The electric hub of mankind
The only city that matters
Electric Bastionland is an Old School Revival (OSR) New Weird Tabletop RPG created by Chris McDowall and published by Bastionland Press in 2020. The game takes place in a sprawling impossible city and its surroundings, full of normal humans, various oddities, aliens, machines and mockeries - creatures of felt, wood and string given the spark of life. The titular Bastion is on the verge of modernity, vaguely resembling real life in the early 20th century, with electricity being the latest brand new technology, installed in any place it can be.
Players take on the roles of downtrodden citizens connected with each other with shared enormous debt - generally, people with failed careers and an urgent need to find treasure that can free them from their debt. Character creation is quick and completely randomized, with the most distinctive feature of character creation being the "Failed Careers" that players draw, which can range from Mendicant Mycologist to Necro-Engineer. This lengthy variety of Failed Career outcomes account for 230 pages of the book's 333 total pages. As a result, the game is deceptively-simple for how huge the book appears to be.
Electric Bastionland provides examples of:
- Adventure-Friendly World: The players going out on their adventures are motivated both by the circumstances of their characters' debts, and the constant presence of treasures hidden all over the city for them to be hired to retrieve.
- Bizarrchitecture: Bastion is impossible to accurately map out, due to constant changes to the city which nobody can completely understand. The Underground, the setting's equivalent of the Metro system, defies the laws of physics and geometry, and can potentially connect to anywhere.
- Fantastic Racism: Mockeries (sentient artificial beings resembling puppets) are described in the book as, "known, but largely despised", with another bullet point pointing out that "real animals hate them".
- Mega City: Bastion is the only city that matters, what with how it is large and complex enough to cover the entire game world.
- New Weird: The setting doesn't fit comfortably into any established speculative fiction genre. Like many touchstones of New Weird, the focus is placed into the titular Mega City - Bastion - which is meant to invoke the aesthetics and technology of the early 20th century, but can't definitely be reduced to such descriptors. The Underground is run by sentient machines which defy the laws of space and time. Deep Country represents the past and can be a setting for rural horror. Living Stars may be the last part of the setting to not be described explicitly in any way, but still involves bizarre aliens and mindbending ways to travel there through the physics-defying routes of The Underground.
- Schizo Tech: Bastion means to roughly invoke an early 20th century technological level, but if you can imagine something from the modern world, it can be there, albeit in an old-fashioned style. Slow, expensive, but extravagant cars, rudimentary computers usually built for one specific task with clunky, room-sized hardware; amplified instruments playing youth music. And alongside all of that, sentient machines are running The Underground.
- Shout-Out: Mockeries are The Muppets of the setting, in the sense of them being puppet-like artificial beings animated by unexplained means and being a normal part of everyday life. Mockeries are prone to theatrics and treat the world as a stage, as if they are observed.
- Starfish Aliens: Aliens can range from more understandable to bizarre. Although the book gives sparse information about aliens and leaves their specifics to the Conductor (Game Master), there is one random table about "Things banished from the stars" in the section on The Underground, and every example fits this trope. Examples include:
- The White Noise - A howling mass of flashing lights obsessed with purity and terrified of contamination from touching lesser beings.
- Oot-bog - A sentient swamp that produces disgusting gifts for those that feed it, only requests payment through cryptic symbols in the moss, and takes forever to actually do anything.
