Troy Press

Now that 2023 is in the books, I present the final stats on what your fellow readers found most interesting. The Top 10 most-viewed blog posts throughout the year: The Top 10 games by views: And here are the Top 10 blog posts that were written this year: I hadn’t intended to become a Star Trek blogger, but, hey, LLAP. And here are the bottom 10 (not counting December posts), if you want to show them some love: 39.  Tips for Using Mastodon 40.  A New Life in Auspele: A Choose-Your-Way Game […]

This year for Lexember, I intended to coin new names for birds and animals in Denju, the ancient language of my RPG campaigns and interactive fiction. I ended up concentrating on birds. I basically just searched through the American Heritage Dictionary Indo-European Roots Appendix, a favorite resource since I was a kid, for inspiration for my own creations. Once I’d finished that, I pulled up a list of the most common European birds and then worked through that to make sure I had translations for each common type. I did a word a […]

Impulse Drive is a science-fiction PbtA RPG that is licensed under the Creative Commons and offers ship playbooks for four different styles of campaigns: “These Ship playbooks not only describe what technology your Ship may use, but also the kinds of adventures your Crew will get up to, what motivates them, and the kinds of trouble that will follow your Crew around the galaxy.” The ships— The ship playbooks have custom moves that lean into the types of stories that can be told with such ships. For instance, each has a […]

While I latched onto warm-up questions as a starting move for Stonetop, some other systems have their own starting moves. Urban/Modern/Fantasy, in which PCs embrace or discover the supernatural, was the first system I encountered with a Start of Session move— Start of Session When you start a new session after your character has significant downtime, say if you primarily focused on your mortal life and obligations or if you furthered your supernatural interests. If you chose mortal, the GM will tell you how one of your Entanglements, Desires, or Dread […]

Back in October 2019, when Mark Rosenfelder was editing Langmaker: Celebrating Conlangs, he wrote and asked, “For marketing, I think it’d be nice to be able to say that the book includes some never published material.” I offered him Denju, which I’m now publishing here for the first time. Denju started out as the language I used to name cities in Civilization IV and became the language of Hexedland, the campaign setting for a 5e campaign and three Dungeon World campaigns, and the backdrop for my interactive fiction, A New […]

When preparing to run a PbtA (Powered by the Apocalypse) TTRPG, keep in mind how experience is gained. Many PbtA games have an End of Session move that awards experience points. Make sure you’re giving players chances during the session that align with this move! Here is the End of Session move in Dungeon World: When you reach the end of a session, choose one of your bonds that you feel is resolved (completely explored, no longer relevant, or otherwise). Ask the player of the character you have the bond […]

Embarrassingly, my number one album this year was Subspace Rhapsody, the soundtrack to the Strange New Worlds’ musical episode. (Last year it was We Are.) After seeing my top songs from the album, I was curious about what others thought. I crunched the numbers for listener stats from Spotify and viewer stats from YouTube. The top three for Spotify were “Status Report” (the first song sung by the crew), “I’m the X” (Spock’s solo), and “I’m Ready” (Christine Chapel’s song). The top three for YouTube were “We are One” (the finale), “How Would […]

How some RPGs get coins wrong: they matter a lot until they matter not at all. It’s fun to play until your PCs are rich, but it’s even more fun to be able to buy things with those riches. Absorbing Excess Wealth At early levels, PCs lack coin and equipment, and they spend whatever coin they get on gearing up. Then eventually the coin no longer matters. There aren’t enough weapons, gear, luxury items or magic items to buy. You’ll know you’ve hit that point in 5e when PCs are […]

In high school I discovered A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin and fell in love with the entire trilogy, though the first book was my favorite. But slowly the books kept coming! I had just gotten married when Tehanu was published in 1990: at the time, I didn’t really appreciate it. I was a father of four by the time Tales from Earthsea and The Other Wind were published in 2001; I ended up reading aloud A Wizard of Earthsea to one of my sons to launch my re-reading of the series. I missed the publication of […]

Back in 2018, I posted the following question to the Wargames forum of BoardGameGeek: I’m looking for a foundational wargame to use to introduce my 13-year old son to the hobby: something that plays in an hour but introduces the key concepts common to most wargames. No more than 88 counters. Replayable up to 10 times (about the most we ever repeat a game). He likes ancients, medieval, Revolutionary War, ACW, and WW2. Thoughts? And, if like one poster, you wonder, “Why 88 counters? (It is an awfully specific number is why I […]

The Road goes ever on and onDown from the door where it began.Now far ahead the Road has gone,And I must follow, if I can. –       J.R.R. Tolkien I remember reading The Fellowship of the Ring on the school bus, arguing with my friend. I loved the songs and poems, but my classmate said they were awful and skipped right over all of them. Hey dol! Merry dol! Ring a dong dilly! He’s got a point that some of these are silly. Still, I’ve found there’s a […]

Back in June, Ariel Edwards-Levy shared a 1940 Gallup poll, presumably conducted face-to-face, about what games Americans played in the past year. I thought it would be fun to re-run that question and see how things have changed. Here’s the most played of these games today, sorted in descending order by 2023 results. And here’s those same findings sorted by the biggest change (absolute value). The average of these games was played by 25% of Americans in 1940, and by 28% in 2023. Key changes— As we’ve written elsewhere, mobile […]

In Dungeon World and many other PbtA games, “When a player describes their character doing something that triggers a move, that move happens and its rules apply.” That sounds simple enough. Except that the triggerspace (all the actions that trigger moves) changes over time and play— Since the inventory of available moves is variable and changes over time, Dungeon World in particular encourages everyone to look for moves: “Everyone at the table should listen for when moves apply. If it’s ever unclear if a move has been triggered, everyone should work together to clarify […]