Most people know Bungie only through Halo, which is popular enough at the moment that I don’t need to explore its origins. If you’ll excuse me a brief disgression into history: Bungie initially existed as a Macintosh-only outfit, where it brought first-person shooters to the Macintosh in the form of Pathways into Darkness and Marathon. Later, it branched out into PCs as well with the release of Marathon 2, and later Myth.
The great thing about Bungie, though, was that they were never content just to put some story along the lines of "Foozle’s down the hole, go kill him." Marathon was, on the surface, about a nameless man trying to stave off the alien slavers - the Pfhor - that had attacked his colony ship. On the underside, it was about a desperate, rapidly maddening AI named Durandal and his attempt to find a way to both free an enslaved alien race - the S’pht - and escape the heat death of the universe. (Durandal, besides being permanently sarcastic, also tended to plan in the long-term.) If you read carefully, you realized that the protagonist was actually the tenth Mjolnir military cyborg.
The sequel featured Durandal returned as the anti-Yoda, running the player through a series of combats against the Pfhor as it tried to rescue itself from the machinations of a subverted human AI while trying to signal the last free clan of S’pht. The last had the player dealing with the repercussions of the conclusion of the second game; the Pfhor having freed a Great Old One-like creature from its prison within a sun, the player jumped from alternate reality to alternate reality in an attempt to find a reality in which he could conquer. The ending of the series revealed the nameless protagonist as a sort of god/Eternal Champion, both as a conclusion to the series and as a tribute to the fact that the final game included the editing tools for the game’s engine. You can read the complete terminal list at the Marathon Story page, which I’ve taken the liberty of liberally linking to throughout the review.
The point that I’m trying to make, in a rather roundabout manner, is that Bungie puts a lot of effort into their stories. Myth is no exception; as a matter of fact, it had enough of a backstory to merit Steve Jackson Games turning into a supplement for GURPS, with mixed results.
Myth’s setting, in a nutshell, was heavily inspired by Glenn Campbell’s Black Company novels, intermixed with the usual Bungie brilliance. The basic details of the setting are fairly similar: Every thousand years, Light falls to Dark, or Dark to Light, with the changeover being spearheaded either by a mighty hero, or by an entity known as the Leveller. The neat trick, however, was that the Leveller was always the hero of the previous age – so that Connacht, who imprisoned the Myrkridia and began the Wolf Age, returned a thousand years later as Balor and proceed to wipe out huge swathes of the nameless fantasy world of Myth’s inhabitants.
That kind of summary barely touches on what makes Myth so…I don’t know, resonant, is maybe the word that I’m looking for. For example, the Fallen Lords aren’t just generic bad guys with big, baroque suits of armor, with names like “Badthor Deathkill”; they get evocative names like the Deceiver, or Ravanna, or the Watcher. When you see them, it’s not as part of a gigantic, Medieval-level battle, but during an attempt to escape from a massive, but unseen army of the undead. You did have stock fantasy elements, like dwarves and the undead – but the dwarves were big on chucking around explosive bottles, sometimes without regard for friendly units, and the undead were most colorfully personified in the Wight, a bloated, shambling corpse that would slouch up to your units, then blow itself up. If you found yourself losing respect for the giants in other fantasy settings, then you’d immediately regain it as soon as a Trow came along and started punting your units into bloody gibs. It’s difficult to convey how rich the entire setting felt – so your best bet is to start reading through the Journal entries to get your own idea of what the game world is like.
So, then: Does the book do a good job of representing the gritty, weird feel of the original game?
Not really. GURPS does a good job of explaining things in a plain vanilla format – if you need the basics laid down in a workmanlike fashion, that’s exactly what their supplements excel at. The text pieces between levels that made Myth so impressive are entirely absent from the book, replaced with a fair, but somewhat dry recounting of the battles between the Light and the Dark. Like, for example, compare this:
The battle for Madrigal lasted four days without pause. Shiver fell on the first night in a spectacular dream duel with Rabican, one of the Nine. No one expected this. We have never before challenged one of The Fallen and won.
But the truth behind the victory is stranger than any of the rumors. Apparently The Nine found the severed head of one of Balor's enemies from the old days, buried out in the desert under several tons of sand and rock, and managed to start talking to the thing. Balor is the power behind The Fallen Lords, and we figure his enemy is our friend.
They say that The Head had an old score to settle with Shiver, and told Rabican that her one weakness was vanity, and showed him how to exploit it.
Compare that, then, with this:
In August of 2480, Shiver and her army reached Madrigal, capital and greatest city of Province.
In the following days, the Nine found The Head (see p.84), all that remained of the entity claiming to be an ancient enemy of Balor. It told the Avatara Rabican of Shiver’s weakness – vanity. In a spectacular dream duel during the first night of the four-day siege of Madrigal, Rabican defeated Shiver, making her the first Fallen Lord to fall.
The Head sent Alric in search of the Total Codex in Covenant’s ruins, and Alric himself on an urgent mission to the east. The Watcher followed closely on the tail of the team sent to find the Codex. A legionnaire who opened the Codex read of a man unborn who would unleash the Myrkridia and revisit these horrors on the world.
Now, to be sure, the second isn’t bad writing – and it also has the disadvantage of not being read by one of the best voice actors I’ve ever heard within a computer game – but it seems like an awfully bare-bones description compared to the original text. It does its job, I suppose, but not nearly as well as I would have liked.
