Troika! – The Dice Pool

UVG x Troika

Vibes

It’s easy to categorise RPGs by genre. Traveller is sci fi, D&D is fantasy, Cyberpunk Red is, well, cyberpunk, Call of Cthulhu is horror. There’s no real question about that. But, when you want to do an RPG medley, you’ve got to consider rulesets and vibes. D&D and Gamma World are basically the same ruleset, which makes it handy to mash ‘em up. But more importantly, their vibes are vibing on the same frequency. This has a lot to do with the art style in the books and the ways in which the games themselves are presented as well as the settings. I’m sure I’m not the only one to take their Gamma World players through a portal to a D&D fantasy world where they could blast dragons with their enormous radiation guns. It just made sense because of the vibes.

We finished a Mörk Borg campaign earlier this year. Got all the way to the end of the world, believe it or not. Cleverly, our GM, Isaac, ended that world and then woke us up from the the virtual reality game our Cy-Borg characters had all been immersed in. Someday, we’ll return to this game that’s also a new game. Now the vibes of these to are so obviously similar because they were both made by the Stockholm Kartell and designed by Johan Nohr. The art style is brash and neon and loud for both so you feel like they vibe together naturally.

Today I want to discuss a couple of games that you might not automatically mention in the same breath, Ultraviolet Grasslands, Luka Rejec’s psychedelic, prog-rock fuelled old school trading simulator, and Troika, Daniel Sell’s Science Fantasy Moorcock/Wolfe mashup using the rules for Fighting Fantasy and the surreal art stylings of Shuyi Zhang and Andrew Walter among others. OK, you might mention them in the same breath, actually. They both tickle a very particular armpit, in between the arm of sci-fi and the torso of fantasy, and, to me, their vibes intersect perfectly. So much so that I decided to employ a Troika adventure in UVG.

The Adventure So Far

The PCs have been on the road for more than six weeks. From the Violet City on the shores of the Circle Sea they have traveled west through the Ultraviolet Grasslands. They’ve encountered Lime Nomads, giant mushroom-tending armadillos, cyborg-like bio-tech lifeforms called vomes, and even a furniture trader named Jonky Bonko so far. And at every point along the way they have gathered resources and items to trade, hopefully for a profit. This has been their over-riding motivation thus far in the campaign. The players are utterly invested in the success of their joint business venture, which they have named Isosceles Inc. Watching their Cash numbers go up has definitely been exciting for them, especially when they make a really good market research roll, or haggle their way into a selling price three times higher than their buying price. But I have been wanting a bit more old-school in it too. To that end, I’ve been seeding something in the otherwise completely randomly generated adventures. It originated in a random encounter, but I kept it running through a couple of other random encounters.

They rescued the daughter of a Lime Nomad clan chief and returned her to her mother. The mother, grateful and impressed, entrusted them with a message in the form of an item known as a portable illusion. She asked them to take it to her sponsor, a Porcelain Prince called Black Pot 5-Body at the Porcelain Citadel. Almost immediately, they rolled up another random encounter with a Porcelain Prince out on the road. A Porcelain Prince is an intelligence that’s distributed across a number of humanoid bodies that wear matching porcelain masks. The PCs, wary and out-numbered mentioned that they were on the way to see Black Pot 5-Body in the Porcelain Citadel in the hope that it would encourage this Prince to treat them favourably. On the contrary, the mention of Black Pot seemed to cause something of a stir. The Prince promptly sent a messenger off in the direction of the city. The PCs promptly killed the messenger in the grasslands and buried him in a shallow grave.

Later, at the Low Road and the High trading post, they heard a rumour that an ultra-conservative Porcelain Prince, Meissen 13-Unity had dedicated themself to restoring the Citadel to the unity of thought not exemplified since the end of the Properly Recorded Period. Not only that but that Sunfire 3-body, who they had met on the road, was an adherent of theirs. At this stage, the PCs were not able to put things together. But once they pushed on towards the Citadel they ran into a random encounter, the caravan of another Porcelain Prince, this time, an ally of Black Pot 5-body. This time, the Prince sold them a pass to get them into the Upper Citadel, where they could do business and find the Prince they were looking for.

Finally, they reached the Porcelain Citadel, the great hand-shaped edifice towering over the grasslands doing devil’s horns. They had been eager to do some carousing here. The PCs had a taste of it in the Violet City at the start of the campaign and gained a lot of XP from it so they saw it as a short-cut. This time, one of their number got completely fucked up on drugs and managed to lose most of their Cash as a consequence of a particularly poor Carousing roll. So they needed to make some money quick. The next day they went to visit Black Pot 5-Body in their workshop. There they presented the eccentric Prince with the Portable Illusion. They activated it and they all witnessed a Porcelain Prince being abducted from a camp by an enormous winged creature with a hand where its head should have been. They were dumped in an enormous nest at the top of a massive index finger stretched up into the sky, as high as a mountaintop. From there the view within the illusion changed and they saw the Prince negotiating with a wizard in a black tower atop another digit of this huge hand. He exchanged a copy of a book for the wizard to help him escape back to the Grasslands. And then the illusion ended. Black Pot was very excited. This was their chance! They had finally found the evidence they had needed for so long. The original book that would prove that the laughable philosophy of their political rival, Meissen 13-Unity was based on nothing more than a work of fiction designed to satirise the exact sort of overtly conservative views they thought were espoused by it.

That’s a lot of backstory. Suffice it to say, Black Pot employed the PCs to get abducted from their dreams by the bird-with-a-hand-for-its-head so they could be taken to the mountainous hand and retrieve that book. They went into the grasslands and did just that. They woke up in the nest, just like in the Illusion. After avoiding the gaze of THOG, the bird-thing, they killed some worms escaped the nest and found themselves on the tip of that cyclopean index finger looking out on a wide green land and a cerulean blue sky. They knew immediately that they weren’t in Kansas anymore.

