Troy Press

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!

If Wizards of the Coast backs down from their draconian changes to the OGL, it will be because of subscription revenue: “Cancelled D&D Beyond subscriptions forced Hasbro’s hand.” Subscription revenue grows more rapidly and is more stable than one-off sales to a base of customers. So it’s no surprise that WotC and others in the RPG space want to convert traditional one-off sales to subscriptions, from Patreons for independents to direct subscriptions for larger firms. One way for major players to generate subscription revenue has been with virtual tabletop (VTT) […]

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 […]

Now that 2022 is in the books, here are the final stats on what your fellow readers found most interesting. Here are the Top 10 most-viewed blog posts throughout the year: Here are the Top 10 games by views: And here are the Top 10 most-viewed blog posts written this year, based on page views just in the month of December (so that blog posts that were published earlier don’t automatically do better):

Lexember is a social-media challenge to add one word to your constructed language each day of the month. Lexember was created by Mia DeSanzo and Pete Bleackley in 2012, so this will be its eleventh year! Adding a word a day is certainly an easily achievable goal, something that you can do over a cup of coffee, on a commute, or when pulling out your smartphone. If you already have a conlang that you’ll be adding words to, check out Stephen Escher’s “12 Tips for Lexember.” If you don’t have […]

After our Microscope worldbuilding, and before our first actual session of Impulse Drive, I ran a Session Zero based primarily on Stonetop’s Introductions procedure. Stonetop is a hearth fantasy PbtA by Jeremy Strandberg (you can back it here, for a limited time). Each playbook has two customized sets of questions: one set for the player to answer about NPCs and one set for the player as PC to pose to the other PCs. Here’s the process for the Ranger— Stonetop is about adventuring for the sake of protecting and growing […]

Having heard great things about using the Microscope RPG for collaborative world-building, I knew that I wanted to kick-off our new science-fiction PbtA campaign with a Microscope session. Heck, our planned setting is literally the first scenario listed on the website: “Humanity spreads to the stars and forges a galactic civilization”! (Fantasy RPG players, the next two are “Fledgling nations arise from the ruins of the empire” and “An ancient line of dragon-kings dies out as magic fades from the realm.”) Since we would be playing online, we used the […]

Suddenly an Ogre is a short gamebook using the Dungeon World system. Most choices that you make correspond to Basic Moves of the game. This gives you an opportunity to experience a bit of gameplay without a GM. The title is an homage to the essay “Suddenly Ogres: What to do on Spout Lore and Discern Realities misses” by Vasiliy Shapovalov. Published using the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license. You are encouraged to adapt this for your game system of choice. Comments and suggestions welcome, directly […]

​Melee in the Mines is a print-and-play microgame that pits two players against one another. The dwarves’ silver mine has cut into the tunnels of a monster lair, and now a band of adventurers is fighting for their lives in the narrow confines of the mine against a band of monsters. Each player starts with 7 of 18 characters (18 Monsters or 18 Adventurers). The winner is the party that drives the other from the mine! Only the first character in each party can use hand-to-hand combat. Other party members can […]

Axis & Allies, Diplomacy, Robo Rally, and Squad Leader will be moving from Avalon Hill to Renegade Game Studios, which will also be developing “new versions of Risk themed around fan-favorite Hasbro brands G.I. JOE, Transformers, and Power Rangers.” In addition, “fans will also see new printings of staples for the line as well as the return of some long out-of-print editions.” In a survey of U.S. adults who have ever played board games, four times as many had played Risk as had played Axis & Allies (42% to 11%). […]