#troika

It's sometimes remarked that my games offer some very strange playable archetypes, but I feel it's worth emphasising that compared to many published tabletop RPGs, my stuff is prretty restrained.

Pride Knight of the Patel Colourguard

Troika! & Goon City: Troika! Background & Tchotchkes

Pride Knights are trained at the Pastel Colourguard Fortress-Monastery of Geoffreya under the transubstantial tutelage of the Immortal Immutable Saint, rumoured to be the living embodiment of gender. Pibling Squires devote their lives to training in all things martial and flaggy under the amorphous eye/s of their divine patron to earn the right to don the radiant raiment. Fully  fledged Pride Knights roam the Spheres waging an eternal war against the  foul minions of bigotry and the heinous Terfaryan Empire with their war  cry, “Trans Knights are Human Knights!”

This background was inspired by the above image that was shared of pride-knightess at Cambridge Pride - @pride-knightess on tumblr and bluesky

Art of pride-knightess

FlamiArt - @flamiart on bluesky and tumblr

CrazyGnomenclature - @crazygnomenclature on tumblr and comic website

I encourage you to support these wonderfully talented people!

Things are shite for trans folx all around the world, increasingly in the UK and US and we just want to fucking live, so seeing absolute legends like this is so inspiring.

I threw this together as something fun for Pride. Love, support, and solidarity to all my LGBTQIA+ siblings around the world. Brina/ RatGrrrl xxx

Pride Knight of the Pastel Colourguard is an independent production by RatGrrrl Games and is not affiliated with the Melsonian Arts Council.

Happy Silksong day!

🐛 Guess whose TTRPG anthropomorphic bug adventure is DIY Crowdfunding right now?!

🪳 Shrink to insectoid size and adventure into the uncanny world that exists inside a sapient pear tree in this weird fantasy pointcrawl.

🐜 52 page full-colour, fully illustrated adventure for TROIKA! written and illustrated by me, Josh Blincow. This book owes much inspiration to HOLLOW KNIGHT | BUG FABLES | THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: THE MINISH CAP | HONEY I SHRUNK THE KIDS | A BUGS LIFE.

🕷️ That's right, I've been the reason Silksong was delayed all these years because this book has been in development literally as long as Silksong has and I wanted to be sure I didn't steal its thunder!

🪲 Unlike Team Cherry, we're a tiny indie team who would rather not keep up with the ruckus of kickstarter, so Melsonia are running a DIY crowfund/preorder through their Shopify store!

🪱 We are going to print the book either way (the benefit of the DIY crowdfunding experiment is you can drop all the kayfabe) but if we hit the funding goal I wanted to pay back to the community that helped me be able to do this at all:

🐌 We'll commission some drop-in NPC cards for everyone who supported in those first 30 days (picture on one side, description on the other) from some of the wonderful folks from TTRPG Tumblr that we know & love who have inspired and supported me on my journey!

🦋 Please go buy a copy, I wrote & illustrated the entire thing (there are 36 colour illustrations) and layout is being done by Shuyi Zhang, who is the reason that everything Melsonia publishes reads like magic.

🪰 It has been a labour of love and I put so much care and attention into prioritising both reference use at the table and playful reading (as well as making it really easy to pick up and run with your game of preference) and I guarantee you'll know it was worth it when you feel the quality of the paper in your hands.

P.S. If somebody gets this project to pop off on the Silksong reddit I'll owe you a life debt & post you a copy with a custom bug drawing! Dead serious.

Acid Death Fantasy (2019) is a setting book for Troika by Luke Gearing and illustrated entirely by the aggravatingly talented David Hoskins.

The Troika rulebook strongly implies its chaotic core setting through its myriad character backgrounds, which nest nicely in the dream/nightmare of Fronds of Benevolence. Together, they demonstrate a specific sort of play. But what if you don’t want to play Troika that way? How do you do the same basic thing, but with a different flavor? Gearing shows you.

