#troika!

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.

I made a new token pack!

This pack is a collection started out as a handfull of tokens I made for a home campaign of Troika!. It expanded into some more and since then I have used some of these for Lancer too.

In the pack are included:

30 illustrated tokens of robot knights and other beings (but all robotic in nature), all tokens infront of a hex, square and circle backdrop.

You basically start with big chapter full of character archetypes and roll some dice to choose one, and immediately fall down a rabbit hole of "apparently I'm a 'poorly made dwarf'; what does this setting think a dwarf is, and how can one be poorly made?" and "it seems that I begin play with a ruby lorgnette – what the fuck is a ruby lorgnette?"

Did the dunmeshi main 4 as Troika! backgrounds, very very lazily, for funzies. I don't think almost anyone else here plays Troika!, but whatever.

Every other week, I set up a table at my friendly local game store with a game, pre-written character sheets, and a one-shot adventure. Then, I play that game with anyone who wants to join! My goal is to provide an entrance into the hobby that isn't D&D, and to introduce players of all experience levels to games they might not have tried.

This week, we played TROIKA! Numinous Edition, from the Melsonian Arts Council.

I have to be honest - I don't know if I have the disposition for games like TROIKA!. Not to say that I don't enjoy the game as a text! On the contrary, I was really excited to play it! The pitch - a zany multiverse of adventure operating on a loose interpretation of classical cosmology - is right up my alley.

It's the lineage of design of which TROIKA is a part that I chafe against. Built in the Fighting Fantasy engine, TROIKA! is neck-deep in the early days of tabletop roleplaying, and all the random tables, encounters built entirely from prose, and impossible-to-solve "puzzles" that act more like pranks on one's players than anything else.

I don't want to rag on this culture of play - there are plenty who love it, and it clearly has a lot of value. This is an issue not of quality, but of taste; my preference lies in more contemporary systems and styles, and I found running a game like this stressful.

Thankfully, this week's table reported having a great time with TROIKA!, for which I'm grateful. And there was still a lot to like; the surreal and comical tone of the text came through marvelously in play, and we were all enchanted by the color palette of the whole thing.

By Daniel Sell and the Melsonian Arts Council

Good question! In theory, troika! Is about fantastical sci-fantasy people exploring the multiverse, but There's been troika! Games about ANYTHING. The way troika content works is that if you make something and go "this is troika content" it is basically now troika content. Anyone can make anything and it's all canon. The setting is very openly "whatever the fuck you want". you can play as a spaceship. You can play as a sentient inkjet printer. You can play as a door to door monkey salesman. You can play as a dog with a gun. There's cowboy settings. There's capitalist bear settings. There's ants heisting a picnic settings. There is so much troika content that I cannot tell you all of it.

This is a game where the teenage mutant ninja turtles can go to a fashion show in the Permian period and that can be your game. Even if you're like "okay. This is too much. I'm just using the Official Official stuff" the numinous edition characters involve robots, locksmiths, children avenging their dead pearents and lammasus, and they're all treated as equal characters. Troika game settings often come written on leaflets and played over a few hours with some pretzels. Troika is a very bizarre game. It's anything, as long as you have a couple d6 to roll.

HEY FOLKS WHO ENJOY ACTUAL PLAY PODCASTS?!

Ya like WHIMSY?

Ya like it WEIRD?

Ya like it when you get to see into a world where a garden gnome, a guy clothed entirely in swords, and an anglerfish-faced fella in a coat go on quests for money to buy Wasp Drinks, navigating their way around sapient mandrills and riddling sphynxes?

Do you want to meet Big Jim Concrete?

You do want to meet Big Jim Concrete.