Troy Press

My fantasy gamebook Under the Blood-Red Mountain differs from a Choose Your Own Adventure® book in that your player has basic stats (strength, dexterity, wisdom, hit points) and inventory. Choosing which stats to use was easy, but the inventory system was more of a challenge. I wanted the player to have a simple way of tracking inventory throughout the game, but the system needed to be obscure but easy to use, so that if you were directed to turn to a specific page based on an item you had, you […]

I find it so weird when I start getting “year in review” summaries from my apps (Spotify, Duolingo, etc.) in the first week of December. While I wouldn’t mind working an 11-month year, the year goes 12 months. (Though I do appreciate that my binging of Abba and their new album won’t affect any of my annual stats.) So, being a purist, I postponed this analysis until 2021 was actually complete. Here are the Top 10 most-viewed blog posts for 2021: Alternatives to Dungeon World Questions to Ask During Session […]

Some of the most common questions over on the Dungeon World Reddit are how to choose between the different hacks. To better answer that question, with help from the Dungeon World+ Discord, I’ve developed this side-by-side comparison. (All errors and wrong opinions my own!) Dungeon World Chasing Adventure Freebooters on the Frontier Homebrew World Uncommon World Unlimited Dungeons Pitch PbtA + D&D DW – D&D PbtA + OD&D Stonetop – Stonetop DW 1.5 +3rd-party playbooks &c. DW 2.0 Requires DW – No No No No Yes # stats 6 5 (removes […]

Nothing can be more anticlimactic than to have your RPG character succeed in an attack against a difficult-to-hit opponent, only to then roll 1 for damage. Jeremy Strandberg makes the case that low damage rolls should at least prompt a fictional change in the opponent’s positioning: “Even when one side rolls low damage (or no damage), look for a way to make the situation change.” An example he gives: “She rolls only a 1 for damage (vs. this guy’s 6 HP), so I say that she smacks the knife out […]

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 tenth 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 […]

The most popular pages on the site last year were two different ways of running BASIC in your browser: Palo Alto Tiny BASIC in Your Browser but running in an assembly language emulator. Two out of three page views to my site inn 2020 were to this page! Play BASIC Computer Games in Your Browser – My integration of David Ahl’s game collection with Joshua Bell’s JS BASIC emulator. (Further notes on its development.) My personal project during the height of COVID-19 lockdowns was reading old manuals for BASIC and […]

Greg Costikyan shares a great example of the market-research sophistication of wargame development at its height in his elegy, “A Farewell to Hexes”: Perhaps Strategy & Tactics’ most important innovation, however, was its feedback system. Using primitive Burroughs, later IBM, minicomputers, Dunnigan put together a highly sophisticated system to obtain marketing information from his customers. In every issue of the magazine, there was a response card, with 96 numbered blanks. At the back of the magazine were a series of questions, to which a reader could respond by entering a […]

DMs and GMs have a lot of different ways they can prep for role-playing sessions, as I’ve learnt over the past three years: Prewritten Modules – When I took up DMing again, I turned to the DMs Guild for 5e adventures. I tended to buy Adventurers League modules – designed for 4 hours of play, they were quick to print out, read, and make notes on. (Less intimidating to me than a full book.) As a bonus, a module would sometimes last our open-table group two or three sessions. I […]

I analyzed the spellings of 422 first names from the Player’s Handbook: there were 219 male names and 203 female names. Half of the female names ended in –a, and none of the male names did so (pity players named Joshua, Dana, and Dakota). Frequency of the top 7 endings of female names (note: these are letters, not sounds)— -a: 51% -n: 10% -i: 9% -e: 7% -l: 6% -h: 3%, -s: 3% And for male names— -n: 29% -r: 14% -l: 6% -k: 9% -h: 8%, -s: 8% -o: […]

TLDR: Compendium of 20 Settlement Moves for PbtA Games Many PbtA adventure starters and scenarios have location-specific moves. I particularly like how in Stonetop there is this move when you are in the town of Marshedge: When you go unwary into the bustle of Edgemarket or the crowded streets of Dropoff, roll +WIS: on a 10+, you spot the pickpocket coming or catch them in the act; on a 7-9, they make off with only trifles (1d4 uses of Supplies, a purse of coppers, a skin of whiskey, etc.); on […]