Troy Press

In 1985 or so, I logged on to my first online community, dialing into a local BBS (Bulletin Board System) using a 300-baud modem. Eventually I got on Compuserve, USENET, Brown University mailing lists, and AOL. Leaving dial-up behind, I joined LiveJournal, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit. I have accounts for the last five, though I rarely ever use them. I still have a friend who I first met on the Compuserve marketing SIG. Online communities are often ephemeral, though for me Twitter had the longest heyday, as I used […]

I’ve recently been reading Norse-inspired Powered by the Apocalypse role-playing games: Sagas of the Icelanders, Bodil’s Gap, and The Wyrd of Stromgard. As background, I even read Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology, which I adored; it was like a Bulfinch’s Mythology of the Norse cosmos. I played a “traditional” one-shot (two sessions!) of Bodil’s Gap a few years ago. I’d read the first 60 pages of the PDF but wanted to own the book. It’s chonky! (The worst part about DriveThru is that their business model doesn’t support printing any books […]

Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) games are known for their narrative-first mechanics and flexible, fiction-driven rules. Most fantasy PbtA games like Dungeon World don’t have a traditional skill system, instead relying on players describing their actions in the game world. While this works great for most groups, some players—especially those coming from D&D 5e—enjoy having a more concrete skill system to leverage during play. A skill system may also be appreciated by players who haven’t adjusted to how failures can compound in a PbtA game, believing their characters should be […]

I just backed Atma: A Roleplaying Card Game – Season III on Kickstarter and wanted to update my review of Season I with some notes about Season III. Atma is a card-based, rules-light, improvisational PbtA game, which is perfect for the first-time Game Master and for new role players. Rather than use maps, locations are represented as cards, and you gloss over how characters move between the locations, as the game is structured around three scenes (three location cards). Rather than character sheets, characters are also represented by cards, which […]

Deck hunting is an unsung mechanic that injects anticipation and unpredictability into card games like Go Fish, Fluxx, and Magic: The Gathering. Deck hunting isn’t listed in BoardGameGeek’s index of mechanics; it involves trying to look through a deck to find specific cards. Go Fish is the easiest example. You’re trying to form pairs of cards, and if you can’t, you ask a player if they have a match or draw a card from the deck. In the Fluxx family of card games, you typically win by having two cards […]

Alien Frontiers is a dice-based worker placement game that blasts players to a fictional alien planet to gather resources and establish colonies. With its blend of Euro mechanics (worker placement, area control) and Ameritrash elements (direct conflict, “take that” abilities, high-quality plastic components), it boldly goes where few games have gone before. Gameplay Overview In classic Euro game style, you’re trying to score the most victory points, from placing colonies on the planet (1 VP each), controlling territories (1 VP for each where you have the most colonies), and by collecting […]

Vincent Baker in his blog series on drafting PbtA games says— A crucial feature of Apocalypse World’s design is that [its concentric] layers are designed to collapse gracefully inward:• Forget the peripheral harm moves? That’s cool. You’re missing out, but the rules for harm have got you covered.• Forget the rules for harm? That’s cool. You’re missing out, but the basic moves have got you covered. Just describe the splattering blood and let the moves handle the rest.• Forget the basic moves? That’s cool. You’re missing out, but just remember […]

One of the things I love about Stonetop is its anti-canon nature, procedurally generating situations, which players are then encouraged to help flesh out. There’s lore, but much of the lore is player generated, meaning it will differ from table to table and that players rarely have to worry about contradicting established canon. Instead of tales from a book think of it as tales told around a fire, changing with each telling. The Ustrina Beneath Gordin’s Delve Here’s a good example of the power of this approach. One session my […]

I finished Level 1 of the Duolingo Esperanto course in 50 days, after about 70 hours of study. Near the end of Level 1, I created an Esperanto-only Twitter account and could read and write basic tweets in Esperanto. All subsequent levels of the Duolingo course after Level 1 are just a repetition of what you’ve already learnt. So the emphasis is really on practice. I completed the Duolingo course on May 14, 693 days in (1.9 years), studying for 15 to 30 minutes a day. And today’s my two-year […]

I recently rewatched Strange New Worlds, in prep for the new season, this time watching it with my son (his first time). The series is well regarded (the average episode rating is 7.9, compared to 7.7 for TOS’s best season), optimistic, and embraces episodic television, covering a wide range of genres. That said, the series does suffer from prequelitis, repeating those problems common to prequels. Here are four types of issues that I noticed. Continuity Issues Prequels often struggle to maintain consistency with the established lore, characters, and events of […]

About one out of four Americans (24%) have ever read any gamebooks (“such as Choose Your Own Adventure, Fighting Fantasy, Lone Wolf, or solitaire RPG adventures such as the Tunnels & Trolls series”), up from 20% in 2019. Here are the most common themes people mentioned when describing their experiences— Slightly more Americans (28%) have ever “played any text adventures or interactive fiction games on a computer, tablet or smartphone, such as Choice of Games, Infocom, or Twine games.” This is also up from 20% in 2019. Reading of gamebooks […]

As part of my ongoing rewatch of Star Trek in chronological order, I watched Star Trek: The Animated Series for the third time and realized that the Animated Series did try to go where “no live action Star Trek has gone before”: Of course, it all too often went where the original series had gone before. Sequels: Reskinned plots: In general, the IMDB ratings show a decline from TOS: In fact, only one episode scores above the average TOS rating of 7.4: “Yesteryear”, by D.C. Fontana, at 8.0, about Spock’s […]

One of the first Apocalypse Engine (Powered by the Apocalypse) hacks, originally crowdfunded in 2013, Sagas of the Icelanders by Gregor Vuga focuses on playing out a historically accurate campaign within Iceland. There’s an emphasis on gendered roles, and playing against or toward gender expectations, which may not be for every table (male moves, a Man playbook, female moves, a Woman playbook, etc.). There’s little to nothing of the supernatural; the focus is on society and feuds. You may want to limit some of the historicity: the lack of nobility […]