I loved this moment. At this point, the players did not know they had just transitioned from UVG-proper to the Troika adventure, The Hand of God, so they had no reason to suspect anything. Also, there have been hints of portals and other worlds dotted around the plains in our campaign so far, so they had no reason to think this was anything but more UVG weirdness. I kept up the pretence as long as I could. But, eventually I shared one of the illustrations from the adventure in our chat and Isaac was quickly able to identify the distinctive style of Andre Walter, so well known for his Troika work. He asked me if this was a Troika adventure and I answered honestly as is the law.

But that was ok! It helped me in fact. The players understood that I would have a little work to do to translate from one ruleset to the other when I had to spring things on them so they have been quite forgiving.

Conversion

For the first session in the Hand of God, I didn’t even do any preparation of encounters in UVG terms. I winged it completely and that was fine. It would absolutely have been better if I had prepped, but it was ok. The nice thing about both rulesets is that they are light. A UVG creature’s strength is based largely on levels/hit dice, in a very D&D-esque way. So I was able to use the following table to work things out approximately while my players waited patiently.

But the fact was, the only combat encounter they had was with a couple of weak and lowly Prayer Worms. In Troika terms, they had low Skill and medium Stamina and their only special was screaming when they died so it was was easy to look at that table and decide to make them level 0.

I rolled up another random encounter as two of the three PCs made their way down through the index finger’s stony interior. There, on the stair, they found a poor undead whose body had been crushed by a fallen boulder. She told them she would reward them if they would bring her to the undead village of Jigigji over on the Little Finger. So they re-reanimated her decimated body and brought her along with them. Meanwhile, the third member of Isosceles glided across the span to the next finger on his handy glider. He landed on the opposite side of the bridge long before the other two made it there. At this point I knew they would be running into a lot of potentially tricky encounters that I thought I should prepare better. So we left that till the next session. In between, I converted all the stats for all the potential encounters, whether random or planned. The conversion did not always fit neatly into the rows of the table above. Sometimes I would add more hit dice if they had more Stamina than Skill, and I would always look at the potential damage on the Troika damage tables to decide the dice and bonuses to give them in the UVG context. None of this was particularly taxing, although I’m sure some GMs would do the conversion differently to me, if they wanted something more or less balanced.

The next session they dealt with a bridge troll and his gremlin minions, but realised they were in for a tough time on this adventure quite quickly. Once they got across the bridge, they soon reached the black tower of the wizard as shown to them by the Portable Illusion. In the adventure, this is known as Rezkin’s Folly. All they would have to do is get into this powerful wizard’s abode, avoiding the fireballs being flung by the magical orb security system and all the weird shit inside, and they would get the chance to maybe retrieve that book!

The Folly is presented as a mini dungeon within the context of the overall adventure. It has fourteen rooms and its spread over a mere eight pages. It is very easy to read and absorb and most of it is usable in any system, with only the creature stats requiring conversion.

There are some Wizard spells referenced in the adventure that are taken directly from the Troika core book. I had to spend a bit of time looking up UVG spells that worked as alternatives to their Troika counterparts. None of these were really done on a one-to-one basis. Troika spells are generally fairly D&Dish, but UVG spells might really do anything, conceivably. I used both the UVG core-book and the forthcoming Wastelands Guidebook to help with this.

Conclusion

Well, we haven’t concluded this adventure by any means. Isosceles Inc have only made it into the tower’s lowest floor. They have encountered a gossamer assassin creature and survived, but still have to make it to the treasure room and out again. They also need to bring their undead companion back to Jgigji and then escape this potential dreamworld to get back to the Grasslands!

So far, I am loving how well the Troika adventure vibes with UVG. There are some anachronisms, like trolls and gremlins, which seem a little too generic-fantasy for the weirdness of UVG, but, on the other hand (if you’ll excuse the pun) they’re on a ginormous hand and they were sent there by a weirdo who lives in a giant hand. This was obviously the thing that linked UVG and the Hand of God in my head. Somehow, this dreamworld leaked into the “real world” of UVG and led the Porcelain Princes to build their Citadel. And, perhaps, the item that same their citadel from repression is contained in it.

Anyway, this adventure will continue soon, hopefully. Our gaming has been dominated by the Editioning recently, but, hopefully, we’ll get some more UVG x Troika in soon!

Sleighed

You might remember a few weeks ago… I reviewed Slow Sleigh to Plankton Downs. Well, the disclaimer on that review, that I had not played or run it is no longer valid.

Nun too soon for an update

Just a short one this week, dear reader.

You might remember a few weeks ago, for my Halloween post, I reviewed Slow Sleigh to Plankton Downs. Well, the disclaimer on that review, that I had not played or run it is no longer valid. Sister Majid, the Misstep Monastic (a type of nun) and Lee Tuluk, the Scud Miller (meat grinder) formed an unlikely friendship through a misallocated cabin and a game of chance and before you know it they were investigating a murder!

We played one session on Halloween and just finished it up last night. It took about six hours altogether, although there was some time spent on character creation in the first session.

Take a butcher’s at this!

Here are some things I loved about running this adventure:

The new backgrounds are great. Most of them are really far out there but the two that my players chose were obviously quite mundane. They still had some incredible Advanced Skills that got milked for all they were worth. Somehow, our nun used “Reconcile God’s Glory with the Failings of Mortals” constantly. Meanwhile, the Scud Miller managed to use “Fix Anything, Not Necessarily Well, Even with the Wrong Tools” on everything, including relationships. Use the backgrounds if you’re going to play this.
It’s so easy to prepare and run. The keyed descriptions are short enough to easily use on the fly, the premise of the adventure is straight-forward and there are only a couple of unavoidable events that are not difficult to get to grips with. I read it through once, fully, and then reviewed particular sections such as basics of the adventure and the murders before actually running it. It doesn’t take long to do this; its a svelte little scenario.
I really got into describing the aftermaths of the murders and the effects they had on the crew and other NPCs. As rumours spread I had nuns moving in pods and whispering about terrible occurences while blessing themselves, while the porters and mates dealt with grief at the passing of their colleague. Upon the discovery of the second victim, the security guards were puking in corners and staring blankly at blood-soaked toilet stalls. The creature has a silly name, which my players refused to say right, but the murders are gruesome and horrific. It felt important to play into that.
The map of the Nantucket Sleigh Ride. We used this work of art throughout. It was so useful to help the players orient themselves on the hovercraft and it was a genuine pleasure to refer to it. Its beautiful.
The Weather table. I got the players to roll for weather right before the final encounter and they rolled us up a storm. The ship was forced to drop its robotic anchors and ride it out just after the second murder. They figured out who the murderer was and that they were outside on the Observation Deck. What a setup for the final showdown. It was poetic.

