Troy Press

The hornet knocks its head against the hard glass, Flowers bright and friendly on the far frame, Still and sullen air, and screams, on this side. “Kill it! Kill it!” she cries (as against the curtain it caroms), Motioning to me to arm myself with a magazine. Waving the issue before me, I waver: Evolved from millions of pairings for this ending? “It will sting you!” she says, but I am already stung: Trembling, I press it against the pane with Time.

In my book Langmaker: Celebrating Conlangs, I have a chapter on creating a naming language. Namelangs are small languages intended primarily for naming people and places in an imagined world. As such, you don’t need to create a grammar or extensive vocabulary, just a short dictionary. Heck, you don’t even have to be formal about what sounds are included in the language and how they are combined (phonotactics). Now much conlanging is for fun and private amusement, but I ran into a problem with Denju, my naming language that I […]

I concluded my post Printouts as Games with “Next time, we’ll look at the primitive visualization tools that were packaged as ‘games’.” That was five years ago! So past time to write this. However, it turned out there were fewer visualization programs than I realized: Bounce, Life, Sine Wave, and 3D Plot. Bounce was a physics simulator that plotted the course of a red rubber ball. For Life, a user enters an initial pattern, which the system then iterates on repeatedly, emulating a changing population, without further input. The Wikipedia […]

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 […]

Five years ago, Yochai Gal compiled the first version of the Dungeon World Syllabus as a tool for new DW GMs. Alex Leone has since taken over as editor, keeping nearly 180 links current. While I had read many of these articles over the years, I decided to systematically read every single link, to improve my own GMing. I then began to compile those that were licensed under the Creative Commons into a single, easy-to-read volume, as a supplement for others to use. While most PbtA games have small fan […]

Axis & Allies & Zombies is a well-designed crossover game that is just missing some final polish. While it can play up to five, the amount of downtime makes it a poor game for more than two players. The significant randomness makes it the least strategic of the Axis & Allies line, which can be a pro or con, depending on your taste—pro: fun battles between two players of uneven skill; con: bad luck can cost you the game. If you’re interested, buy it now, though, as it is no […]

Esperanto is relatively easy to learn, but it is not easy to learn. Relatively easy, because it is easier than any natural language, as it has fewer exceptions and streamlined grammar. Today, a year into my study, I’ve accomplished far more than I did in four years of high-school Spanish. Not easy to learn, because, like a natural language, Esperanto has tens of thousands of words to learn. Esperanto lessons on Duolingo proved even more addictive than I anticipated. I thought I might do it for the month or two […]

Which PbtA or FitD games are recommended for science-fiction settings? In part, it depends on which genre you are trying to emulate. The following are each unlicensed settings in similar genres. To boldly go where your favorite science fiction has gone before: If you want 1950s pulp-science fiction space opera, try Uncharted Worlds. If you want Alien/Aliens, try The Regiment: Colonial Marines [PDF]. (H/T Bytor_Snowdog.)  If you want Asimov’s Galactic Empire series, try Numberless Worlds. If you want Battlestar Galactica, try Last Fleet. (H/T @Quietwraith on the PbtA Discord.)  If […]

In Christmas of 1979, my dad bought me Dungeons & Dragons. This was the Holmes edition, first published in 1977, covering levels 1 through 3. It was a dramatic simplification of Original D&D, intended specifically for use by those as young as junior high school. Amusingly, it was still surprisingly complicated. One of the breakthrough innovations of OD&D was the wide range of types of dice, and the mechanics seemed design to center and celebrate using all those different types of dice: For instance, when creating a character, you’d roll […]

Tl;dr: Seven-card stud, low card in the hole is wild, follow-the-queen is wild, suicide king has to fold, face-up joker means you have to shift your hole cards to the right. Whenever we get together with my brother-in-law and his family, we inevitably play poker. This time, we started with 7-card stud, then played follow-the-queen, then low-card-in-the-hole. At that point, I was ready to fully embrace chaos, and I combined them! I added that if you were dealt the suicide king face up or in the hole, you had to […]