Troy Press

I lifted one of my prep techniques from the mystery countdowns of Monster of the Week by Michael Sands. These aren’t “whodunit” mysteries but instead mysterious monsters with mysterious agendas and mysterious weaknesses. As the book puts it­— Each mystery has a countdown: this is the sequence of the terrible things that will happen if the hunters don’t stop the monster. The countdown will be your guide to what will be going on off-screen as the hunters investigate. To create the countdown, think about what would happen if the hunters […]

Five years ago, Yochai Gal compiled the first version of the Dungeon World Syllabus as a tool for new DW GMs. Alex Leone has since taken over as editor, keeping nearly 180 links current. While I had read many of these articles over the years, I decided to systematically read every single link, to improve my own GMing. I then began to compile those that were licensed under the Creative Commons into a single, easy-to-read volume, as a supplement for others to use. While most PbtA games have small fan […]

Axis & Allies & Zombies is a well-designed crossover game that is just missing some final polish. While it can play up to five, the amount of downtime makes it a poor game for more than two players. The significant randomness makes it the least strategic of the Axis & Allies line, which can be a pro or con, depending on your taste—pro: fun battles between two players of uneven skill; con: bad luck can cost you the game. If you’re interested, buy it now, though, as it is no […]

Esperanto is relatively easy to learn, but it is not easy to learn. Relatively easy, because it is easier than any natural language, as it has fewer exceptions and streamlined grammar. Today, a year into my study, I’ve accomplished far more than I did in four years of high-school Spanish. Not easy to learn, because, like a natural language, Esperanto has tens of thousands of words to learn. Esperanto lessons on Duolingo proved even more addictive than I anticipated. I thought I might do it for the month or two […]

Which PbtA or FitD games are recommended for science-fiction settings? In part, it depends on which genre you are trying to emulate. The following are each unlicensed settings in similar genres. To boldly go where your favorite science fiction has gone before: If you want 1950s pulp-science fiction space opera, try Uncharted Worlds. If you want Alien/Aliens, try The Regiment: Colonial Marines [PDF]. (H/T Bytor_Snowdog.)  If you want Asimov’s Galactic Empire series, try Numberless Worlds. If you want Battlestar Galactica, try Last Fleet. (H/T @Quietwraith on the PbtA Discord.)  If […]

In Christmas of 1979, my dad bought me Dungeons & Dragons. This was the Holmes edition, first published in 1977, covering levels 1 through 3. It was a dramatic simplification of Original D&D, intended specifically for use by those as young as junior high school. Amusingly, it was still surprisingly complicated. One of the breakthrough innovations of OD&D was the wide range of types of dice, and the mechanics seemed design to center and celebrate using all those different types of dice: For instance, when creating a character, you’d roll […]

Tl;dr: Seven-card stud, low card in the hole is wild, follow-the-queen is wild, suicide king has to fold, face-up joker means you have to shift your hole cards to the right. Whenever we get together with my brother-in-law and his family, we inevitably play poker. This time, we started with 7-card stud, then played follow-the-queen, then low-card-in-the-hole. At that point, I was ready to fully embrace chaos, and I combined them! I added that if you were dealt the suicide king face up or in the hole, you had to […]

Atma is a card-based, rules-light, improvisational PbtA game, which is perfect for the first-time Game Master and for new role players. Rather than use maps, locations are represented as cards, and you gloss over how characters move between the locations, as the game is structured around three scenes (three location cards). Rather than character sheets, characters are also represented by cards, which will include a starting move, some random moves (drawn before Scene 1 and Scene 2), and a randomly selected Super Move for Scene 3. Any loot items the […]

Researchscape conducted a newsmaker survey of 1,074 U.S. adults to develop an overview of game-playing. The survey was fielded from April 22 to 24, 2022. The responses were weighted to be representative of the overall U.S. population by the following variables: state and region, gender, age, race and ethnicity, household income, ideology, and registered voter status. Videogames have long had niche appeal, but mobile games have democratized the reach of computer games. In fact, mobile games are now played by as many people as card games: 88% of U.S. adults […]

During the summer of 2016 I read the great book, Pacific Languages: An Introduction, by John Lynch, with the intent of creating a Polynesian artlang. In November that year, I named the language Gana fa Folua, and I collated 37 roots for pronouns, from Pacific proto-languages. And then I did nothing more with it. Then, the last Sunday in August, 2021, my son and I played the board game Kahuna, which has islands with invented names (in alphabetical order). The island names were so badly designed (for instance, ‘c’ is […]