Playing the Mythic Mystery Matrix

Now that I am sharp with the tools and setup, plus the release of Magazine 18 that came with a bunch of very, very useful tables, I thought of playing a SciFi Space Horror mystery game. The Adventure Setup looked like this:

And I went on with it (The adventure setup and idea construction is recorded here: Preparing a Solo Adventure with Foundry + Mythic + FU – YouTube). The first attempt, however, was terrible. I didn’t like it. The story didn’t make sense, and uncovering the mysteries of the Hannubis #91 were a chore to come by. Only guided by my own questions.

After a discussion on Discord, I decided to give the Mythic Mystery Matrix rules a go, the ones that come in Mythic Magazine Volume 6 or as part of the Mythic Magazine Compilation 1. Supposedly, this system follows the design patterns of the Location Crafter or Adventure Crafter (by tracking progress points, and so on), and helps you track down clues and suspects. I recorded this play through in its entirety, so if you are willing to listen to some slow boring 50 minutes, here you go:

With this in mind, I filled it in with pre-known clues, and asked Mythic if there were any rumours regarding potential initial suspects. Mythic said yes, and gave me horrible ambush, which I interpreted as rumours on an ambushing interstellar terror faction. This is what the layout looked like:

In parallel (and because I like complicating things, unnecessarily), I decided to use the Spaceship Location Crafter from Mythic Magazine Volume 7 to help me with coming up with the unknown spaceship parts. After some scenes, this is how it was looking like:

As I started playing, the scenes I followed mostly through my homebrew JV’s Scene Designer, with the only tweak that I used the Mythic Mystery focus table as focus, instead of my own. This would kind of remind me what each of the scenes would be about.

In practice, I got a few NPC Action scenes, so I represented it like the crew of the PC calling him to give him extra info or intel about during his exploration. Ultimately, I got a Combat scene, which ended up by finding a raged survivor engineer that attacked the PC with a plasma pistol.

What I liked about the mythic matrix rules, is that it kind of kept solving the mystery as the center of the game. Just after 4 scenes, I managed to learn some new clues and even link one of them, which seems to refer to a self-sabotage by the crew of some sort, and even active chemicals on the air within the Ship.

JeansenVaars