ADF consists of a brief introduction that lays out the barest frame for the setting — desert, a plastic sea, a thousand petty sultanates, a fallen high-tech civilization. At the end of the book are three tables for sketching out a sultanate and some adventure seeds. The rest of the book is split between character backgrounds and enemies. Reading through them, a handful of Gearing’s inspirations quickly becomes clear: Dune, Dark Sun, Al-Qadim, Fallout, Gorilla City, Arik Roper’s Dopesmoker cover, a smattering of real-world cultures and historical eras. There’s also plenty of original weird stuff too, though it is a bit more regimented by the setting themes.

for demonstration purposes, here she is psychically blasting lacroix with period cramps

Vanilla

Unused

Texture itself

Last week, I reached out to one of my ttrpg friends and asked if he wanted to try a new experiment with me - a public discussion of various topics related to ttrpgs, kind of like the VlogBrothers but... well... with blogs. @goblincow was excited about the idea, so here's edition 1!

Hello Josh!

Thanks for being the first person to try this experiment with me! I like the idea of writing blogs to each-other, just talking about thoughts we've been having about ttrpgs.

What I think is so interesting about our friendship is that I feel like we're reaching towards each-other from opposite sides of the aisle; I'm most at home with PbtA and FitD games like Apocalypse Keys and Slugblaster, and you live very comfortably amongst OSR/NSR games like Mork Borg and Troika. The skills that the two of us have polished are similar, but not exactly the same.

We were talking a few weeks ago about Troika and the OSR, and one of the things we touched on was agency. When I'm playing a Powered-by-the-Apocalypse or Forged-in-the-Dark game, I'm throwing a lot of agency over to my players in the form of choices about the world and their relationship to it. We choose what parts of the world we care about when we make selections on our playbook, and we choose what kinds of stories matter to us when we select the thing that binds our group together. The map typically fills out as your characters make choices, and more often than not the GM doesn't even know what a place or a person is like until that part of the story shows up.

In a lot of the OSR games I've played, the map feels a little more… predetermined. Even in a depth-crawl or a dungeon with multiple routes, the GM typically has an image or a flavorful description that points them in a direction or towards a theme. I don't know, there's something about the way these kinds of games feel like they're expected to be played that doesn't quite give me the same feeling of spontaneous creation. (It's also entirely possible this is the result of my specific experiences, so I'd love to know your thoughts on this.)

Let's see if I can tackle this tension from a different angle. In a lot of PbtA games, the characters are exploring their relationships with each-other, much more so than they are exploring the land around them. In the last Troika game we played, it felt very much in the reverse. I knew that my Parchment Witch had this objective of getting back home, but I didn't feel like she had a reason to care about what the other characters at the table were doing. I have to think a lot harder about what motivates her - and that allows the setting to occupy front and centre, but for me, it made it harder to figure out what my character would do next.

I think the difference between these two styles of games is what the rules tell you to do. The rules in the OSR are often considered to 'get out of the way,' prompting players to try and come up with something to do, and only ask you to roll when your character is in danger. More often that not that danger is physical, although sometimes it might also take the form of Sanity or Luck. The success state is survival. The fail state brings you closer to death.

In contrast, in a lot of the story-games I run, the rules care a little bit about what happens to the character, but I feel like they care much more about the relationship that character has to the world around them. In Masks, your teamwork gets stronger if you're honest with each-other, and you need that teamwork in order to succeed in high-stress situations. In Apocalypse Keys, your relationship to the world is measured by your Doom, and how close you get to becoming a Harbinger. In both cases, I need to roll if my character attempts to comfort another teammate, - and while opening up to them or bottling up my feelings are both interesting answers, it's often the dice that tell us which way the story is going to turn. The randomness propels characters into situations that players might typically try to avoid.

This means that my characters in games like MASKS and Protect the Child are goaded into complex relationships, and the randomness of the die results prompts me as a player to consider my character's motivations - and to care about the people around her (or, at least, to care about what others think).

This isn't to say that my Parchment Witch shouldn't care about her traveling companions. She's certainly allowed to, and I'm hoping that as we continue to play, she finds a good reason to connect with the other players at the table and create fraught relationships with each of them. But I'm going to have to do a lot of figuring out on my own about how I want to make that happen, and that's a muscle I haven't had to build in the way I game before.

What kinds of agency do you feel exists for players in the OSR/NSR?

What are the rules of games like Troika and Mork Borg prompting players to do?

How do you cross the gap in what the games tell you is possible and what the players have to figure out for themselves?

Are there any struggles that you have in games like Blades in the Dark or Apocalypse World?