Troy Press

Stonetop was first released as a village playbook for Dungeon World 10 years ago yesterday. It’s come a long way since then, and I keep discovering new things I love about it. Stonetop has the best system of magic items I’ve used in a tabletop roleplaying game, with unique items, shared with players as cards or inserts, which require taking action to unlock custom powers. Minor and Major Arcana Here are examples of a card for a minor arcanum (front and back) and a major arcanum. Note some major arcana […]

When my 12-year old Toyota was in the shop, I drove a new loaner car for two days. I’ve driven newer model cars when renting a car while traveling but using a new car in a familiar environment—where I was not constantly worried about navigation—gave me a chance to dwell on the new features. First, I love having blind spot detectors in the mirrors. It’s a really great UI. You’re looking to see if you can switch lanes, and the warning light is where you are looking. But with cars […]

I’ve never had a pumpkin spice latte, but I love pumpkin beers more than Oktoberfestbiers or Märzenbiers, and I look forward to them every fall. I’ve tried 41 different pumpkin beers over the years, as part of flights, as singles at alcohol retailers, and at restaurants. The only six pack I bought this fall was Voodoo Ranger Atomic Pumpkin, which packs a nice bit of heat and is definitely my #1 pumpkin beer. If you don’t like heat, I recommend seeking out beers from Elysian Brewing Company: Punkuccino Coffee Pumpkin […]

Dune: Imperium is a deck-building worker placement game about political intrigue that plays best with 3 or 4 players. With great implementations on Steams, Google Play, and the Apple App Store, it is also a fun board game to play electronically. You play a character representing one of four Great Houses (e.g., the Atreides House). You start with a deck of 10 standard cards, from which you draw five to start each round. These cards have three capabilities: they decide the type of place you can send a worker to […]

We asked U.S. adults if they’d ever engaged in game design: 31% had, though this was often just adding house rules (15% of all adults). The most widely created new games were, with multiple responses permitted, board games (10%), card games (also 10%), RPGs (6%), video games (5%), mobile games (also 5%), interactive fiction (2%), and gamebooks (also 2%). Younger generations are more likely to create games than older generations: 22% of Gen Z have made their own house rules, compared to just 8% of Baby Boomers; 16% of Gen […]

While different playbooks have unique moves in Apocalypse World for PCs, the GM doesn’t have different moves depending on which playbooks are being used. Masks was one of the first PbtA games, if not the first, to give the Game Master playbook-specific moves. For instance, for the playbook The Outsider, the GM gets the moves: For The Protégé: Many of these moves are tied into the character arc and challenges faced by the corresponding playbooks. Thirsty Sword Lesbians offers three GM moves per playbook: Chasing Adventure does this as well, and I think any GM of […]

If—like some of my friends—you bounced off the first few episodes of Star Trek: Lower Decks, but are willing to give it another try, I offer this Top 10 11 list. These are from the first four seasons, arranged in chronological order. Two of the top 10 are from Season 1, three from Season 2, three from Season 3, and two from Season 4. And the last episode of each season is in the Top 10. I cheated and include the #11 episode, The Inner Fight, because it is my […]

I ignored the release of Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition when it came out. I thought the original edition was a phenomenal Ameritrash-style civ game, and I’d already decked my copy out with 3D models of the wonders and with custom wooden tokens for resource tracking. I was wrong to ignore it. Earlier this year, I re-played the original a few times and realized that certain advances (e.g., technologies) were overpowered and that the beginning of the game was pretty scripted. So I downloaded the revised rules [PDF] and compared them to the original. To […]

Improv Almanac: Dangers and Discoveries for 88 Places is a 467-page resource for the busy Game Master. Did your players take a shortcut through a swamp, and you are looking for ideas for encounters? Are they trying to cross snow-capped peaks, and you don’t want to evoke The Fellowship of the Ring? Are they sailing, and you’ve run out of ideas for what’s on the next island they’ll encounter? The primary way to use this ebook is to look up the type of location your adventurers will be exploring. You’ll find questions […]

Over on Mastodon, RPG fans spent August posting on the above themes, and I decided to as well:

One of the things that Axis & Allies is not particularly concerned about is modeling the rapid technological change that took place during World War II. For the most part, a tank at the start of the game has the same capabilities as a tank at the end of the game, a fighter plane at the start of the war has the same capabilities as a fighter plane at the end of the game, etc.  This is most unlike the actual war. For instance, just look at the proliferation of bombers and […]

Growing up, I taught myself to program BASIC on the TRS-80 Level I, then the Bally Astrocade and the Tandy Pocket Computer. At the time, I didn’t realize that all three were based on Palo Alto Tiny BASIC. PATB itself was inspired by the People’s Computer Company (PCC) “Build Your Own BASIC” project, created by Dennis Allison. What amazes me about Allison’s design spec is how streamlined it is: he defined his own programming language, IL (Interpretive Language), and specified his Tiny BASIC interpreter in just 124 lines of code! Back in 2017, I wrote […]

I’m happy to present this guest post from @skander, a former languages professor who left for the strangely greener pastures of being a corporate drone (and it gives him more time for elf games). – J. Alan Henning In my life, I’ve been a tenured language professor and a TTRPG player, and I’ve seen a few discussions of how to act on the idea of language differences in role-playing games (this one by Tom van Winkle and a discussion around it led me to writing this post). The goal of […]