WHAT IS ELECTRIC BASTIONLAND?

Electric Bastionland is a roleplaying game written by Chris McDowall, author of the critically-acclaimed Into The Odd. It uses and expands upon the systems developed in Into The Odd, resulting in a rules-set that’s easy to run as a Referee and even easier to play. It’s not a sourcebook or an expansion – it’s a standalone journey into an unknowable place.

The majority of the book is devoted to detailing 100 Failed Careers; by cross-referencing your character’s abilities that are randomly generated during creation, you can see precisely what job they used to have before bad luck, incompetence and maliciousness forced them out of it and into the dangerous profession of treasure-hunting. Each comes loaded with hooks and sketches out information on Bastion and the surrounding areas, giving the players and GM room to tell their own stories within the strange and fascinating world.

Will you be a Counterfeit Taxidermist, hounded out of your quarters for concocting dubious cryptozoological finds? An Animal Vassal, as in that you are literally owned by an animal, and must seek to interpret its insane demands? An under-whaler without a ship, bearing smuggled treasures of curious flesh harvested from bloated corpses in the deep sea? An urban safarist, currently between clients, who finds appropriate adventure for wealthy thrillseekers on the mazelike streets of Bastion? A pie-smuggler, partially responsible for the fact that over 60% of all illegal goods in the city have, at some point, been hidden inside a pie?

EQUAL-OPPORTUNITIES MAGIC

There aren’t any spellcasters in Electric Bastionland; no wizards, no sorcerers, no warlocks. Instead, magic is the purview of oddities – technological or uncanny marvels that break the fundamental rules of the universe, many of which are available to player characters. (In practice: the less powerful your character is in terms of raw ability, the more access they’ll have to reality-warping knick-knacks.) These range from the Unstoppable Rod (once thrown, cannot be stopped, and will eventually fly off into space) to the Powder Sack (infinitely reproduces any powder placed inside), to the Earth-Angel (causes earthquakes when broken).

Or perhaps your character will have picked up unusual abilities from their heritage or training; human flotsam who take on elements of the sea and river, massifmen of massifland who are from a part of Deep Country where everyone is significantly bigger than normal people; or the urbalist who can hear, see and taste the secret messages of the city when they’re loaded up on hallucinogenic herbs.

INTO THE ODD

Electric Bastionland uses an updated version of the Into The Odd ruleset, a straightforward system that uses a D20 and three statistics (Strength, Dexterity and Charisma); it’s designed to be as easy to run as possible whilst still presenting both players and Referee with interesting choices.

Most importantly, it’s flexible enough that you can fit any idea you’ve got into the system – and the world is dynamic and weird enough to accommodate plenty too. If you want to run an old adventure you picked up in the 1980’s using Electric Bastionland, you can do so with very little fuss – not only do the mechanics adapt easily to translating older scenarios, but you can position the dungeon itself in the strange Underground (or the castle in Deep Country) with no problems at all.

YOUR BASTION

Bastion – and the world surrounding it – has been created with inventive Referees and players in mind. Aside from a handful of defining guidelines, the setting of Electric Bastionland is intentionally malleable, open and ready for readers to take inspiration from and adapt what they’ve found inside.

There’s no timeline, no history, no reading comprehension exercise to undertake before you get started with play. Instead, the setting of Bastion is communicated through Spark Tables: lists of random events, characters, locations, and items all written around the central themes of the game. These Sparks keep the city in a constant state of flux, and no two excursions into the mad streets (or the treacherous underground) will be the same.

Your Bastion will be different from everyone else’s: all strange, and dangerous, but all unique.