The game: The game has a couple of themes and undercurrents too it. On the face of it it's an epic, metal game about killing gods. Which it totally is. The premise of the game is that if you read a lot of old stories about gods, they're kind of jerks. They mess with mortals, teaching them 'lessons' that are meant to instill fear and require worship. The PC's are mythenders, they've tapped into mythic power and are now using it to defeat the gods and loosen their grip on humanity.
Underneath the surface, the game becomes about free will versus power. You can always take more power, but if you take too much, you become a god, an agent of the mythic force that seeks to control mortals.
The thing that sets this game apart from other games is the dice mechanics. It works of a d6 pool method, but your pool of dice ebbs and flows over the course of the game. It represents your ability to force your will on the world around you, as well as your survival. When you take meaningful damage (in the description of events you can be injured, but it's just color unless the damage mechanic is invoked) you lose dice. If you run out of dice, you die. The game does not measure your chance of success at doing something, it measures how meaningful and the impact of what you do.
The Author: Ryan Macklin has worked on some other games, notable Dresden Files RPG. He's done some rules development, but mostly works as a freelance editor for small press games. He recently joined Paizo as a contract editor. He has a blog, where he talks about his ideas on editing/developing/writing games, how to work on a project, dealing with mental illness while working and some other related topics.
My Experiences:
I love this game, I've mentioned it more than a few times over the past year in particular. I was first introduced to it 3 years ago and have been craving it ever since. A year ago Ryan finally decided to push through and finish the game and I was able to give some feedback and cheerleading along the way. I'm very excited that the game was finally released (just this week!) and that it is available for free and released using Creative Commons. I'm even working on my own version of a game using the core mechanics, but attempting to do something very different.
If you're in the Minneapolis, MN area and want to try this game out, let me know I would be delighted to run a session (takes about 4 hours to play the demo). Odds are about 75% I'll be at GenCon this year, so I can also run a session there (I'll probably carve out 4-8 hours a day for GM'ing this year).
It's d6 and about killing gods? You have garnered my interest.
It requires all of the d6.
My kit includes:
3 cubes of white dice
1 cube of purple dice
1 cube of light purple dice (not required, but I find them helpful when teaching the game)
1 cube of orange dice
3 oversized d6 (for a special die used in the game)
Each cube being the standard set of 36 chessex dice. Towards the end of a big fight, it's not uncommon for at least one player to have around 30-40 (or more) dice in their pool.
I love it, because:
A) who doesn't love rolling giant piles of dice?
B) when you take damage, you lose dice, it feels very visceral and real as I describe what happens to your character and you're putting your dice back into the bowl
I...f$$#ing..LOVE..this....
I want to see the other mythic worlds brought to life. What must I do?
I don't think he's going to do a whole lot. He spent 5 years getting the game to this point, I think he's kind of ready to move on. Unless it's wildly popular he's not planning on doing a print run.
That said, he ransomed the game in Dec 2011 (he raised money for a friend's cancer treatment), so he's going to do some additional rewards for that, for example I donated enough money he's going to make a custom Myth for me.
If someone wrote up a complete mythic world, I'm pretty sure he'd give you a \m/ and post links on his blog and/or the Mythender page.
I want to do a sci-fi reskin. Think Mass Effect, the reavers are here and gobbling people up, the best way to fight them is to use their own tech, but doing so makes you more and more like them. The game focuses on those who are adapting reaver tech and the price they pay of slowly losing their humanity.
My current project is hacking the game to play My Little Pony. I did a play test two weeks ago, but it needs a lot of major changes.
That's unfortunate. I really just want to see the other worlds- from Mythic Atlantis to Mythic Now.
Still, thanks for bringing this to me. I really want to see more things like this.
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I took a look at the Mythender Core Rulebook and I can tell you that is a very good game indeed.
Anyway, here are my conclusions:
- It's sad that the rulebook lacks illustrations. It NEEDS illustrations.
- The concept of killing gods, while risking becoming one of them, is totally awesome.
- The approaches flexibility (Metal &/or Drama) make it ideal for many types of players and GMs.
- The Lightning tokens are almost unnecessary and could slow the battle's pace.
- New players (those formed by D&D 3.5/4e and Pathfinder, few years ago) could find the battle rules confusing, since is obviously grid-less.
- The Battle Tutorial was lame, but the battle example provided later is brilliant.
- The rulebook lacks more clear rules about creating Myths, like the rules for creating monsters in other games (like D&D and Pathfinder).
- The dice needs more generic and less norse-oriented names.
In any case, I invite you to download it (after all, ITS FREE!) from the author's webpage. Its a great game, and if you don't like it after reading it, you haven't lost anything (at least, the same that you could loose watching bad TV).