Bastionland

18 Jul 2025

• I finally got my physical copy of Mythic Bastionland in that mail and it’s fantastic. This book has been on my mind since September of last year when a friend showed it to me for the first time. I was originally pretty skeptical because I had never played an OSR game before and my only experience was with games like 5e, Blades in the Dark, and other more modern games. My biggest hang up was character progression. It felt like it must get boring after a few sessions when you don’t get cool new spells or feats that you can use in combat. I was very wrong.

• Emily is nearly four months old at this point. She’s a much easier baby than Dean was, or we are just more seasoned parents. I had such expectations that it was going to be crazy jumping from one kid to two and our lives were basically going to be over, but that just hasn’t been the case.

• I’ve been saving up money for the last few months to get a Surly Disc Trucker bike. When Emily was born I watched the series “Tip to Tip” by Ludwig and Micheal Reeves and it had such a profound impact on me. Since I have zero desire to get a motorcycle, I started looking into doing long distance cycling and found out that there are bikes designed for this task. While I do love my current bike, I can confidently say it’s certainly not as comfortable as it once was. In high school I didn’t mind so much leaning over into the drops and clipping into the pedals. Now, I would rather a more comfortable experience and just throw on my tennis shoes.

• Game dev is cruising along. Spatial partition has been implemented and is currently being debugged. I am still working alongside the handmade hero videos, but I am starting to feel more and more confident in branching off and doing my own thing. There are a few ideas and strategies that I am not familiar with that I would prefer to get some insight on, but the days are numbered for Handmade Hero.