You Are the Guinea Pig
And an Intergalactic Teaser
This Week’s post is all about GM-focused playtesting.
That’s right. When you run a playtest it’s not about those parasitic players. You’re the one who should be under the microscope.
Not exclusively, and I talked about player feedback from playtests before, but I want to stress the importance of examining your own experience as the person running the game.
I’m looking out for two things:
Unfulfilled Wishes
Those mid-game GM moments when you think:
“I wish I’d prepared X”
“a random table of Y would be so useful right now”
“I wish I could just roll a die whenever Z happens to see how it goes”
A lot of the random generators in Mythic came from this, and the broad guidelines for Exploration Actions, which were introduced as a replacement to a rigid set of actions (set up camp etc).
Glimmers of Gold
I like to note cool moments that happen in the game, even if I feel like they emerged from outside of the rulebook, and think “how can I make stuff like that happen more often?”In an early version of Mythic, each player had their own set of quests, and it was fun when they lightly contradicted each other. The Oath ended up being a better way to give the knights a set of objectives that occasionally felt mutually exclusive and forced interesting choices.
The Link
The link here is that I’m often testing for content as much as I’m testing the rules. Yeah, numbers will need tweaking, mechanics can get tweaked or stripped back, but I’m just as interested in everything else that goes in the book, and how that gets used in preparation and play.
Elsewhere
The Smiling Fox Podcast continues to dig into Mythic Bastionland with guest Amanda P, a true legend of the realms.
Tabletop Curiosity Cabinet explores the Chimera, an all-time classic.
Among Cats and Books talks about classifying knowledge Common, Recalled, or Obscure.
Coming Soon
Over on Patreon I talk about another part of the proposed Intergalactic Bastionland experience… more work!
Dock is the second spoke on the Wheel that makes up crew life, between the drudgery of Transit and the enterprise of Layover.
I’m aiming for a good clear procedure to work through here. As with the other phases of the game, there are times when this will breeze past and others when it will make up a substantial part of the session.
Expect the full post here and on the blog next week.
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The GM experience is something I find not talked about in design nearly enough. Excited to read your thoughts on it.
Brilliant reframe on playtesting. The 'Unfufilled Wishes' framework actually flips the whole design process because its capturing friction in real-time rather than hypotheticals. I ran a campaign last year where I kept wishing for NPC reaction tables mid-session, but never built them til after. What suprises me most is how these gaps often reveal the game you're actually running vs the one you designed.