Troy Press

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 […]

The vast majority of tabletop RPG campaigns are fantasies rather than science fiction. As Jason Bulmahn writes, “One of the reasons why I think fantasy is a dominant genre in TTRPGs is just how much of the core of it is public domain, gathered from centuries of myth and folklore. It allows each game to borrow from those core concepts and define itself by the ways in which it is different.” It’s hard to have those same shared expectations of the world in a science fiction setting. Are there aliens, […]

So one of the joys of releasing texts into the Creative Commons is seeing how other people adapt them. When I wrote Suddenly an Ogre, I wrote it as a gamebook teaching the basic moves of Dungeon World. I thought others might like to adapt it to different game systems. I was shocked and pleased when Infinite Zone ported it to the Nintendo Switch instead. They’ve removed the mechanics elements to focus on the story; e.g., removing text like “You roll ⚃ ⚁ +1=7. Defy Danger—You stumble, hesitate, or flinch: the GM will offer you a worse outcome, hard bargain, […]

Filk music is the folk music of science-fiction and fantasy fandom, often sung together at conventions. Like folk songs, filk songs often are new lyrics set to old tunes. Also like folk songs, they morph and change over time. The first two commercial albums of filk music were by Leslie Fish and the DeHorn Crew: Folk Songs for Folk Who Ain’t Even Been Yet (1976) and Solar Sailors (1977). Both are worth seeking out, if you’d like a taste of early filk; “Banned from Argo” (BFA)—from Solar Sailors—is the most famous filk song of […]

In my Impulse Drive campaign, before facing the BBEG, the PCs needed to run a last gig to earn some lucre to repair their spaceship, buy some gear, and pay down their debt. I typically offered two or three gigs for the PCs to pick from, having them choose at the end of a session so I could prep the right gig. In this case, I really wanted to play the Mothership adventure The Cleaning of Prison Station Echo (by Haig Morrison and Dave Kenny), so I offered two gigs inspired […]

On the Dungeon World+ Discord, Gojson asked how he could roll up a DW character, rather than just allocating the preset stats. I suggested he do it old school, rolling 3d6 down the line for each attribute. That may work for you as well, and—if you’re playing a hack that drops ability scores (3-18), as most DW hacks do—then just use the modifiers: 3d6 Modifier 3 -3 4-5 -2 6-8 -1 9-12 0 13-15 +1 16-17 +2 18 +3 The table I listed is from Dungeon World, but you could […]

One of my custom GM moves is “Bring in backstories and world-building.” This isn’t always easy, but I try to make history come alive as more than just signs on a wall.

Here is a curated list of the Top 15ish episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, in roughly chronological order. I’ve flipped the order of “Q Who” and “The Measure of a Man” because the entire series starts with a Q episode (“Encounter at Farpoint”) and ends with a Q episode, so it seems fitting to bookend this best-of list the same way. And “Q Who” has two of the essential antagonists of the TNG series. I also think it is good to encounter Data in another way before “The Measure […]

June 20 marks my third anniversary of studying Esperanto. To celebrate my anniversary, I thought I’d share some resources I have found valuable. Photo by Stefan on Unsplash.