A victim, missing its maxilla in a toilet stall. The Maxillary Uslurper in the air vent above. — Aftermath

Conclusion

Dear reader, I would highly recommend you take the Nantucket Sleigh Ride on a trip to Plankton Downs. If you have a couple of evenings to spare and a couple of friends who might enjoy a who-nunnit, as it were, you could do a lot worse. It’s not your typical Troika fare but I am beginning to think there may not be such a thing. You will have horror, you will have laughs and you will definitely have fun.

Slow Sleigh to Plankton Downs

There are two stars of this adventure. The first is the murderous creature itself. It’s unique, insidious and gross in a bonkers sort of way. The second is the artwork, which you can find examples of above.

Horror gaming in Troika!

Troika! Would not be my first call for a game of horror this Halloween, but I think Slow Sleigh to Plankton Downs, the 33 page adventure by Ezra Claverie, illustrated by Dirk Detweiler Leichty could be the thing to change my mind.

Disclaimer

I have not played or run this adventure. I just wanted to review it because A Perfect Wife reminded me a bit of it. Not necessarily in its themes or anything like that, more because of the creature at the heart of it and the murders. Also, the incredible artwork.

There are minimal spoilers ahead but, even so, if you are planning to be a player in it, maybe skip this review. I will say there are some conversations to be had with your table before playing. You should let them know that it is an investigative scenario and you should also discuss the body-horror and brutal murder aspects of it.

The Basics

The PCs are aboard a ship of sorts, a hovercraft called the Nantucket Sleigh Ride, transporting them from Out of Order, the site of the moon, Myung’s Misstep’s space elevator. They are on their way to Plankton Downs, a water-farm town along with a motley assortment of Macramé Owls, Ice Miners and Martian Orthodox Christian nuns among others.

The adventure opens with a short history and geographic treatment for Myung’s Misstep as well as the function of ships like the Nantucket Sleigh Ride. It also lays out the scenarios thoroughly for the GM.

The PCs themselves could be a regular set of Troika! characters (by regular, of course, I mean utterly bonkers.) But I think, if I ran this, I would get them to choose one of the nine new backgrounds presented in the back. You have a wild variety from the aforementioned Ice Miner, whose greatest Advanced Skill is to “Exert Oneself Alone without Hope of Assistance,” to the Astropithecus Truckensis, a Martian cyborg described as “a six-wheeled, motorised Standard Habitat Truck, slightly larger than a wheelchair.”

There is a description of the keyed locations from the, frankly, resplendent, map of the Nantucket Sleigh Ride on the inside front cover, and a section on the general characteristics of it. It’s important to note that most of the vessel is off limits to passengers such as the characters, however, once the murders start, they are likely to find ways to explore.

We also have a bunch of very handy random tables including but not restricted to NPC names (a selection of pretty standard human names from all over the world), NPC Preoccupation (from “Professional Opportunities” to “Impending Masturbation”), NPC Distinctive Feature (Loving “Head Small for Body”)

The PCs are going to be aboard the Nantucket Sleigh Ride for at least 72 hours but that’s likely to be extended through the liberal and recommended use of the weather table in the back (2d6, if you roll a 12, its a Catastrophic Storm and you better pray to whatever deity most aligns with your beliefs that the anchors hold or the ship is truly fucked.) With that in mind, it would be pretty terrible if someone on board were, in fact some sort of vampire disguised as one of the passengers or crew with an irrepressible hunger for a very particular human body part every 36 hours or so, wouldn’t it?

The Murders

This is mostly an investigation scenario. After the first murder causes a stir on the upper decks and the lower, the PCs might very well decide to start asking questions and investigating the scene of the crime. After all, the crew do nothing about it except arm themselves. However, it is not likely that they will discover the identity of the murderer until after the second or maybe even the third one.

The murders are gristly and disgusting in a very particular way. The creature has a method of killing their victim that can only be described as brutal and bizarre. If this were a Call of Cthulhu adventure, witnessing the aftermath would certainly be enough to elicit sanity rolls all around. They are described in relative detail in a matter of three pages. This, along with location and NPC descriptions is all you get to guide you in running this scenario. I do think it’s enough, especially as it feels as though the PCs are not really supposed to discover the truth until after the second murder reveals something important.

Conclusion

This short and sweet adventure is a definite departure for Troika! lovers. You may not get the chance to do the strange combat hijinks you’d be used to in most of the other adventures presented for the world’s other favourite RPG but it will present a set of very particular challenges. Several of the PC backgrounds have Advanced Skills that, while not exactly “investigation,” as such, will still be very useful in specific situations that you could imagine coming up. But there is no getting away from the fact that this system is not designed for investigation and I can imagine the GM having to make a lot of rulings while playing this.

If you’re interested, dear reader, you can go and pick the adventure up from Melsonia.com here. And maybe consider it for your Halloween game this year!

Obituaries

…Whalgravaak’s Warehouse is, by a long way, the most murderous I have ever run. Death truly waits around every turn. It’s really just as well Troika! characters are so easy and quick to create.

Bring out your dead!

