Troy Press

In Emily Short’s classic blog post “Small Scale Structures in CYOA,” she wrote about local structures (as opposed to narrative structures that describe the entire work). She was interested in structures that could use stats, as in Choice of Games or Twine games. I instead want to concentrate on the traditional finite-state machines that are CYOA stories. The only variable is the page you are on or the number of the block you are in. I’ll use lightly-edited screenshots from Twine from my game, A New Life in Auspele, to […]

Back in 2018, I was working on the design of card games intended to be distributed digitally. Players would need to first print out the cards, then cut or otherwise prepare them. As I wanted to understand the largest size deck that PnPers (Print-and-Players) had ever actually printed, I posted a poll on BoardGameGeek. Ironically, I now have responses from 54 PnPers (54 being the size of a standard four-suited deck of cards with two jokers!). I provided choices in increments of 9, since 9-card sheets are very common. The vast majority of PnPers […]

The Battle of Five Armies. The Battle of the Hornburg (Helm’s Deep). The Battle of Pelennor Fields (the Raising of the Siege of Minas Tirith). These were epic, even before they were ever animated or filmed. Such battles bring a new element of drama to a fantasy PbtA campaign, but the challenge is how to handle them cinematically and at a high level, without getting bogged down in mechanics. You’re not going to manage every individual soldier as you might in a wargame. Here are three frameworks for accomplishing this: […]

This is an unauthorized fan variant of Axis & Allies 1941 solely intended for those who find that the game played Rules As Written is too long or too complex for players at their table. If you’re happy with the current rules, or have house rules that increase complexity, this is not for you. In 1941 ABC, turn order has been simplified to ABC: Advance your units (whether into combat or not), Battle, then Create and place new units. Since new players, even old hands, of Axis & Allies often try to do non-combat moves at the same time as combat […]

Writing new games in BASIC is definitely a lost art. But I was drawn back to this forgotten medium. Back in 2017, I had put together plans to implement Tiny BASIC on an Arduino with a 4-row x 20-character LED display. I’d then adapt classic BASIC games to it. This was intended as an homage to the fun I had with BASIC machines in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I’d converted a few of the games into Tiny BASIC when I got distracted by Michael Rieneck’s board game, Around the World in 80 Days. […]

April is National Poetry Month, but few Americans name any contemporary poets when asked what poets they can think of and who their favorite poet is. In fact, it’s a Dead Poets Society for the Top 35 poets, all of whom are deceased. Four out of ten Americans name Edgar Allan Poe, making him the most famous poet by far. In fact, 29% of respondents named him first, and 18% said he was their favorite poet. A distant second is the Bard. William Shakespeare was named by two out of […]

BLUELITE is designed for playing classic Level 1-3 RPG adventures with the standard abilities and classes but with fewer rules (i.e., “with the flavor but not the crunch”). BLUELITE is Holmes Basic with the rough edges rounded off, a streamlined schematic hack using a common d20 mechanic where higher rolls are better. Probabilities of success approximate the original but on a d20: for instance, a 2-in-6 chance to force open a door is now a 14 or higher on a d20. Keep in mind in the original, opening doors was […]

This post is an excerpt from The Best-Delayed Plans: The Game Master’s Guide to Adventure Prep. Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) games—games in the school of design of Apocalypse World—often outline moves and principles for Game Masters. While these are typically intended for use during play, they can also be useful in prep, no matter which RPG system you use. Principles Here are some principles to keep in mind during prep— Moves While principles guide overall play, in PbtA games “GM moves” are the types of responses that GMs make […]

Google released an elegant but incomplete open-source implementation of BASIC in 2018 and maintained it through 2022. The primary design goal was to run graphical QBASIC programs directly from the browser, without needing a machine-code emulator. The easiest way to experiment with Google’s implementation is through this editor. Unlike actual QBASIC, but like many browser-based implementations, you can’t STOP a program and can’t PRINT or change variables to speed your debugging. That’s because this implementation is not a traditional interpreter. Your BASIC program is translated to a series of JavaScript […]

Free League Publishing is currently crowdfunding a new edition of its Coriolis science-fiction RPG­ – Coriolis: The Great Dark. The new edition is based on the updated Year Zero Engine, which powers their RPGs based on licensed properties: Alien, Blade Runner, The Walking Dead, etc. Unlike those games, Coriolis is their own IP, their own setting. I discovered its predecessor, Coriolis: The Third Horizon (ironically, its second edition) when seeking science-fiction modules for my Impulse Drive campaign. While I’ve never used its game engine, I did find the setting to be invaluable for prep and adventures. Billed as “Arabian […]

The fifth and final season of Star Trek: Discovery premieres Thursday in the U.S. After compiling the Top 10 Episodes of Star Trek Lower Decks, in Chronological Order, I struggled with how to do something similar for Discovery. The series is a puzzle-box show, with season-long story arcs where episodes collect puzzle pieces to assemble. (Alas, sometimes the final picture doesn’t match what was on the box.) Given the show’s structure, I don’t think it would make much sense to watch the Top 10 episodes of the show in chronological order: […]

You can now back Chasing Adventure on Kickstarter, to get a hardcover copy of the book or to pre-order the PDF. And the game, which used traditional copyright during its development, is now part of the PbtA Commons! So you can integrate its text into your own PbtA hacks, as desired. The author, Spencer Moore, describes Chasing Adventure as “built to facilitate fast cinematic fantasy action-adventure.” I’ve typically pitched it as “DW-D&D,” that is as Dungeon World minus some elements of Dungeons & Dragons, removing ability scores, hit points, encumbrance, […]

Oðblgshezi (pronounced /oth-blg-SHEH-zee/, with a syllabic /L/) is the name of a "language" consisting of English written with the digits of a calculator.  You type in a number and then turn the calculator upside down to see the word.  In order to make use of all ten digits, I persuaded the Anglo-Saxon letter eth (ð) to return from retirement to stand in for ‘TH’.  For instance: SHIBBOLETH (SHIBBOLEð) 937088145 Here are the 10 letters of Oðblgshezi: I 1 Z 2 E 3 H (h) 4 S 5 G 6 L […]