Campaign ship

A basic campaign structure for Troika! is to give the party a golden barge, or horizon fort, or some other convenient mode of cosmic travel. At the beginning of the campaign they might be aware of a handful of spheres, or parts of spheres, or at least discrete locations. Provide some information about what can be found in these places.

Information handed out like this should be in the same way you'd expect a 10th century sailor would have it. Spices comes from that way sorta and there are dragons there and a fountain that grants eternal life and the emperor owns a tea set that summons swans when served from. There should be desirous things that players may want.

The spiders of the spider bank have found a way to weave more robust golden sails. They refuse to sell it, ensuring their treasure ships are the fastest vessels in the spheres. Getting your hands on it would ensure faster and safer journeys.

While travelling between spheres the players must expend huge resources to fuel the ships. Most of them run on gold, but more elaborate ones might have plasmic engines.

The ship will encounter troubles between places. Go watch the ship episodes of Cowboy Beebop. Turn the ship in to a little dungeon and play the Alien film.

Bad cosmic weather, or too many beasts have attached themselves to the sails and weighed it down. The further you go without stopping to scrape of these horrifying barnacles the more dangerous the trip will be, eventually scraping your metaphysical hull against the tip of a sphere, causing reality to crash right in to you.

Keeping the ship running becomes a driving factor. Making the ship nicer, or getting a better ship, or hijacking and staffing a horizon fort: also fun. Eventually the hold will be full of arcane treasures.

Golden Barge
Horizon Fort



4 comments:

  1. This is good. Vague-adventuring. I like it. And who did the art in that bottom picture? That's awesome!

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    1. Not sure but it looks like something out of either Fading Suns or a really old Warhammer 40k book.

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    2. That's the back cover of an old issue of White Dwarf before it became a catalogue.

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  2. The Horizon Fort makes me kind of think of the level design from the later point in the game GRIS.

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