Troy Press

I’m happy to present this guest post from @skander, a former languages professor who left for the strangely greener pastures of being a corporate drone (and it gives him more time for elf games). – J. Alan Henning In my life, I’ve been a tenured language professor and a TTRPG player, and I’ve seen a few discussions of how to act on the idea of language differences in role-playing games (this one by Tom van Winkle and a discussion around it led me to writing this post). The goal of […]

The vast majority of tabletop RPG campaigns are fantasies rather than science fiction. As Jason Bulmahn writes, “One of the reasons why I think fantasy is a dominant genre in TTRPGs is just how much of the core of it is public domain, gathered from centuries of myth and folklore. It allows each game to borrow from those core concepts and define itself by the ways in which it is different.” It’s hard to have those same shared expectations of the world in a science fiction setting. Are there aliens, […]

So one of the joys of releasing texts into the Creative Commons is seeing how other people adapt them. When I wrote Suddenly an Ogre, I wrote it as a gamebook teaching the basic moves of Dungeon World. I thought others might like to adapt it to different game systems. I was shocked and pleased when Infinite Zone ported it to the Nintendo Switch instead. They’ve removed the mechanics elements to focus on the story; e.g., removing text like “You roll ⚃ ⚁ +1=7. Defy Danger—You stumble, hesitate, or flinch: the GM will offer you a worse outcome, hard bargain, […]

Filk music is the folk music of science-fiction and fantasy fandom, often sung together at conventions. Like folk songs, filk songs often are new lyrics set to old tunes. Also like folk songs, they morph and change over time. The first two commercial albums of filk music were by Leslie Fish and the DeHorn Crew: Folk Songs for Folk Who Ain’t Even Been Yet (1976) and Solar Sailors (1977). Both are worth seeking out, if you’d like a taste of early filk; “Banned from Argo” (BFA)—from Solar Sailors—is the most famous filk song of […]

In my Impulse Drive campaign, before facing the BBEG, the PCs needed to run a last gig to earn some lucre to repair their spaceship, buy some gear, and pay down their debt. I typically offered two or three gigs for the PCs to pick from, having them choose at the end of a session so I could prep the right gig. In this case, I really wanted to play the Mothership adventure The Cleaning of Prison Station Echo (by Haig Morrison and Dave Kenny), so I offered two gigs inspired […]

On the Dungeon World+ Discord, Gojson asked how he could roll up a DW character, rather than just allocating the preset stats. I suggested he do it old school, rolling 3d6 down the line for each attribute. That may work for you as well, and—if you’re playing a hack that drops ability scores (3-18), as most DW hacks do—then just use the modifiers: 3d6 Modifier 3 -3 4-5 -2 6-8 -1 9-12 0 13-15 +1 16-17 +2 18 +3 The table I listed is from Dungeon World, but you could […]

One of my custom GM moves is “Bring in backstories and world-building.” This isn’t always easy, but I try to make history come alive as more than just signs on a wall.

Here is a curated list of the Top 15ish episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, in roughly chronological order. I’ve flipped the order of “Q Who” and “The Measure of a Man” because the entire series starts with a Q episode (“Encounter at Farpoint”) and ends with a Q episode, so it seems fitting to bookend this best-of list the same way. And “Q Who” has two of the essential antagonists of the TNG series. I also think it is good to encounter Data in another way before “The Measure […]

June 20 marks my third anniversary of studying Esperanto. To celebrate my anniversary, I thought I’d share some resources I have found valuable. Photo by Stefan on Unsplash.

Stonetop consists of two books, the second of which is unique in RPGs, to my knowledge. As I wrote in my review of Stonetop: Book I, Stonetop, has the rules, including probably the best fantasy PbtA GMing advice out there…. Book II, The Wider World and Other Wonders, is an almanac of locales and creatures, full of unique beasts and places, but presented in a way so as to be immediately useful to the GM. I just recently read an RPG that spent pages discussing a race, their culture and outlook, reading like an […]

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: […]