Troikan Bumble-Logic

When running interplanar games reduce time and space to an abstract narrative tool. While the party stays in close spatial and temporal proximity to something, such as a town or an NPC, they will not change. However if the party hasn't seen a memorable NPC (etc.) for suitably long time then change them slightly, add something or take it away, alter their memory of the party (this has the side effect of aiding the forgetful GM by allowing them to claim their misremembering is canon).

Consider: Recurring NPC Shoutpurple, a prominent homeless person keyed in to the local goings on through his close ties with other homeless people. Has endeering delusions of grandeur and always invites the players in for formal tea in his upturned barrel he lives in.

Time has passed, players have either travelled a long way and or forgot about him. When they get back Shoutpurple is in charge of the secret police and heading a furious witch hunt. He still has delusions of grandeur and is incredibly polite to the players. One thing has changed and recontextualizes the others. This is not a transition in his or anyone else's eyes, he always was this.

We're putting on a fake mustache.

When re-shuffling people it's most satisfying to keep it small. Change their name slightly (Shoutpurple is Shoutyellow), or give them a job, have them forget the players, or re-use their image as someone completely different.

With places, push them forwards or back through the timeline, change the name, replace the inhabitants with flump-people.

Keep enough sense to move the game along and not confuse everyone terribly. Build up a catalogue of unique symbolic devices that will help place the players.

Consider: You use pigs as a device on Shoutpurple's secret police badges, they are nicknamed pigs. Pigs can recur as objects of oppression and violence. A person owning a pig could turn out to be the killer all along. Pig-in-boots is a notorious sapient-consumer and diabolist. Undermine the pattern occasionally like we do with the Christian symbolism we use so reflexively.

Have events play themselves out again and again. Consider all the Christian patterns used: death and rebirth, brother killing brother, and other things a more competent writer could tell you. Figure these events out by picking up on something the players respond well to. Maybe they throw Shoutyellow off a roof to end his reign of terror. Have that become a standard way to dispose of tyrants, have them go to a town where that is the standard method of executing shoplifters and so on.

We don't need a plan in mind when placing these narrative devices, just use them. They will either snowball and gather up meaning and weight or they will wither naturally. Using them too deliberately will make the game predictable and possibly eye-rolling. Imagine you put a Jesus analogue in every campaign you run. Yea, like that, don't do it.

This should be easy. Easier than tracking time and places and names would be. When the players decide to return to some interesting place they visited a year ago you don't need to know the exact details of what happened and what happened in the interim, you just need to reacquaint yourself with the feel of it and build something new. If they look up old friends maybe they are exactly as they left them, maybe they are gone, maybe they have changed beyond recognition. And change isn't permanent, they can go back.

Your world is plastic.

Finally, consider the meta-textual possibilities of building your own bank of devices. You end one campaign completely, you and your players start another. You introduce pigs, the players all laugh about that time with the pig where you threw it off the roof. You then either reinforce that or you undermine it and have them reassess it. If you've done well you have a pocket full of these things you can throw out that will communicate in a secret language you and your players have built up. The sense and logic of the world is a step removed from the surface; we are not looking for mundane links between places and things but symbolic. You and your players are magicians.

D666 Common Items

Luck is:

• Search for things. There is no looking-at-things skill. If there is nothing to find just say "there isn't anything here", don't dick about.
• Any instance you think of saving throws: Luck
• If you're unsure if something is passively bumped into, a secret door is found, a magic item pulled out of a pile of rubbish, you ask if someone wants to test their Luck. One go. If they all then say "we keep looking!" they never find it because they're bad sports. Quantum bumping.

Luck is not:

• A group thing. Only ask everyone if they'd like to test their luck if they would each individually benefit/die from it. If you're checking to see if they spot a door, ask if anyONE wants to test. Don't waste their resources.
• Don't waste it. Never ask to test luck to freak them out, or for something rubbish. If you're unsure if you're ripping them off, give them an idea of what is happening. "Would you like to test your luck to hear something" "Would you like to test your luck to avoid something" and so on. Same as before, using the knowledge of the luck test happening to then go and pull an area apart to find what it was for should not be rewarded.

D6 places you got in the middle of

1. Troika green rooms. Arrive in the green rooms of troika, brightly painted streets designated for use by visitors not in possession of the correct and ever changing passes and permits. The area is small and rife with controversy. The spider bank offers papers of passage for an extraordinarily high price, allowing honest visitors to earn their way in. They are however forbidden to work without a permit. The easiest way to get a work permit is to work for the state. The Congress of Animals sets jobs which typically include repainting streets a different colour or demolishing a building. Typically multiple groups have been set to the same task with differing colours, or are set to repair or rebuild that which you are breaking. The constables insist the Congress did not make a mistake and all work orders are as intended.
   
2. War Sphere. The north and south hemisphere hate each other and have stripped the planet bare with their war. The origin of the war is something mundane like a border or trade dispute that escalated due to a few extreme actors. War crimes pile up on both sides, everyone is justifiably (and irrevocably) hateful towards one another and eager to enlist help. Hex crawl. Terrain is minefields, open ground/sniper alleys, quiet killing fields, shattered towns (25% chance occupied by a field command), active battlegrounds. These guys are using huge cthonic barges, flyers, heat weapons, psionic nukes, null bombs.
   