In the last several months, since I published Death and Troika! the Tables and Tales RPG community has suffered the losses of many more PCs. Good and bad, greedy and selfless, sci-fi and fantasy. Most of these mortalities have been described or at least touched upon in the two DCC posts here and here. Sailors on the Starless Sea proved to be one of the most lethal modules I have ever run. But it’s a 0-level funnel so of course it was always going to have a high body count. If I am counting correctly, it took eighteen of the 23 PCs that sailed it. But, for a non-funnel adventure, Whalgravaak’s Warehouse is, by a long way, the most murderous I have ever run. Death truly waits around every turn. It’s really just as well Troika! characters are so easy and quick to create.

Nicksen aka Sticky Nicky

An impressionistic depiction of a Rhinoman with a tiny helmet on his head and a small spear in one hand. Red lines on yellow background. The illustration is from Troika! Numinous Edition. — Nothing in the world is Rhinoman-sized.

The character who replaced Tim the Gremlin Catcher lasted just three sessions. Here is his obituary:

The heroes continue to meet their ends in Whalgravaak’s Warehouse. Nicksen, known by his friends and casual acquaintances as Sticky Nicky, came to his end in the swirling maelstrom of Deep Storage. We had little enough time to get to know this intimidating Rhinoman but we did discover that he had been sent to the warehouse by one of Troika’s underworld bosses to track down a band of underlings. Instead he had been captured and almost exsanguinated by Paude, the vampiric red giant. When our other warehouse workers discovered and freed him, he joined them in their explorations and told them of a treasure they could seek out. Sticky Nicky used his formidable strength to help them break into the energy maelstrom of Deep Storage where they met a Gulf Man Roamer, a wraith-like creature. In his efforts to fight off the swirling menace, Sticky Nicky found himself trapped in a sack and whisked away to be eaten alive in the depths of the void by his captor. A moment of silence, please, for Sticky Nicky.

Socrates Honeysuckle

The black ink on white background drawing of an owl perched on a branch. The owl has a smadt, checkered cloak and a sporran-like satchel. The illustration is from the a supplement to the original edition of Troika! — His Excellency, the Prime Minister of Owls.

Borrowick Grimpkin, Wizard Hunter, was replaced quickly by a most august personage who also lasted only three sessions. Here is his obituary:

All Socrates Honeysuckle, Prime Minister of the Owls, had ever wanted was to regain control of the Owl Nation from the Usurper Queen. Shamefully, however, politics is all about who has the biggest pockets these days, and Socrates had been thrown out of Owl Parliament on his ear, with barely a Silver to his rather ostentatious name. He was forced, as a consequence, to assume the unseemly roles of adventurer and treasure seeker in the hopes of striking it lucky with one big score. The Prime Minister had heard of the potential riches stored in the Warehouse of Whalgravaak, the city’s most notorious and dead wizard, so he flew there, heedless of the unknown dangers within. Inside he happened upon his soon to be fellows, Ba’Naana , Puddle and Sticky Nicky (RIP.) Together they succeeded in exploring the strange reaches of the Warehouse. Socrates Honeysuckle had a way with words that succeeded in getting the party out of trouble on several occasions but, in the end, his silver tongue proved useless when he was sucked into the void outside time and space at the bottom of the vortex known as Deep Storage. Despite being the only member of the crew with the ability to fly, his luck ran out and his slight, owlish frame disappeared forever into oblivion. Doff your caps, dear friends, for Socrates Honeysuckle, Prime Minister of Owls.

MHIEE

A red, yellow. and white illustration in a cubist style of a humanoid with oddly shaped limbs and an unbearded face. The illustration is from Troika! Numinous Edition. — There’s something off about this dwarf.

Sticky Nicky’s replacement was a poor lost soul. He survived only two sessions (being generous.) Here is his obituary:

Very little is know about MHIEE. To all intents and purposes, he seems to have popped into existence, whole cloth, in an infinite wardrobe dimension, where he, almost literally, ran into Ba’Naana, Socrates Honeysuckle and Puddle the narcoleptic Sorcerer of the Academy of Doors. They had been exploring the pocket dimensions of Deep Storage and experimenting with the wardrobe’s automatic garment dispensing properties. To their eyes, MHIEE was nothing more than a regular, if somewhat forgetful Dwarf. And he was happy to allow them to labour under that misapprehension throughout their short acquaintance. The fact was, though, that MHIEE was a Derivative Dwarf, carved from the ancient rock by a Dwarven mason. On completion, he was deemed imperfect, flawed, poorly made. So he was abandoned. Only a Dwarf could have seen the flaws, however. To all others, he was the very epitome of Dwarfishness. MHIEE and his new companions had adventures together and while Socrates Honeysuckle’s luck gave up on him in the vortex of Deep Storage, MHIEE’s positively carried him to the exit. Soon afterwards, they encountered the giant, Arbuthnot, warehouse employee and stickler for maintenance. He attacked them when Ba’Naana’s monkeys attempted to steal his master key. But he was soon tricked into falling through the unstable floor above the sunken lair of the Mother of the Worm-Headed Hounds that lived in the tunnels below the warehouse. MHIEE fought bravely, whacking the giant, over and over, but finally, all it took was a single mighty blow to connect. Arbuthnot crushed MHIEE with his enormous fist. Our thoughts and prayers are with his surviving companions, Ba’Naana and Ishmael D’Undifoy.

Warehouse closure

We are nearing the end of the PCs’ time in Whalgravaak’s Warehouse. I have warned them that the next session will be the last. I have also warned them that, like the last session, which claimed the lives of both Socrates Honeysuckle and MHIEE, I reckon there is the potential for at least two more PC deaths. Can Ba’Naana continue to be the only original player character to survive, or will he too succumb to the deadliness of the Warehouse?

Plugs

Time War

Linear time is a blasted curse! Apparently, these days, you can’t have a full time job, a home life, take part in four to five sessions of RPGs in a week and still manage to update your blog on a Wednesday and a Sunday as well! To hell with it! That’s what I say! I’m doing it anyway! It might be half-arsed and it might not be precisely what I wanted to write about but I’m going have my blog and eat it too!

