Mythic Bastionland was released this year, and I got a physical copy of it some months back. It’s a fantastic read with beautiful illustrations and the typical Chris McDowall terse prose. It’s obviously going for something Arthuriana’ish, along with sensibilities from Pendragon and developments from the “Into the Odd” world. So naturally, I thought, “why not make it sci-fi?”  More specifically, I wanted to try to adapt the myths into a sci-fi context. Mythic Bastionland is a tight product, with a very neat interplay between the concept of Knights, Myths, People, the Sandbox and the passage of time. My own gut instinct told me that taking any one part from this design would probably break on its own. But breaking things is how you learn to put it back together or appreciate loss. Or you can pick a sci-fi subgenre that could plausibly be close enough to rhyme a bit with Mythic Bastionland.  For my part, I’ve longed for a particular franchise in RPG form - the game series called...

My first contact with wargames was Warhammer 40,000, way back in 1998. Third edition had just come out and I stumbled into the hobby, buying a bunch of space marines. Of course, this is a long time ago, and my memories from this time are colored by the passing of time.  The cover of the Warhammer 40k 3e box set.  Compared to roleplaying games, miniature wargames seem to have a very different nature, despite their common origins. Back then, Warhammer 40k was played mostly in one-off scenarios with very little context, using armies of the players that happened to show up. One day there would be Tyranids vs Tau, on other days there would be Space Marines vs Space Marines. The fiction was there, but it was at best secondary. The idea of a campaign was very unlike that in roleplaying games.  In the present, there are games that sort of attempt to bridge the gap between roleplaying games and wargames, especially games like Mordheim (published 1999) and Frostgrave (published 201...