3. Palace of tigers. Hex crawl. Palatial rooms, solariums, halls, grand dinning rooms, water features, scent gardens, kitchens, towers (where up can lead to another ground floor). And endless palace that shifts through styles and one travels and makes little sense. The place is always clean and the cupboards are always stocked in the "wilderness". Non-wilderness is occupied by carnivalesque courts, each grander and more ridiculous than the last. People farm the fruit gardens and scavenge the dining halls.
   
4. The inner world. An inverted sphere, where life is on the inside. Inner sun, dinosaurs probably, large wilderness with isolated groups of marooned sailor civilisations. The only way to get off this sphere is to get outside, and to get outside you have to go through the crust. The crust is occupied by an advanced civilisation of rubber-clad anti-personality conformists who know nothing about the inner world and rightfully think their sphere is a lifeless rock.
   
5. The Living Room. A sphere that consists of a single room, about the size of a typical lounge. Every time it is visited there is a different monologue or kitchen sink drama occurring (50/50). The inhabitants can enter and leave the room but no-one can follow them; anyone leaving will end up where they came from. The inhabitants will monologue and not acknowledge anything outside of the context of their drama, doing mental acrobatics to fix or ignore it. The place is harmless, and harm rarely finds its way inside. Few people know about it and it's hard to get in to. The atmosphere is comforting and slightly smothering. Put on an Allan Bennett play if you can't muster the angst or twee to do it. The dramas often communicate useful truths.
   
6. Sun Chaser. Sunny desert hex crawl. Assemble your typical fantasy hexcrawl except there are no ancient well used towns. The towns that exist are indeed ancient, but the people there are effectively squatting in well kept ruins. All civilisation is nomadic, constantly outpacing the night, in which you all shall surely die. Every week in-game time the night covers the easternmost hex column. The night is cold, totally dark (the only light is what you bring), and full of monstrosities. Each nomadic group has different ideas about what's going on, though they all agree it wasn't always like this. Once a year (so somewhere near a century our time) the day reveals the source of the sinister night, or the origin point, or at the very least something that offers hope to crazy adventurers. Consider: the land is barren and desert-like near the dawn and becomes lush and pleasant as evening closes (plants and animals have time to re-grow in time for the night).

D6 Things You Saw in the Window While Passing

1. They are boarded up, but not in an unsightly manner. The wood is fine grained and varnished.
2. The resident, a yellow and blue fellow of an amorphous nature, leans out of the window and talks to its more recognisably hominid neighbours. You feel that you have seen an inappropriate amount of flesh, but you can't be sure by how much.
3. An alchemist, chemist, or possibly just a collector of caustic fluids is angrily clearing out their apartments by hurling their possessions in to the street. Some chitinous children are playing in the rainbow puddles, while other softer people are nursing colourful welts.
4. An elderly person in a dusty gown speaks meaningfully at the people who walk by. The window remains shut and no one hears. Anyone approaching will be met with angrily closed curtains.
5. The curtains move like kelp, the light enters the room thickly and shimmers. There is vivid moss under the sill, and you swear there are nicknacks floating about inside.
6. Seven fellows in large padded coats innapropriate to the weather dance around in circles, stomping and running until they bump together and roll around laughing. They repeat this over and over, but invite anyone who interrupts them in for a quiet interlude of tea and backgammon.

I'm slow, alright. There are two books, both of which were originally going to be in Troika itself, but I would be a mad man to publish a 300 page monster that is 90% tables and 100% niche/not D&D.

But you've seen them before, so you know what's coming. You think that god thing is complete? HAH.

Anyway, how the hell do you run Troika!?

Strangers Meet At A Crossroads

My favourite campaign structure is to front load everything, make an area or sprawling situation to explore with no thought of who will be doing it. Then drop whatever party you roll right in the middle with no guide.

My last campaign, the Empires of Foliage, started with everyone being passengers on a golden barge that ripped its hull open and crashed into an unexpected crystal sphere. The party emerge from emergency life blobs and find each other. It was a big boat, so no one knows each other but they know enough to know that they were the closest thing they had to allies. Job done.

From here they start to explore their surroundings, ask questions, touch things and find out how stuff works. The first session should have some immediate questions the party can investigate (all games are investigations).

• Why did we crash?
• Where is the ship?
• Are there any other survivors?
• Why is there four feet of blossoms everywhere?
• We have no food. Can you eat the pink fruit?
• What are these fleshy pipes running under the blossoms and where do they go?

And then off they go.

This structure has the benefit of allowing any variety of backgrounds you care to use. Their time together investigating their situation will give plenty of time for them to rub together and make some sparks. Use these sparks to plan for when they escape their situation and you need to widen the world.

The mutual bullshit that backgrounds encourage as players explain themselves to each other also helps you work backwards. Don't offer too much about their pasts, let them go with it. But also remember that you're a player too and can also BS.