Going to promote a couple of things I think you should know about, dear reader. These are worthwhile things that you should get in on.

Friends of Melsonia

The Melsonian Arts Council, who are responsible for such TTRPG high-points as Troika! and Swyvers has a subscription service. Now, I will be the first one to hold up my hands and admit that I have been critical of literally everything becoming a subscription. Still, I love being a Friend of Melsonia. I say that in the least cultish way possible, I think?

The goal Daniel Sell and the rest of the Melsonian Arts Council are trying to achieve is to reduce or remove their dependency on crowdfunding efforts for every new project. Crowdfunding takes up a considerable amount of effort that these incredible artists could better spend on their creativity. That’s why I support it.

If you sign up for Friends of Melsonia for £10 a month (other currencies will, I assume, require different amounts, but Melsonia are UK based so I’m going with pounds sterling) they will send you a copy of every book they produce while your subscription is active. If that were all you were getting it would be a saving of a few dozen pounds, but on top of that, you will get exclusive stuff too! Just check out the new cover art on this version of Troika that I received in the first Friends of Melsonia delivery on Monday.

And the latest in their series of Troika location based adventures, the 1:5 Series. Eye of the Aeons has Cyclopes and snails.

AND, as if all that wasn’t enough, I also got this turtle with the power of sword and armour in postcard form.

Go join up if you can!

Friends of Melsonia

Cosmic Dark Kickstarter

If you have been here for the last few months, you have probably noticed me mention Cosmic Dark a couple of times. Go check out those other posts for more information on this great game. So far I have only played one session of it, but it was one of the best sessions of the year so far. Also, I have another one coming up tomorrow evening.

Graham Walmsley comes with some impressive bona fides. He is the creator of Cthulhu Dark, which was something of a high water mark in the rules-light indie RPG scene that spawned a bevvy of fun hacks such as Alien Dark, which I was lucky enough to play last year. Graham also wrote Stealing Cthulhu and has contributed to some other well known indie RPGs like Fiasco and The Laundry.

The Kickstarter for Cosmic Dark is live now! It funded in under 3 hours yesterday! There is a special Launch Edition which is only available for the first 48 hours, which means you can still get it at the time I’m publishing this post and, on top of that, there are some fantastic stretch goals being reached right now. This will mean contributions from such RPG luminaries as Alyssa Griffiths, Kieron Gillen, Scott Dorward, Thomas Manuel, Jeeyon Shim and Grant Howitt. So get over there and back that thing! I want all the weird space shit these guys can throw at me.

Cosmic Dark Kickstarter

Death and Troika!

Whole-Hearted goodbye

The death of a PC in a role playing game might be something to mourn, it might be something to celebrate, it might be something assiduously avoided, it might even be something to seek out. But I think there’s one thing for certain: it’s almost always memorable.

When I think about the death of a PC there is a high-water mark for me. Heart is a game that builds up to that ultimate beat from the get-go. Your character’s death (or end at least) baked into the character creation system. The Zenith Abilities generally come in only two or three flavors and one of those is going to be the way your fucked-up little guy says goodbye. And yes, I know it‘s possible for a Heart character to die before their Zenith Ability goes off, but that’s only with the consent of the player. And, from my experience, the player really wants to make it to that finale. It is the greatest treasure they can obtain in the game. It is truly, all about them and how they do it. As the endgame hoves into view in Heart, the players are planning how they will work their big moment into the fiction and the GM is paddling away frantically like a murderous swan, to ensure it happens for them. And when the two meet in the middle? When player and GM both realize the ambition to achieve the perfect end? Chef’s kiss. One of the best feelings I have had playing any RPG, honestly.

And then there’s Troika!

Three adventurers protected by a magic shield against a hail of arrows. One of them takes an arrow to the back of the head though… — That’s gotta hurt. Art by Andrew Walken from Whalgravaak’s Warehouse.

We haven’t played much Troika. I ran three players through the hotel-based adventure, the Blancmange and Thistle, from the core Troika book last year. We did it as a one-shot and it was so surreal and hilarious that I knew I wanted to play more. So, in the summer, I thought I would give Whalgravaak’s Warehouse a go. Since then, we have lost one player (who moved to Spain, don’t worry) and two PCs. Please bear in mind, there have only been four sessions exploring the chaotic and bizarre workplace so far. We have lost one PC in each of the last two sessions! Tim got smashed and burned in an encounter with a blood sucking crimson giant (one of the warehouse staff) and Borrowick Grimpkin got got in an encounter with some wizardly loaders. So, this seems like a high lethality rate, right?

I think Troika has a fairly tough rule for character death. Essentially, if you go to zero Stamina (Health) and another PC comes to your aid in the same round, you have a chance of survival. This is particularly nerve-wracking for the incapacitated PC since Troika initiative is random. Each player and enemy gets a certain number of tokens and they all go into a bag at the start of each round along with one other token that, when drawn, means the end of the round. So you never know when it’s going to be your turn or when it’s going to be the end of the round! Add to this the fact that, if you go into negative stamina, you’re instantly killed, and I think you can see what I mean. On top of that, there is no way to increase your Stamina so you will always be exactly as squishy as you are at the start of the game, unless you add armor.

A warrior bleeds from the eyes and mouth as he is assaulted by some other dimensional horror. — I don’t know how to describe this one.

For poor Tim and Borrowick, they were beyond help, insta-dead, no coming back. Some of the enemies in Troika can do so much damage that they are not unlikely to one-shot the average adventurer. And that is the way the game is built. At least, that’s what I am coming to understand. You have to make the most of the time you have with your characters because it’s going to be a good time, not a long time.

Another thing I have come to understand is that, even in a game where your character’s end is not necessarily the goal, and not something you plan for, you can still have a good one that feels right and satisfying. After their character’s death, each of the players highlighted it as a major star of the session! The shock and the surprise element of their endings, in fights that seemed both unexpected and momentous, not to mention, in true Troika fashion, bizarre and unique, left them happy with how they went out.

