Troy Press

I ignored the release of Clash of Cultures: Monumental Edition when it came out. I thought the original edition was a phenomenal Ameritrash-style civ game, and I’d already decked my copy out with 3D models of the wonders and with custom wooden tokens for resource tracking. I was wrong to ignore it. Earlier this year, I re-played the original a few times and realized that certain advances (e.g., technologies) were overpowered and that the beginning of the game was pretty scripted. So I downloaded the revised rules [PDF] and compared them to the original. To […]

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, […]

I just backed Atma: A Roleplaying Card Game – Season III on Kickstarter and wanted to update my review of Season I with some notes about Season III. Atma is a card-based, rules-light, improvisational PbtA game, which is perfect for the first-time Game Master and for new role players. Rather than use maps, locations are represented as cards, and you gloss over how characters move between the locations, as the game is structured around three scenes (three location cards). Rather than character sheets, characters are also represented by cards, which […]

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 […]

In a visit to Montenegro last summer, my wife and I encountered the wall of a castle that listed some of the rulers of the country, which only became independent in 2006. This is a pretty boring way to convey history, and there were no other details but this wall.  Our tour guide had served in the navy of Yugoslavia and told us stories about that navy, and how he missed it. He later discussed life in Serbia and Montenegro, before discussing the current political situation in Montenegro today, making it […]