The pleasure of being surprised
I have been playing Mythic Bastionland for about thirty brief, almost-daily solo sessions now, and have satisfyingly filled a favourite notebook; the last word in it is: muted.
The pull towards the trusted black Bic, the map - filling up with a world coming alive, and the marvellous Book has been incessant.
The main reason I have felt compelled to return to the table each day this past month or so (and to keep sitting down with the game whenever my day allows it) is a craving to discover what else I might encounter, meet, invent, resolve, believe.
Mythic Bastionland makes it easy - at least for my preferred style of play - to start, play, wonder; however, this is not a piece of writing in which I want to explicitly discuss my deep love and admiration for the game and its creator; it'll need to be inferred by the reader, in between the lines.
The game one chooses to play is but a means to achieve a certain satisfaction, live a certain fantasy, tinker with something that makes one pleased. For me that satisfaction is the unexpected, the sudden, the unforeseen; that instant of surprise following a roll of dice (or any randomizingdevice) and preceding the first idea to materialise in my mind when I read two terms placed together. It is for that reason alone that I play, and I favour systems that make reaching that state smoothly. And spark tables.
In one of my recent sessions, my Knight and his Squire are waiting at the gate to enter the Seat of Power to resolve some business of theirs; guards are checking papers and confiscating all but one weapon from anyone entering. I wondered who was the cause of our wait, who was being checked before us, who was delaying us from getting into a bed after days and nights of galloping and camping.
I did not want to have a pre-existing idea; I desired being surprised by this place, to be given something, to feel the same sense of lostness, confusion, determination as my characters when facing a reality to them unfamiliar.
I turned to the spark tables in the book, and among the many possibilities, two results emerged - by the power of chance: an influential collector and muddy astrologer.
I feel the demiurgic powers tingling my fingers; those two characters are now unquestionable elements of the reality of this realm. There are two individuals, among all in the realm, that for their own reasons happened to be at the same gate of the same holding at the same time of my Knight and Squire.
Why are they there? Why is the muddy astrologer trying to convince the guards that two stars had gone missing from the sky in the nights leading up to that day? Why is the influential collector carrying a trunk of rings of many dimensions?
I have no clue, but I must find out.