Troy Press

“When Gandalf & Thorin’s Company overcame the stone trolls, they found in their lair two great elven blades: Orcrist the Goblin Cleaver & Glamdring the Foe-Hammer. I don’t know if they’re +1 or +2, but I do know I’d much rather have something called ‘The Foe-Hammer’ than a +2 longsword. On top of the names, they have a history (like everything in Tolkien). Glamdring was wielded by Turgon, the elven King of Gondolin, during the First Age.” – PTFO

A mini adventure to choose which blog post to read to learn more about interactive fiction. Photo by Joshua Sortino on Unsplash.

Lexember is a social-media challenge to add one word to your constructed language each day of December. Lexember was created by Mia DeSanzo and Pete Bleackley in 2012, so this will be its thirteenth year! Add a word a day over a cup of coffee, on a commute, or when using your smartphone.

The current streaming landscape is dominated by a few major players, but with interesting nuances in who uses them. According to a recent Researchscape survey of 1,023 U.S. adults, YouTube Music leads overall usage at 38%, followed closely by Spotify at 36%, while Amazon Music rounds out the top three at 30%. However, raw usage numbers tell only part of the story.

Stonetop was first released as a village playbook for Dungeon World 10 years ago yesterday. It’s come a long way since then, and I keep discovering new things I love about it. Stonetop has the best system of magic items I’ve used in a tabletop roleplaying game, with unique items, shared with players as cards or inserts, which require taking action to unlock custom powers.

When my 12-year old Toyota was in the shop, I drove a new loaner car for two days. I’ve driven newer model cars when renting a car while traveling but using a new car in a familiar environment—where I was not constantly worried about navigation—gave me a chance to dwell on the new features.

I’ve tried 41 different pumpkin beers over the years, as part of flights, as singles at alcohol retailers, and at restaurants. The only six pack I bought this fall was Voodoo Ranger Atomic Pumpkin, which packs a nice bit of heat and is definitely my #1 pumpkin beer. Here are my top 20 pumpkin beers.

Dune: Imperium is a deck-building worker placement game about political intrigue that plays best with 3 or 4 players. With great implementations on Steams, Google Play, and the Apple App Store, it is also a fun board game to play electronically. You play a character representing one of four Great Houses (e.g., the Atreides House).

We asked U.S. adults if they’d ever engaged in game design: 31% had, though this was often just adding house rules (15% of all adults). The most widely created new games were, with multiple responses permitted, board games (10%), card games (also 10%), RPGs (6%), video games (5%), mobile games (also 5%), interactive fiction (2%), and gamebooks (also 2%). Younger generations are more likely to create games than older generations: 22% of Gen Z have made their own house rules, compared to just 8% of Baby Boomers; 16% of Gen […]

While different playbooks have unique moves in Apocalypse World for PCs, the GM doesn’t have different moves depending on which playbooks are being used. Masks was one of the first PbtA games, if not the first, to give the Game Master playbook-specific moves. For instance, for the playbook The Outsider, the GM gets the moves: For The Protégé: Many of these moves are tied into the character arc and challenges faced by the corresponding playbooks. Thirsty Sword Lesbians offers three GM moves per playbook: Chasing Adventure does this as well, and I think any GM of […]

If—like some of my friends—you bounced off the first few episodes of Star Trek: Lower Decks, but are willing to give it another try, I offer this Top 10 14 list, arranged in chronological order. Two of the top 14 are from Season 1, and three are from each subsequent season. And the last episode of each season is in the Top 14 (and the penultimate episode of each season is in the Top 14 except for season 3). Why the Top 14? Because I won’t compile a best-of list […]

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 […]