Troy Press

The premise is simple—and absurd. Nuclear waste explodes and propels the moon out of our solar system at FTL speeds. While the 300 people living on Moonbase Alpha have no control over the moon’s trajectory, fortunately it encounters a new planet or alien every week!

Warp Your Own Way, by Ryan North and Chris Fenoglio, became the first interactive fiction to ever win a Hugo Award!

While typically I run year-long TTRPG campaigns, I had an opportunity to run a summer-long campaign. Sometimes less is more, and this was a wonderful experience.

Here are some ideas for when you need a dungeon for your players to explore: Dyson’s Dodecahedron maps, Roleplaying Tips’ five-room dungeons, the One-Page Dungeon Contest, Perilous Wilds, Improv Almanac, and Hex Describe.

Here are the top-rated Hugo winners of the past 10+ years, according to GoodReads.com: #1 Network Effect, #2 The Stone Sky, #3 A Desolation Called Peace.

Unlike the TMS1000, which had 32 bytes (bytes, not kilobytes!) of RAM, the unit in Dark Tower, the TMS1400, had twice that: 64 bytes of RAM. As perspective, this single sentence using ASCII takes 64 bytes! Bytes weren’t the basic unit: nybbles were (half-bytes, consisting of 4 bits). So, in Dark Tower, the amount of gold, food and warriors a player has are stored as two-nybble BCD representations rather than as traditional binary numbers.

Nothing breaks my immersion in a story so much as a coincidence. No spoilers, but two points in season 2 of The Last of Us with coincidences so angered me that I turned off the TV. And rewatching Strange New Worlds, in preparation for the new season, the one person who survives an attack that kills 200 is by coincidence the only regular cast member aboard that ship.

Hypothesis: The first IMDB ratings are by the biggest fans and therefore represent the peak rating, with stable ratings being lower as non-fans eventually catch up and watch something. I look at Section 31 ratings and Season 5 Lower Deck ratings to prove the hypothesis in that context.

When designing your game, it’s important to understand what your Harm and Recovery System is doing for your game. Both should create drama-filled moments, which means they need to have Costs associated with them: but those Costs not only need to be sensible for the touchstones evoked during play, but also carry a level of interest and intrigue all on their own. 

Jack Guignol has an oft-quoted post, “Just Use Bears,” about using the stats for a bear when the players outpace your prep and end up facing “some cool, weird-ass monster that you don’t actually have stats for.” Lars, at Dice Goblin, expanded this further, to leveraging animal archetypes in general, “Just Use Bears… Or Wolves, Dragons or Spiders.”

The fundamental tension of the Twilight Struggle series of Cold War games is that you often have to play cards that help your opponent. The strategy centers around determining when to play such cards.

Powered by the Apocalypse games take diverse approaches to representing injury, stress, and deteriorating health. Unlike traditional RPGs with their focus on hit points, PbtA harm systems often try for other narrative consequences. Thoughts about Harm Clocks, Debilities, Conditions, Stress, Dice Pools, and NPCs.

1) You can practice the language with hundreds of people on social media, in bite-sized chunks.

2) You can make up your own words in the language, using established roots and affixes.

3) Many of the speakers are multilingual—they may even speak one or two other conlangs…