Troy Press

I first played Star Trek Panic in 2018, playing it twice, and I loved it so much I bought it for my father for his birthday, as he was a fan of Star Trek when it premiered. Well, neither he nor I ever got around to playing the game until I visited him recently. I’ve now played it six times total, working through all the missions twice. Star Trek Panic is a cooperative game where each player is one of the main characters from Star Trek: The Original Series—Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Uhura, Scott, Sulu, or Chekov. […]

During its beta, I ran Stonetop pretty much Rules As Being Written, though we didn’t always update to the latest version.  As I wrote in my review of Stonetop, “My hacks to the system were minimal: integrating a Flashback move to keep things advancing, and experimenting with different forms of prep (threat maps, Monster of the Week countdowns).” More often I brought in material that Jeremy Strandberg, Stonetop’s author, and Jason Lutes, his publisher, had created elsewhere. Flashback For my Dungeon World campaign, I had hacked together this move: Flashback When you propose that you took some previously undeclared action in the […]

From 2016 to 2020, I belonged to a board game group which typically played a new game every week. Meanwhile, my parents still play Scrabble every day, sometimes twice a day. Two very different extremes. My parents are in good company. In a newsmaker survey of 1,059 U.S. adults, 54% of adults would prefer to play a board game that they had played before, while just 16% would prefer to play a board game new to them (20% have no preference, and 10% don’t play board games). While the 16% who prefer […]

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 […]

I love having a Starting Session move. It is a great segue from small talk into the game itself. Frankly, I think I’m going to hack such a move into every PbtA campaign I run from now on.

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 […]