Troy Press

I ran 5e with 8 to 10 players for two campaigns. The first campaign was an open table at our FLGS (Friendly Local Game Store). That campaign quickly grew from 3 players the first session to a peak of 12 players once (on which occasion we split into two separate tables with two DMs). Given the shortage of DMs, you too may find yourself with lots of players. My key advice: In general, just embrace the chaos! Roll with the punches! All my plans went out the window fairly quickly […]

I’ve compiled and updated all of my blog posts on preparation techniques for Game Masters into a free 86-page ebook. Key content: This advice comes from my own experience with 5e, O5R, and PbtA games, so it spans a range of systems, albeit with a focus on fantasy worlds. In addition, I’ve licensed the text under the Creative Commons, so that you can freely adapt any of this material for your own RPG projects, simply by following the CC BY-SA 4.0 licensing terms. You can download the ebook from Itch.io. You […]

A 2023 New Years’ Resolution that I’m not repeating was my resolution to read 52 books (a book a week). I had been an inveterate reader from a young age, often winning the summer book-reading challenges at our public library. But as an adult, as with many of you, I expect, smartphones in general and social media in particular cannibalized the time I’d spent reading books. In 2022, I realized that Twitter had so weakened my reading attention span that it was taking forever to read the nonfiction books I […]

For the most recent stats, check Best of Troy Press. 2024 Now that 2024 is in the books, I present the final stats on what your fellow readers found most interesting: This was the first year our blog traffic declined. The reason: in 2023, Wealth Systems in RPGs made Hacker News and racked up over 7,000 page views. Taking out that one viral post (it dropped from #1 in the rankings to #21 this year), we would have grown 4% instead of shrinking 13%. I’ve not seen any growth in views from posting on Mastodon, […]

This year for Lexember, I intended to coin new names for birds and animals in Denju, the ancient language of my RPG campaigns and interactive fiction. I ended up concentrating on birds. I basically just searched through the American Heritage Dictionary Indo-European Roots Appendix, a favorite resource since I was a kid, for inspiration for my own creations. Once I’d finished that, I pulled up a list of the most common European birds and then worked through that to make sure I had translations for each common type. I did a word a […]

Impulse Drive is a science-fiction PbtA RPG that is licensed under the Creative Commons and offers ship playbooks for four different styles of campaigns: “These Ship playbooks not only describe what technology your Ship may use, but also the kinds of adventures your Crew will get up to, what motivates them, and the kinds of trouble that will follow your Crew around the galaxy.” The ships— The ship playbooks have custom moves that lean into the types of stories that can be told with such ships. For instance, each has a […]

While I latched onto warm-up questions as a starting move for Stonetop, some other systems have their own starting moves. Urban/Modern/Fantasy, in which PCs embrace or discover the supernatural, was the first system I encountered with a Start of Session move— Start of Session When you start a new session after your character has significant downtime, say if you primarily focused on your mortal life and obligations or if you furthered your supernatural interests. If you chose mortal, the GM will tell you how one of your Entanglements, Desires, or Dread […]

Back in October 2019, when Mark Rosenfelder was editing Langmaker: Celebrating Conlangs, he wrote and asked, “For marketing, I think it’d be nice to be able to say that the book includes some never published material.” I offered him Denju, which I’m now publishing here for the first time. Denju started out as the language I used to name cities in Civilization IV and became the language of Hexedland, the campaign setting for a 5e campaign and three Dungeon World campaigns, and the backdrop for my interactive fiction, A New […]

When preparing to run a PbtA (Powered by the Apocalypse) TTRPG, keep in mind how experience is gained. Many PbtA games have an End of Session move that awards experience points. Make sure you’re giving players chances during the session that align with this move! Here is the End of Session move in Dungeon World: When you reach the end of a session, choose one of your bonds that you feel is resolved (completely explored, no longer relevant, or otherwise). Ask the player of the character you have the bond […]

Embarrassingly, my number one album this year was Subspace Rhapsody, the soundtrack to the Strange New Worlds’ musical episode. (Last year it was We Are.) After seeing my top songs from the album, I was curious about what others thought. I crunched the numbers for listener stats from Spotify and viewer stats from YouTube. The top three for Spotify were “Status Report” (the first song sung by the crew), “I’m the X” (Spock’s solo), and “I’m Ready” (Christine Chapel’s song). The top three for YouTube were “We are One” (the finale), “How Would […]

How some RPGs get coins wrong: they matter a lot until they matter not at all. It’s fun to play until your PCs are rich, but it’s even more fun to be able to buy things with those riches. Absorbing Excess Wealth At early levels, PCs lack coin and equipment, and they spend whatever coin they get on gearing up. Then eventually the coin no longer matters. There aren’t enough weapons, gear, luxury items or magic items to buy. You’ll know you’ve hit that point in 5e when PCs are […]

In high school I discovered A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin and fell in love with the entire trilogy, though the first book was my favorite. But slowly the books kept coming! I had just gotten married when Tehanu was published in 1990: at the time, I didn’t really appreciate it. I was a father of four by the time Tales from Earthsea and The Other Wind were published in 2001; I ended up reading aloud A Wizard of Earthsea to one of my sons to launch my re-reading of the series. I missed the publication of […]

Back in 2018, I posted the following question to the Wargames forum of BoardGameGeek: I’m looking for a foundational wargame to use to introduce my 13-year old son to the hobby: something that plays in an hour but introduces the key concepts common to most wargames. No more than 88 counters. Replayable up to 10 times (about the most we ever repeat a game). He likes ancients, medieval, Revolutionary War, ACW, and WW2. Thoughts? And, if like one poster, you wonder, “Why 88 counters? (It is an awfully specific number is why I […]