Troy Press

Oðblgshezi (pronounced /oth-blg-SHEH-zee/, with a syllabic /L/) is the name of a "language" consisting of English written with the digits of a calculator.  You type in a number and then turn the calculator upside down to see the word.  In order to make use of all ten digits, I persuaded the Anglo-Saxon letter eth (ð) to return from retirement to stand in for ‘TH’ (whether voiced, like ð, or unvoiced, like þ).  For instance: SHIBBOLETH (SHIBBOLEð) 937088145 Here are the 10 letters of Oðblgshezi: I 1 Z 2 E 3 […]

This afternoon I’ve been enjoying playing J.J Flash’s new implementation of Colossal Cave Adventure 101*, a hack of my streamlined and randomized take on the original Adventure game. You can now play Advent 101 in your web browser! My key innovation to Crowther & Wood’s adventure was heretical: I randomized the map. Heretical because the original map was a faithful simulation of Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. But the random map makes the game more replayable. While the ways to overcome each obstacle are the same from game to game, and resemble the […]

This is an excerpt from the second edition of my ebook, How to Design Card Games. One of the earliest uses of suits in tabletop games comes from the 12th century.  Chinese dominos first had two suits: the Chinese suit and the Barbarian suit (later renamed to the Civil suit and the Military suit, respectively, so as not to disrespect the “barbarians” that had taken over). Unlike modern understandings of suits, these suits were not visually indicated; players simply had to memorize which domino tile belonged to which suit. For […]

Email is a cruel master. When I first started working in an office, in the 1980s, we shared files via “sneaker net” – taking them back and forth on floppies. Very high tech. For customers and prospects, we sent and received documents overnight through FedEx, then we sent and received faxes. When we first got email, we could only email other people in our building. Then, of course, we could finally email through the Internet. Over time, my In Box became my master, often to the detriment of my true […]

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 […]