Troy Press

Last week I wrote about micro-RPGs. This week we take a look at one of my own such systems, for the gamebook Hero’s Arc: Under the Blood-Red Mountain, winner of Best Dungeon Crawl in the 2018 Solitaire Print-and-Play Contest. You are the hero of this story, making decisions that will shape your fortunes. Unlike a conventional book, you don’t read this sequentially – most numbered sections will provide you with a choice to make: depending on your choice, you will continue reading a different section. Creating Your Character To begin, […]

The very first role-playing game was the original Dungeons & Dragons boxed set, with its three 36- to 40-page booklets (Men & Magic, Monsters & Treasure, The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures) presenting the idea that RPGs should go big. Of course, the second RPG was Tunnels & Trolls, which fit everything into one 42-page booklet. Still the belief has been that RPGs need to go big, with the average length of main books about 250,000 words. So it may surprise you to learn that RPGs can be less than 0.1% that size. […]

DM: You can’t see any towers. The redwoods here are hundreds of feet tall.Cleric: As we fly above the trees, I use Locate Object to try to find the same type of stone used in the other towers.DM: The cleric follows his senses till it brings you to a pond among the redwoods. The pond is about six hundred feet in diameter. The wind whispers softly through the trees.Artificer: Let’s land about 120 feet away from the pond, just in case.DM: OK.Artificer: Can someone give me Water Walk?Wizard: I will.Artificer: […]

Twenty-five years and one week ago, I started an ASCII-email newsletter that I began posting on Compuserve. Its masthead and introduction: MODEL LANGUAGES The newsletter discussing newly imagined words for newly imagined worlds ————————————————————————– Volume I, Issue 1 — May 1, 1995 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE HOBBY OF MODEL LANGUAGES Some people build model airplanes, some craft model trains and some… well, they invent model languages. Model languages can be everything from a few words of made-up slang to a rigorously developed system of interrelated imaginary tongues. It is not […]

Back in November, one of my players asked me to run a one-shot campaign for her son and his wife, as one of them always DMs, and they’ve never both played in the same game. I asked them what they wanted and they said that they would like “to have a one-shot with high-level characters, like level 15 or so, and possibly mostly a dungeon crawl with puzzles and games and things.” I’d never run a session for higher than level 7, so after first thinking about writing my own […]

My group played our first remote D&D 5e session last night. As it happened, my notes (written before I knew this would be online) called for them waking in the middle of a cavalry battle between centaurs and horsemen. It was certainly a lot easier to manage with a virtual tabletop! We had problems with the Roll 20 app’s audio and switched to JoinMe halfway through: that went much better. We will do that going forward. Unfortunately, virtual D&D brings all of the fun of conference calls to your gaming […]

My 14-year old son asked me to teach him to play Solitaire last weekend. This made me question my life choices: how had we never taught him Solitaire?! I can remember playing Simultaneous Solitaire all the time with my maternal grandmother and brother and sister before I was even ten. So we got out three decks and each played traditional Solitaire, my wife and I guiding him along. I even queued up a soundtrack (“Solitaire” by Suzanne Vega).  I explained to my son that when Windows 3.0 came out it was the […]

As I’ve written elsewhere, when I started my current homebrew O5R campaign, I generated a 10×10 hex map using Hex Describe. Even though it is powered by nearly 2,000 tables (!), I found myself missing the cast of characters that populate a town. I came up with a design goal of, within a single page, emulating the keep from The Keep on the Borderlands (buy it!) as a useful starting location for the adventurers, but adding more elements of intrigue. Since Hex Describe is open source, and you can append your own tables […]

Last night I got two hours of O5R play out of one sentence of my session notes! That sentence: A dead man, an arrow in his eye: you find no food or weapons but a saddle and shield. Reacting to my players’ actions, I ended up roleplaying the dead man (thanks to Speak with Dead), the grass (!) his body was found in (thanks to Speak with Plants), and his murderer. The key resource I used during play was a random name generator I had written at the start of the campaign, when the situations […]

I’m amazed by the variety of implementations of spellcasting in OSR systems. I asked OSR Reddit what the problems are that these new implementations are trying to solve, what the most popular approaches to spellcasting are, and people’s preferences. I distilled the discussion into the following analysis. Perceived problems with OD&D— Boring Vancian magic isn’t magical enough Difference between spell levels and PC levels Set spell lists Doesn’t suit certain settings and types of campaigns Types of spells— Set spell lists: By spell level By player level (e.g., level 2 […]