I’d like to take this opportunity to share the obituaries I wrote up for each of them. I shared these in the general chat on our Tables and Tales Discord. After the second one in a row went up, we all agreed we needed a new channel entitled Fallen Heroes Obituaries. And that has been a big hit!

Tim

We lost a good one last night. Tim leaves behind his beloved gremlin-terrier, Brutus and fellow worthy adventurers, Ba’Naana and Borrowick Grimpkin. He had an illustrious career as a gremlin catcher before ever setting foot into Whalgravaak’s Warehouse. He had once managed to trip up one of Troika’s oversized citizens in the city’s renowned Gianttown district. This caused massive property damage but he still managed to capture the gremlin he was chasing at the time. In the warehouse Tim faithfully executed the wishes of his erstwhile patron, Exultant Wulf Memnemenoch by bludgeoning to death the alien cacogen known only as the Opportunist. Unfortunately, it was a member of staff of the warehouse that laid low the heroic gremlin catcher. He died bravely clubbing another giant, an enormous, crimson, vampiric one named Paude. And no doubt, his sacrifice was deeply appreciated by Ba’Naana and Borrowick Grimpkin as they accidentally but poignantly cremated his body just as the ancient warriors did for their honoured dead.

Borrowick Grimpkin

We lost another brave soul last night. Borrowick Grimpkin, Wizard-hunter extraordinaire, known across Troika City for his exploits in infiltrating and despatching an entire wizarding cult of Muhtrenex the Rufescent, Gulper of Blood, met his end. Despite having fulfilled his mission to slay the cacogen Opportunist, he and his team-mates continued in their exploration of Whalgravaak’s Warehouse. It was there that he was predeceased by his companion Tim in the battle with Paude the vampire giant. The circumstances of Borrowick Grimpkin’s passing were, in many ways, that of a workplace accident, impaled, as he was by the forklift arm of a rusty humanoid loader with the oxidised face of the wizard who created it. If it were not for the fact that, by his actions, his crate pilfering friends, Ba’Naana and Sticky Nicky were afforded the opportunity to escape, that might be how his death was recorded. Instead we can proudly state that Borrowick Grimpkin died as he lived, performing a dangerously acrobatic jumping sword attack from two stories up on a man made entirely of metal. RIP.

How does your group handle PC death, dear reader? Do they celebrate it? Do they rage against it? Are they forgiving or do they hold a grudge?

Games I Wanted to Play this Year

Review

So, how have I done with that list from earlier in the year? At the time I wrote that, on the 28th July, I thought, Time-shmime! Who needs it?! Not me, that’s who. I’ll breeze through this entire list of ten frikkin’ games. But, of course, that was assuming a lot.

Assumptions

The first assumption that was happily crushed was that we had a smaller number of GMs willing to run sessions in our little community, Tables and Tales. Up until then, only three of us had run anything so I assumed that would continue. When a fourth and even fifth GM raised their hands to take the helm, I was delighted. That’s what I had always wanted in our space. From what I can see, if GMs were water, most RPG communities would be dying of thirst. Even in the much larger Open Hearth community, you tend to see the same dozen or so members announcing new games all the time, despite there being a membership in the hundreds. Given the size of Tables and Tales, five active GMs represents a pretty large percentage of our total player-base. On top of that we have had a couple of board game nights too. The long awaited and pretty fun Darkest Dungeon board game is, honestly, very close to the video game (actually, I’m told by friend of the blog, Media Goblin it’s closer to Darkest Dungeon 2 in rules) but also pretty close to an RPG so we gave it a go.

Assumption number 2: I have a pretty stable schedule, which meant that I could run games almost every night of the week if I had the wherewithal. And there were weeks there when I was playing, either as GM or player, in four or five sessions. Turns out that was not sustainable. For one thing, obviously, I started writing this blog, dear reader. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love doing this and it’s not like it takes that long, but if I want to blog, I need to do it in the evening (even though I am typing this on the train to work right now because its a busy week for me and my evenings are taken up with pre-Christmas socialising.) Between that and various other work and family commitments that came up, it was simply impossible to maintain that sort of schedule.

Reality

Even taking these points into account, I managed to play a lot of games in the last few months, just mostly not the ones I expected to. So, let’s have another look at that list:

GM

Tales from the Loop – Mascots and Murder – Short Campaign – Nope, didn’t happen. This one is still simmering away on that back-burner, ready for promotion to the front of the stove-top any time now. It had to be shelved to make way for other games and other GMs. Like I said earlier, I was perfectly happy to do it.
Dungeon Crawl Classics – individual modules – Haven’t managed to get any of these to the table yet, I’m afraid. But, I have a plan for this one. I have had to re-arrange my schedule a bit to allow it. Our local game shop, Replay, has been undergoing a big refurbishment in the last few months. Once it’s done, they will expand their number of gaming tables a lot and I am hoping to get in there on a Wednesday night to run some DCC Level 0 funnels. My preference would be to get some newbies to sign up for these sessions and hopefully gain some new members for Tables and Tales in the process. The new year will be the perfect time for this, I think.

