Dark Tower & The TMS1400 – Troy Press
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 6…| Troy Press
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.| Troy Press
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.| Troy Press
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 6…| Troy Press
Free RPGs & Print-and-Play Card & Board Games| Troy Press
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.| Troy Press
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 Se…| Troy Press
We asked over 1,000 U.S. adults what tabletop games they had played last year, “in real life, not on an electronic device.” The most played board games were Monopoly (37% had played), Checkers (25%…| Troy Press
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.| Troy Press
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.”| Troy Press
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 car…| Troy Press
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. Dungeon World 1e and many of its descendants are an exception: they maintain familiar territory with a hit-point system, though adding tags and debilities to create narrative weight. This approach helps transition traditional players to PbtA. (For a long discussion...| Troy Press
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 th…| Troy Press
Originally pitched as a prequel, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds now has to be conceived of as a reboot on an alternate timeline, based on its own changes to the timeline and to the development of its characters. Nor should this be a surprise. The future of the 1960s show didn’t quite pan out.| Troy Press
In 2023, Joey D. Jones of the University of South Hampton interviewed me and over a dozen others about the authorial burden of interactive fiction. His paper on the topic is now available.| Troy Press
After a thorough review of dozens of science fiction PbtA games, and after hacking the last two TTRPG systems we played quite a bit, I decided to create my own game with exactly the vibe I wanted. Why a new system? Well, I’d just published Reflections on PbtA Design, so it seemed apropos to design a game from scratch rather than just hack up an existing system.| Troy Press
Planet of the Week is my PbtA homage to shows like Star Trek, Firefly, and Stargate: Atlantis. You’re the away team of the research vessel Endeavor Maru. You’re the first group to land on each new …| Troy Press
We started a campaign using the second edition of Apocalypse World. At the end of July 2024, Vincent Baker announced a beta of AW: Burned Over 2024 for his Patreon subscribers. We began using the r…| Troy Press
Tl;dr: If you enjoy fantasy RPGs, buy Stonetop! Excellent GM advice, collaborative worldbuilding, and easy to improv. The beta materials are copious (over 200,000 words!), beautifully illustrated, …| Troy Press
The Line separates what the GM narrates vs. what the player narrates. In D&D, the player narrates their backstory and their current activity; the DM narrates everything else. Of course, even so…| Troy Press
TL;DR: Microscope, by Ben Robbins, Lame Mage Productions, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐, an innovative RPG for collaborative world building, and a great way to start any campaign with a Big Bang. Having heard great things…| Troy Press
I ran a Session Zero on Friday for our new homebrew campaign. We had just wrapped up a 41-session, open-table campaign set in Melvaunt in Forgotten Realms, and this time we’re doing a homebrew, clo…| Troy Press
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 play…| Troy Press
After our Microscope worldbuilding, and before our first actual session of Impulse Drive, I ran a Session Zero based primarily on Stonetop’s Introductions procedure. Stonetop is a hearth fantasy Pb…| Troy Press
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 f…| Troy Press