The character races / types take up the midsection of the book. Weirdly enough, the villainous races are listed both as standard monsters and as racial templates, so that you can play a deathless alien entity wrapped in human skin if you’re so inclined. Some of them get downright silly, like the character template for a Wight, a zombie bloated with explosive gas whose sole purpose is to get close to the enemy and then detonate. (The book admits that having a Wight as a PC is a silly idea, and recommends that it only be used for one-shot or comedy games.) There are some ideas listed for each monster, but they’re not inspired – stuff like “You find an abandoned baby monster,” or “A sentient monster comes to you for help.” It doesn’t capture any of the truly interesting bits contained within the original game.
Speaking of which: I don’t want to say that I’m not a fan of GURPS, but it’s not my system of choice. It is remarkably versatile, encompassing a huge variety of settings and rules choices without sacrificing too much flexibility, but I find the point-based system way too...I don’t know, clunky. Take, just for example, this description of what happens when a wight stabs itself:
Their masters arm themselves with a large knife with which to slay themselves once among enemy troops; treat this as a blow to the vitals, All-Out Attacking (+4 to skill) a willing target (+4) for an effective Knife skill of 16 doing triple 1d6+2 damage.
Or this section about how to break down a Wight's attack:
The Wight attack does 7d uniformly over an area centered on himself with a radius of 12 hexes. It also acts as a sprayed level irritant Venom (see p.C171) over the same area. The attack is purchased with the damage properties (if not special effect) of a Sonic Blast (see p.C173) for a base cost of 56 pts with the enhancements "Linked" (+10%), "Area Effect" (+50%), and increased area of 12 hexes (+200%) and the limitation "One Use Ever", "No range and must be centered on user" (-20%) and "Always and only triggered at 0 HT (-100%) for a net 79 points. The Venom purchased with the enhancements "Linked" (+10%) "Sprayed" (+100%) and "Increased Area to 12 hexes" (+200%) and the same limitations as Blast for a net 143 points.
To be sure, that’s a pretty thorough recounting of how you model a zombie stabbing itself. It’s also baroquely perverse - there’s something disturbing about going to the effort to model an explosive zombie with this kind of precision. Any other game would have simply said something to the effect of “When it gets close, it blows up, inflicting X amount of damage and causing paralysis and poisoning.” Breaking down the points cost of somebody stabbing himself with this kind of detail is just…weird. Unwholesome.
The character classes follow, and all of the old favorites are here – Journeyman, Heron Guard, soldier, Warlock and so forth. Noticeably missing are the stats for the Fir’Bolg, the not-quite-human archers of the first game; I’m not sure if they were cut for space, or simply not included, but it’s weird that a race that figured so prominently in the first game would be left out entirely. I should note that the book does mention repeatedly that the basic spellcasting rules from GURPS have been revised in order to compensate for Myth’s powerful magic. I don’t have GURPS: Fantasy, so I can’t really make a judgement; I do know that it mentions repeatedly that strain, the usual limiting factor in casting spells, has largely been nerfed or eliminated altogether. I should note that one of the coolest ideas I’ve seen so far is detailed within the book – the idea of the dreams of one of the primal gods falling to earth and turning to stone, acting as mega-spells to whomever can find the crystallized dreams. (Actually, just calling spells “dreams” is cool enough as it is.)
The adventure section is, unfortunately, pretty stale. Myth’s strength, besides the fact that it had a great physics engine, was that it focused on tight, bloody battles, where you had to be very careful about how you used your forces – you couldn’t just whip up forty more after your first batch got killed. As a result, most of the adventures within the game involved commando raids, ambushes, last stands, and last-ditch defenses against superior forces. The book’s adventures, by contrast, are simply campaign seeds like “maybe the characters explore the Trow lands”, or “maybe the characters advance in the ranks of the Legion.” I can’t really fault them for not coming up with something as cool or epic as the two major wars between Dark and Light, or being as crazily imaginative as some of the stuff that Bungie did, but this kind of begs for troupe-style play, where you bounce from character to character as you see the war progress – this week, you’re an street urchin in Madrigal trying to evade undead soldiers, the next week you’re a berserker leading an angry Trow into the icy clutches of the Stair of Grief. It’s a shame that the book doesn’t explore it in any detail.
I should note that the book does a great job of listing and cataloguing the various magical items of the Myth world, including the Total Codex, the bow of Stoning, and so forth – while it isn’t quite as comprehensive, or as radical, as Bungie’s Myth pages, it’s definitely a good resource, and the authors deserve praise for it.
The final chapter details how to role-play using the Myth engine, playing on the Internet and hacking your own maps. With the advent of Neverwinter Nights, this bit is pretty much useless, but…well…um. Yeah.
The artwork is pretty decent, almost all of it coming from the Myth games themselves – the art pretty much defined the way that the world looked, although I can’t help but to think of what Timothy Truman would have done with the setting’s artwork.
As a sourcebook on Myth, it’s not a bad value. As an add-on to GURPS, it’s going to be of somewhat limited value, probably shading to the not-useful. I would recommend it as a curio to fans of Myth, but not as a serious sourcebook – and now that d20 has been released and open-sourced, it’d be fascinating to see what would happen if somebody were to convert the game into the 3.5th edition of D&D.
Not me, though; I hear that Steve Jackson’s a lawyer. ;->
-Darren MacLennan
