If your Powered by the Apocalypse game has stats, you want the basic moves to make a balanced use of those stats. That’s not always as simple as having five basic moves for your five basic stats, for instance, because moves may get used in play at different frequencies.| Troy Press
The most played board games are old; some are even ancient (#2 most played, Checkers; #3 Chess; #13 most played, Backgammon). The only game to make the list from this century—and just making the li…| Troy Press
Free RPGs & Print-and-Play Card & Board Games| Troy Press
To my surprise, Oðblgshezi has taken a life of its own. My absolute favorite is that Goodfire Brewing not only named a Kölsch after it, they put a calculator on the can!| Troy Press
While the Epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest epic poem known, and one of the oldest works of literature, it was lost to history until the 1870s. Since then, different versions have been painstakingly reconstructed from broken cuneiform tablets scattered all over the world. Checking Amazon and Goodreads, here’s how different translations and adaptations are rated.| Troy Press
I had a chance to interview Jon Simantov, designer of Liberation and Vamp on the Batwalk, among other card games.| Troy Press
The majority of those Americans who have provided ratings have logged 1-25 ratings (58%), yet these ratings comprise only 1% of all the ratings that one sees. Nearly half (47%) the published ratings are from the 2% of reviewers who have rated more than 500 items.| Troy Press
The premise is simple—and absurd. Nuclear waste explodes and propels the moon out of our solar system at FTL speeds. While the 300 people living on Moonbase Alpha have no control over the moon’s tr…| Troy Press
Warp Your Own Way, by Ryan North and Chris Fenoglio, became the first interactive fiction to ever win a Hugo Award!| Troy Press
While typically I run year-long TTRPG campaigns, I had an opportunity to run a summer-long campaign. Sometimes less is more, and this was a wonderful experience.| 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
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
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 it…| 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. …| 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
