Troy Press

We greatly enjoyed playing two sessions of MASHED by Mark Plemmons of Brabblemark Press. MASHED is an Apocalypse Engine take on a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in Korea. (Not a license of the TV show.) The book is well produced, and you can purchase decks of Camp cards, Wound cards, and Event cards if playing a campaign. One aspect I particularly enjoyed was getting to learn the history of the Korean war better (from the book) and then seeing it unfold in play. The PCs landed in Pusan after crossing […]

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 […]

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. Fith’s syntax isn’t alien to computer programmers of a certain generation, but it is alien to how people make and interpret sentences.

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 […]

You and your fellow villagers know that you can keep the iron-age village of Stonetop safe from the strange creatures of the wider world and even help it prosper. And you’re willing to adventure away from Stonetop to get the resources you need to do so. The GM is given three key resources: Book I, Book II, and Arcana cards. Each expands the state-of-the-art for fantasy PbtA games.

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. To create the countdown, think about what would happen if the hunters […]

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 D&D 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 and a supplement I made for incorporating 5e skills. Photo by Carlos Cram on Unsplash.

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 are licensed under the Creative Commons: Chasing Adventure, Fantasy World, Freebooters on the Frontier, Homebrew World, Stonetop, Unlimited Dungeons, Urban/Modern/Fantasy. However, there are a […]

Now more than ever people are looking for alternatives to Dungeons & Dragons. But, with thousands of choices of tabletop roleplaying games, where to start? Fantasy RPGs Other Types of RPGs With so much to choose from, consider running a few one-shot games to find a system that resonates with you! Photo by Marie Bellando Mitjans on Unsplash.

I researched a lot of PbtA and FitD science-fiction games before selecting Impulse Drive. For my group, the game provides the Firefly/Expanse-style heroics we were looking for, with enough of a framework to encourage the narrative without so much complexity that it bogs down play. Our group just shifted from playing every other week to playing every week, because they couldn’t get enough! When I first started reading Impulse Drive, I searched the web for something like the Dungeon World Syllabus, a collection of invaluable links for GMs. Not finding […]