handy that, isn’t it? I don’t like the idea of just collecting magical items in MB, it doesn’t feel mythic at all - but going on a quest to retrieve the item you need to solve a myth does feel suitably mythic and something a knight would do. The three items I put in the reliquary are purposefully a little open to interpretation for what they can accomplish too - they’re not “magical sword of +1” but a sword which has its blade guided by the seer's hand. Does that mean it hits better? Maybe. Does it always know a foe's weaknesses like a seer would? Could do. Does attacking (say) the Wight with it allow you to kill it without needing a seer? Seems pretty likely. However, it’s up to the GM to decide, regardless the reliquary is still a source of a knight (if you can convince them to help you on a quest), some remedies and good hospitality regardless.
You will also notice the heading image, which shows a path of frequent travel that players might take. This demonstrates that the whole region acts as a funnel both towards the most common element players are likely to come here for (the seer), but also one that helps push them past each of the main features of the region. You basically have to pass by all the interesting elements to get to where you want, interacting with many of them on the way. A land is its geography, but a game map should equally be shaped in a way that guides players towards the interesting things you made for it so that it is fun to explore.
Conclusion
Regardless of what you’re designing for, I encourage world builders to think in terms of interconnected regions when next mapping out new spaces to explore. Have common elements threaded through multiple locations so they can all reference each other easily. Have some distinctive elements to form an identity beyond the terrain or ruler the place has. Give the places within the region unique aspects to give you a reason to go back there even when it's “just wilderness”. Try to work in some interesting gimmick or two which makes the place useful or stand out. And lastly, try to envision which paths players will frequently take, and ensure that those routes are interesting and provide many choices and things to interact with.
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