Troy Press

Back in May, 2020, I blogged about short, rules-light RPGs, and how The Ultimate Micro-RPG book—a collection of 40 one-page games—was going to be published in November of that year. While I pre-ordered it, I didn’t end up reading it until this year. And I read it slowly. I read the book the same way I read a volume of poetry, one piece at a time, setting the book aside after each. Each game is worth contemplating alone. The collection is well thought out and well laid out. While I […]

An avid Trekkie, I had read and admired Marc Okrand’s book, The Klingon Dictionary, when it was first published in 1985. Marc, a linguist by training, designed the Klingon language to sound alien and to embrace features that rarely occurred in natural languages. That said, Klingon could still be a human language. In 1996, I was inspired to create a truly alien language, one unlike any natural language at all: Fith. My inspiration was the postfix notation used on my HP calculator and in the FORTH programming language. The name […]

Unlike many of my generation who learned to program one of the 1977 Trinity (Apple II, TRS-80, and and the PET 2001), I didn’t discover BASIC Computer Games until later (1983), in my high-school library. Of course, by then, I’d been typing in BASIC programs for years, from magazines, other books, and from dot-matrix listings shared by friends. By the time I discovered BASIC Computer Games, I’d seen many of the games in other forms, as each was effectively treated in the public domain and adapted by other programmers. But […]

Tl;dr: If you enjoy fantasy RPGs, buy Stonetop! Excellent GM advice, collaborative worldbuilding, and easy to improv. The beta materials are copious (over 200,000 words!), beautifully illustrated, and available to backers now. Over two years ago, in December, 2020, I promised Jeremy Strandberg that if he sent me the beta-test materials for Stonetop, I’d play at least three sessions of his system and give him feedback. We ended up playing 41 sessions—the system is that much fun! And while the printed books haven’t gone to press yet, that’s a testament […]

Uncommon World is my crowdsourced update to the core moves of Dungeon World, based on a survey of over 250 players, choosing between moves from seven fantasy PbtA games. Originally released in October, 2021, I’ve updated the Uncommon World PDF: Here is the full change log. And if this system is new to you, here’s the overview.

Monster of the Week: Codex of Worlds is now crowdfunding on Backerkit! 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. […]

If you were invited to a beer-and-pretzels game night, but you’re the designated driver, here are my favorite “non-alcoholic” beers to consider, though technically some of these do have up to 0.5 alcohol by volume (ABV). For each of the last two Januarys, I set aside regular beer to drink these instead, which I tracked and rated on Untappd. These are sorted by my rating, with the global rating across all app users being the tiebreaker. (Good games need tiebreakers.) Anything I rated below 3.0, I personally won’t buy again. […]

I went back through the Dungeon World subreddit posts to come up with the top 10 things that people should know when making the switch from 5e— And you may find these other discussions from Reddit helpful: Finally, here’s my own story of why I switched from 5e to Dungeon World.

My father hunts witches   studies the occult   reads all about Salemdoesn’t let my little sister    dress up on Halloweenand always carries with him   a Coors silver bullet   a garlic glove   a wooden crossand a rare iron stake. My mother is a witch   I mean that quite literallyfor she rides a broom   cooks in a cauldron   has a rat nest in her hair   studies Mephistopheles   makes unholy Swiss cheese   prefers the Lions o’er the Saintsand hides her little spells   from my father in a dictionary. My sister can turn invisible   float across the room   bowls with a crystal ball   has an undead boyfriendcan mix a love […]

One of the reasons I personally switched from 5e to Dungeon World was because of DW’s use of a Creative Commons license, which meant that—while the game text was copyright—re-use was granted along with certain obligations (e.g., attribution). This commons is probably far larger than you think, with many systems and much third-party content available to adapt. Normally I write about DW hacks, all of which but Chasing Adventure are licensed under the Creative Commons: Fantasy World, Freebooters on the Frontier, Homebrew World, Stonetop, Unlimited Dungeons, Urban/Modern/Fantasy. However, there are […]