The Positronic Library and Electric Bastionland

Saturday night, I played a game of Electric Bastionland, designed by Chris McDowall.

Electric Bastionland takes place in a setting reminiscent of the early-to-mid 20th Century, with some weird electric oddities added in. Each player has three stats: Strength, Dexterity, and Charisma. They also get randomly assigned a “failed career” a pseudo-class that defines what they were doing before being driven into a life as a treasure hunter. The game is derived from McDowall’s earlier Into the Odd (affiliate link), and shares the exploration focused game play of that game. The regular game loop involves describing the world to the players, them giving their chosen actions, and then describing back to them how their actions change the state of the world.

To give us our first play in Electric Bastionland, we used The Positronic Library by Yochai Gal. This was a nicely written and fairly minimalist adventure that came in at four pages, including the cover and the map, two pages if we only consider the adventure text itself. As we talk about the experience the group had, I’ll talk more about why that minimalism came to be a great thing for adding fun during play.

Character creation in Electric Bastionland was super quick. Neither of my players had read the book, or even had the PDF downloaded during the game, but we walked through each character in just a couple minutes. Our characters were Pollux, a divorced middle-aged former football star whose failed career was as a starblessed executioner; and Derk, a revolutionary duelist whose puffy clothes were decided to be parachute pants and who carried a crowsword (part-sword, part-crowbar) from his dueling days. They owed their debts to Pollux’s ex-wife, an archaeologist.

From this beginning, they get a hint from one of Derk’s groupies from his duelling days about how there’s an abandoned library where there’s supposedly some “totally rad music that collectors would pay so much for man.” Because apparently California Surfer Stoner is the voice that comes out when my players tell me they’re going to a groupie. This hook got them to the door to the library.

Having been warned about “robots went weird before the library was abandoned”, they approach the entry corridor a bit suspicious. They inspect and re-inspect a robot near the entrance which has succumbed to an electrical failure, to make sure it’s not going to get back up and come after them. Finally, they encounter many a party’s bane: the closed door. Derk pries it open, then spies a sloping tunnel and decides that it opened too easily. They throw the deactivated robot down the ramp to see if there’s any response.

The party then sticks outside next to the entrance to watch as security robots inside respond to see what made a robot suddenly roll into the room they were patrolling. Pollux throws an unidentified bottle of oil down the hallway at the robots, spilling the bottle all over the room. Turns out, that was sonic oil, and now every movement through the room causes all sorts of squealing sounds, like the worst rusted hinges you ever heard mixed with a teenager meeting their favorite celebrity.

The security robots end up lured to the outside, where Pollux laid into the first of them to appear with his bulky mace. He dented in the face of the robot that had formerly been so perfectly symetrical and designed with zero wiggle room from the standard sphere shape. (We used the Sly Flourish “describe a distinctive thing about your enemy” to differentiate enemies). Two of three security bots are beaten into disrepair, and the third is “sent home to its robo-daughter to think about what it did” after failing a morale check. And thus, the party finally walks in the front door to inspect the room the security bots came from.

Finding nothing that interests them in the lounge where the robots came from, they immediately turn to a room filled with maps and paintings. Derk starts prodding the paintings with his sword, causing them to realize that the paintings somehow change to show different angles on faraway locations. And behind one painting, there’s a switch that opens a door to a secret hallway.

The secret door leads to a hallway wallpapered with what looks like a super complicated piece of sheet music. Derk immediately begins looking for a way to take the wallpaper down or to copy it, expecting this is exactly what he was looking for.

And that’s when the Blue Man shows up. Unknown to the players at this moment, the Blue Man is a holographic representation of the AI from the Core computer at the back of the library. The hologram can’t be harmed. It’s just there to annoy the players and try to convince them not to take the sheet music. They try to shoot the hologram anyway and it teleports around a bit before possessing two security robots to attack them. The bots are dispatched quickly through the power of dual wielding pistols picked up from everyone else we’ve faced so far.

And so Derk and the Blue Man begin their banter anew before Derk declares he’s leaving. The Blue Man decides that now is a good time to seal the place off. Neither Pollux or Derk can manage to fight the mechanism used to keep the doors closed so they head into the frozen room which contains the AI Core. Pollux hits buttons in the Core room to try and mess with things until he accidentally shuts down all power to the library, leaving only emergency lights.

The group heads from the Core room into a maintenance tunnel which doesn’t even have the emergency lights active. They are nearly immediately set upon by three electric nymphs working in concert. Derk is critically damaged immediately. Pollux rushes in to assist and has a chunk bitten out of his shoulder, leaving it a Bloody Mess.

Pollux swung his massive mace in a great huge reckless arc to knock the nymphs’ heads together Three Stooges style and routed them.

Pollux and Derk turned the power back on, and Derk shot at the core until that turned back off. They then took the musical wallpaper with them back out the front door, deciding they’d had enough adventure for one night, forget the other whole half of the library.

And it was a total blast to run. There were multiple points during the night where I got asked as Conductor “could I do this thing that technically goes against the rules” and I was able to make up a small side system on the fly, give the information to players who had never read the book, and they had enough to say whether that sounded good to them to try. As an example, Pollux had huge trouble with the Nymphs because he did not have a burst type weapon. So he asked if he could try and do a really wide reckless swing. We decided it would be a Strength Save, with a success giving him Burst on the weapon and a failure causing the weapon to fly off somewhere leaving him vulnerable to more attacks before it could be retrieved. And it made a memorable moment. The whole system feels like it makes room for those on the spot case by case type of calls by the Conductor. I liked it, and my players took full advantage of being able to just declare what their characters were doing rather than having to check for feats and powers that gave them permission.

In the same vein, I really enjoyed the room that the adventure left for the same sort of thing. Nothing in the adventure mentions anything about “emergency lights” or switches to cut power to the library. They were just things that came up to solve problems of the moment at the table.

For fans of the OSR or NSR style of gaming, a lot of these comments won’t be anything new. The sort of freeform “well, what are you looking at in the dungeon” type of exploration play is what originally inspired me to DM my first campaign using Swords and Wizardry rather than the 3.5 that the group had been using in the last game. So this game was a fun one shot return to the very beginnings of my gaming journey back in college.

I will definitely be keeping Electric Bastionland in my rotation of games going forward. It’s light, full of delicious setting flavor, and a blast to play. I’m already thinking what kind of trouble is going to start emerging from what the players did in this adventure. They never did figure out that the music on the wallpaper was deadly. That’s another secret to be stashed in the back pocket for next time.

And the weird pseudo-modern setting already has me looking to write some of my own adventures to share. The current premise: local megamart has a portal to hell in the back, it’s always been there but everyone just ignores it. I’m going to try my hand at designing a point crawl for it, and maybe see if one of my players can draw me a map to go with it.

In conclusion, if you haven’t played Electric Bastionland, it’s a great game based in exploring and looking for treasure to pay off the immense debt you owe to a random benefactor. And if you need a first adventure to get you over the hump of learning the system? You will not go wrong using the Positronic Library.

Where to Buy

Electric Bastionland

DriveThruRPG (affliate link) Price: $19.00
Itch.io Price: $19.00
Hardcover from Bastionland Press Price £40.00
Free Versions Including Player Rules and Ten Example Failed Careers Also Available from Itch.io and DriveThruRPG