More Troika! – one-shots – Achievement unlocked! Although, technically, it was more like two sessions of the same game, rather than multiple one-shots. I did a blogpost on it! We went to Whalgravaak’s Warehouse, one of the Location based adventures made for Troika. So far it has been very fun. It’s a dungeon crawl, there’s no doubt about that, but it’s a warehouse. And the rooms and creatures and general vibe are beautifully weird in the way only Troika can do it. So far, the PCs, a Monkey Monger, a Wizard Hunter and a Gremlin Catcher (there was also a Landsknecht who has since moved to Spain) have murdered the Cacogen they were sent there to murder, made friends with a thin mutant, captured entire detachments of microscopic soldiers in gremlin catching jars, discovered a desert other-world on top of the warehouse and, um, set fire to a load of old rope. Brilliant craic altogether.
Death Match Island – one-shot – You know what, I just completed a rewatch (maybe not “rewatch” since I never watched the entire thing in the first place) of Lost, the whole thing. All six seasons. All 5000 episodes. I think I was in mourning for the lost Death Match Island one-shot that should have been. This one was a scheduling issue. Those of you out there who play RPGs (and if you don’t and you’re here, welcome! You must be confused…) will be aware of the difficulties one often encounters in getting four or five adults together in the same room at the same time. Honestly, I am surprised this problem doesn’t come up more often in Tables and Tales. Anyway, having just finished that Lost marathon, I am 1000% ready to play this game. It’s not quite the same and it would definitely not run for 678 sessions like Lost would if it were an RPG but it has the same heart and the same mystery box feel to it. And I want that. That’s what I want.
The Wildsea – campaign – Just go read my blogpost on My First Dungeon’s campaign of the Wildsea. I desperately want to play this game. Honestly, whether I got to be a player or a Firefly, I would be excited. But, really? I’m not sure when I was going to fit this one in this year. Another campaign? Dunno what I was thinking.
DIE RPG – one-shot – I finished listening to the My First Dungeon Wildsea campaign and just started listening to the DIE one. They have a great episode that is mainly Kieron Gillon being effusive for an hour about his, admittedly very cool, game and I enjoyed it. But then I got into the Session Zero episode and I immediately wanted to play it. I want to run this for my friends and have them play real-world people with real-world problems working it all out it in a fucked-up fantasy world of their own creation as characters of their own creation. I really want it. Maybe next year.

Player

Old School Essentials – campaign I think – So this one has not happened yet. I think it is, at least partly, due to the fact that Isaac, of Lost Path Publishing has been running other shit like crazy in the last few months instead. I hope it wasn’t my OSE character creation post that put him off running the game (I’m pretty sure it wasn’t. I’d really be flattering myself to imagine I had that much influence on anyone.)

Heart: The City Beneath – Open Hearth campaign – Our GM, Mike, brought a whole bunch of us together (There were six PCs at the start) to hopefully save the landmark known as Nowhere from being consumed by the Heart. This was a real learning experience for me as it was only my second time as a player in the Resistance System (see the section on Magus, Pike and Drum below for my first experience.) I discovered that, if left to our own devices, players (for “players” read “Ronan” but not just “Ronan”) are apt to take the hand when there is no form of initiative to govern the order or frequency of actions in combat. It was a lesson learned early in the campaign due to one player’s proper and timely use of Stars and Wishes after the very first session. Saying that, I had a brilliant time playing my Incarnadine, Priest of the God of Debt, alongside a Heretic, a Cleaver, a Deep Apiarist, a Vermissian Knight and a Deadwalker. We often had opposing desires and drives, which made the role-play fun, and the GM came up with lots of weird and interesting situations, NPCs, enemies and locations for us. Forgotten-Frost-Remembered, my Aelfir Incarnadine, got to reach Tier 4 of the Heart and retire(!) at least in his head.
Call of Cthulhu – Masks of Nyarlathotep – campaign – Not really sure if this was anything other than wishful thinking when I wrote this, to be honest. This post explains that it was always going to be a long shot to get this campaign started again. But someday, I would love to get Grant Mitchell back on the trail of the mystery in this thoroughly classic campaign.
Magus, Pike and Drum – Playtest – This is Isaac again. He has a great basis for a Resistance System game set in the English Civil War that never was, and this is it. There were four of us gathered around the table for this playtest at the end of the summer. I genuinely had so much fun with it. Gráinne was my character. She was an Irish noble and she had some very fun abilities (some of them were a bit too fun with a few too restrictions, it was decided, as a result of this playtest.) What was important in the game is that we solved the mystery in very short order, after scaring the shit out of the mayor and not blowing up the town. But what’s really important is that we provided Isaac a lot of valuable feedback to feed back into his new game. Can’t wait to play this one again, hopefully in the near future. I hope to write a lot more about this game as it develops.

Conclusions

So there you go. Three out of ten. Not great. But! I experienced so many other games instead of the ones I didn’t get to in that post! And I got something out of all of them. I’ll tell you about them in the next post (or the one after if I don’t have time to write the rest of the week and just post some more old fiction on Sunday instead.)

Back to Troika with Tables and Tales

Whalgravaak’s Warehouse

We’re going back to Troika for another one-shot tonight! I’m very excited for a couple of reasons.
The first is that I finished reading through the Whalgravaak’s Warehouse book last night and it seems like a lot of (potentially very lethal) fun. I don’t think it was necessary to read the whole thing before beginning play, actually, but I was enjoying it so I kept going. That can rarely be said of RPG products so that’s a big tick in the plus column already.
How does it play? Only time, and my players, will tell, dear reader. But I will say, I love the setup of it. I think it has done enough, to lay the groundwork for a session full of strange and dangerous settings, fun and dangerous encounters and weird and dangerous NPCs.

They call it a Location-based adventure and, in the intro they admonish the DM to pay attention to
“the classic tenets of danger, resource management, exploration and player agency.”
This says a lot in just a few words I think. But it neglects to mention that it also involves elements of the classic dungeon crawl and a hex crawl in too!

New Tables and Tales members

The second reason for excitement is the introduction of a couple of new members to our little, local RPG community, Tables and Tales. We have been in existence only since February and after a small initial influx, recruitment died down somewhat. Our aim is to be able to have a few different games going on, in person, that interested players can get involved in and to continue to grow in our relatively small local community.
Although our growth has been modest, it has meant a lot to me, personally, to get to play with lots of people I would otherwise never even have games with. As a blow-in to the place I live, it’s also a great way to get to know people with similar interests and meet up face to face.
So, I love when I am able to share a table with some new tablers. Maybe talers is a better moniker? Hmmm. We’ll have to workshop that one.
I met these new recruits at the recent celebrated birthday party of one of our founding members. One was a friend of hers who has never tried TTRPGs before and one was the bar-tender, who just overheard me nerdily chatting about D&D while standing at the bar.