It's perfectly ok for them to never get home. Have them be strangers in a strange land forever, play quantum leap, star trek, ulysses 31. The million spheres are huge, and once you go off the beaten paths you're screwed.

CYO Pre-gen

Good for one shots, but equally viable as campaign starters, is to build a closed list of backgrounds and let the players at them. An excellent way to seed the background of the adventure, giving each player a different background with a different bit of information. Player introductions are easy since no one is expected to play amateur theatre class exercise and can just read out "my thing says I used to be a farm-boy, but I picked the spectacles from a wise man's vision matt and learned I was the reincarnation of the Near-Sighted-God-Killer, so that's why I'm here" 

D&D more Troika

Following on from my previous post on making initiative enjoyable (and arguably more realistic*) I've got the comprehensive and very complicated way you can make D&D fit better.

1. Use that initiative system
2. Attack rolls are contested, with the winner dealing damage
3. AC is replaced by damage reduction

Some armour DR:

Full plate - 8

Half-Plate/Chain/splint/whatever flexible metal bullshit you have going on - 4

Padded/leather/cloth/etc etc - 2

Shields might add 1DR or +1 in combat rolls. Or both? Shields are pretty great.

Feel free to add DR ignoring rules for bludgeoning weapons, and also make it so grappled enemies do not receive the protection of their armour (pin them down and stab them in the eye holes)

Anything that might otherwise increase your AC instead increases DR

* Realism doesn't matter, but have you been in a real brawl? Or some sort of emergency situation? People choke, step up, fall over, and otherwise don't take turns.

Troika! Initiative Rules

(UPDATE: The cards exist and can be owned now)

This initiative system can replace most I-go-you-go style initiative arrangements in role-playing games without much fuss. You need the following:

• Two identical cards for each player character
• One card that signifies the end of the turn
• An abundance of one card to signify henchmen
• An abundance of one more card to signify enemies 

When a fight breaks out you gather up the player cards, the end of round token, henchman tokens equal to the number of henchmen present, and a number of enemy tokens equal to the total initiative value of all enemies. Shuffle these.

Draw a card, the owner of the drawn card acts. If the end of round card is drawn you gather up all the tokens and start again.

Player tokens

Each player gets two. You could play with this for spells that speed up or slow down, but generally don’t fiddle with it too much. (delayed actions, aiming)

Enemy tokens

When you draw an enemy token any enemy may act. This means that a single enemy can perform multiple actions in a given round, even above the number of initiative tokens they contribute. Assume this represents the bolstering effect of having leader-sorts around, or lots of their friends. In practise the GM is encouraged to not use this to purely mechanical advantage, but in a way that makes sense and is enjoyable for everyone.

Henchmen

Each henchman contributes one token. When a henchman token is drawn the GM must take an action for any one henchman present. They can take instructions from the players but are not obliged to follow them, henchmen are people too.

End of round card

If the end of round card is drawn then all cards, including the end of round card, are put back in the stack. Resolve any per round or end of round activities such as magic effects, fire, poison or bleeding out, remove any cards belonging to dead or absent participants, then draw another card and carry on.

Aim

On your turn you may decide to take aim with your ranged weapon. To do so, declare you are aiming and hold onto your initiative card. When your next initiative card is drawn you shoot, rolling twice and picking the best roll. If the end of round token comes up and you haven’t used your aim action you may decide to hold on to your aim token or abandon your action and put it back in the stack.

Delay an action

You may choose not to act when you hold initiative, in which case you put the token back in the stack. This increases your chances of acting later, but does not guarantee it.

Converting initiative from other games

Enemies contribute to a communal pool of enemy initiative equal to their initiative value, representing the broad press of opposition. Initiative doesn't just represent physical speed, but also confidence of action, bravery and general quick wits. Place your monster on a spectrum, with 1 being a cowardly goblin or a brain dead zombie, 3 being a charismatic captain, 5 being an ancient manticore, and 8 being a dragon who can literally see the future. Place your bad guys in there, trying to stick to 1-3 for the most part, and don’t be afraid to tamper with them if you feel you’ve made a mistake. The system is spongy and forgiving, feel it out until you can confidently throw numbers about.

Converting initiative tampering effects from other games

In general you do not want to tamper with the number of cards anyone uses too much, however sometimes you need to show how fast or slow someone has become. In the caste of a sped up participant, let them use a third (or fourth etc.) card as an additional initiative card for the round (or as many rounds as are required). To slow them, do the opposite. Be strict with round counting, since this might cause them to not see much benefit/hindrance from their alterations before it resolves itself. Violence is capricious.

Alternatively, if you are insistent on being very very fast, allow them to “recycle” their initiative cards for a turn. By which I mean let them put any initiative they draw back in the stack after using it. This could be a finite number of times or only limited by the passing of rounds. For slowness in this case you could force a player to possess two whole initiative cards to act once. Have them hold onto the first one drawn and let them pray another shows.

Head over to the ongoing Kickstarter if you'd like to see these cards made. Just a slice of money left until we can afford them.