I think that shows that the RPG nerds are everywhere. If you want to find your people, just announce yourself loudly at the bar.

So it’s an exciting evening ahead. I hope I don’t end up frightening off the newbs…

More Troika! – One-shots

Appendectomy

When was the last time your mind was genuinely blown by an idea, a concept, a creature or a situation presented to you when you played a fantasy role playing game? Because I don’t think D&D is providing opportunities for that sort of thing these days. I don’t necessarily blame the writers of D&D books for that; Wizards of the Coast has painted themselves into a corner that they are very comfortable occupying. In fact, because D&D is responsible for much of the public image of fantasy games for the last half century, they have dragged a lot of the hobby with them. As a result you have endless polished and glittering iterations of elves and dwarves and dragons and wizards with spell levels and clerics with devotion to individual deities and all the same monsters repeated ad nauseam. It is particularly interesting when you look at Appendix N, the appendix to the original D&D, in which Gary Gygaxstated his inspirations for the game. It has a few names you would expect to see: JRR Tolkien, Robert E Howard, Fritz Leiber and Poul Anderson but you also have a few that might make you wonder about the connection to the D&D of today.

HP Lovecraft is well known as the author of The Call of Cthulhu and other cosmic horror stories but his influence on D&D might not be obvious to all. Jack Vance wrote fantasy novels but they were tinged with an element of science fiction and gonzo world building in his Dying Earth books. In fact, many of the authors represented in Appendix N were famous for science fantasy rather than straight fantasy books, just look at Roger Zelazny and Edgar Rice Burroughs. You can still see bits of that influence in Wizards of the Coast’s D&D if you think of Spelljammer and Eberron but they always feel little too clean and sanitised compared to the books those ideas came from.

What I am getting at is that the true spiritual successors to the game developed with Appendix N in mind are part of the OSR. I wrote just yesterday on this very blog about Dungeon Crawl Classics and that very much embraces those influences, but it’s Troika! from the Melsonian Arts Council that truly embodies them for me.

Stretching those imagination muscles

The cover of my copy of Troika! Numinous Edition.

From Acid Death Fantasy by Luke Gearing:
“To the East lies the Plastic Sea, a miraculous main of liquid plastic. Upon contact with living skin it solidifies, covering the coast with Coated Men dueling each other in elegant, fatal contests, having made the choice to die young and glorious, sealed in flexible plastic armour.”

From Fronds of Benevolence by Andrew Walter:
“Fletherfalloon is a floating Thinking Engine of a very basic sort, dating from a bygone age. Festooned with rotting ribbons and rusty curlicues, it hovers at varying altitudes burbling and whistling to itself.”

From Slow Sleigh to Plankton Downs by Ezra Claverie:
“Water: three billion years old, frozen by the perpetual
night at the edge of the Galaxy, compressed into glaciers
of midnight blue. Taste the weight of time and solitude,
darkness and purity. With Djajadiningrat.
Hear it crackle in your favorite spirit. The sound of time
calving into an ocean of premium flavor.
Cut by natural-born hand, never by machine, never by clone.
At night’s edge, taste the infinity. Only from Djajadiningrat.
— advertisement in Ice Tomorrow (trade magazine)”

Troika! Is a city at the centre of everything, and around it gathers a host of bizarre and fantastical settings dotted throughout the cosmos. Perhaps you traverse this universe in a space-ship, perhaps it’s a Golden Barge you use. Maybe your character is a Displacement Prosthesist, maybe they are a Hyenaman Scavenger. The possibilities are truly endless and the strangenesses abound.

A page from Acid Death Fantasy by Luke Gearing. It details of the background you can choose to play in that setting, the Hyenaman Scavenger.

We had the chance to play a single one-shot of Troika! A couple of months ago and it did nothing but whet my appetite for more oddness. The adventure we played was a published one, The Blancmange and Thistle, in which the PCs encounter a hotel. Saying any more would involve spoilers but suffice it to say, if you are a fan of the unusual, that hotel is the place to stay.

The inside front cover of my copy of Slow Sleigh to Plankton Downs by Ezra Claverie.

From that, I fed the PCs a hook that should, someday, when I find the time, lead them to the world of Myung’s Mis-step and the whodunnit adventure at the centre of Slow Sleigh to Plankton Downs.

But I have a few others too:

Some lads on a page from Frond of Benevolence by Andrew Walter.

Fronds of Benevolence is a short, point-crawl where the PCs journey in search of an item of great importance to their friend/ruler/patron/deity, Duke DeCorticus, which will lead them “to the Rainbow Badlands, across the precipitous face of The Wall and in the very vaults of the hump-backed sky!
Acid Death Fantasy is more of a setting book but could equally be used as a point-crawl adventure. It contains elements from Dune, Planet of the Apes, others from dying earth genre books and still others from classic fantasy.
Whalgravaak’s Warehouse also by Andrew Walter is an adventure “that centres the play experience on the classic tenets of danger, resource management, exploration and player engagement agency.”

And given the fact that I will probably only get to run these once every few months, these will no doubt last me a while!

Have you had any experience playing Troika!? If you met a Slug Monarch in an awkward situation, would you help them or attack them?

Games I Want to Play This Year

Five months to go

Having managed to get through so many games in the first 7 months of the year, you know what? I reckon, if I really make an effort, I think I can fit in up to ten more different games before New Year’s Day. I’m particularly looking forward to a few more one-shots. For those of you who’ve been keeping an eye on this space over the last couple of weeks, you’ll know I have a soft spot for them.

Lists 4

Here we go. Like previous lists, I’m just going to split them between those I want to run and those I want to play in.

To be honest, a bunch of these games are ones I already have in the schedule. I’m hoping to get Tales from the Loop started in a few weeks and I have Death Match Island in the calendar for next Friday. Even the ones I want to play in include a couple that are almost good to go.

GM

Player

I’m going to spend the next couple of days going through each of these games to explain why I’m so excited about playing them.

Stay tuned!

Also, what are you looking forward to play this year? Let me know in the comments!