#trophy dark

@loremistress93 and i are hosting a charity streamathon all this weekend for trans lifeline!!

come watch some AMAZING people play for a great cause over at https://www.twitch.tv/theloremistress! (i'll be posting as each game starts, don't worry)

we're doing in-stream giveaways of each game being played (some with really fabulous limited-edition physical versions, like trophy and blood borg), as well as a HUGE raffle!!! donate a minimum of $5 USD and get a ticket to win one of over 50 really fabulous prizes donated by equally fabulous people!!! here's the link to donate if you wanna get a headstart:

During Open Hearth's annual Shared Hearth online con, I got the chance to sign up for a one-shot of a Trophy hack, called Isle of Water and Blood. It was my first interaction with Trophy Dark, and I signed up upon a recommendation from some other members in the community.

As of this writing, I'm fairly certain that Isle of Water and Blood is still in development, but from what I can tell, it's basically a Trophy version of a Call of Cthulhu-style story, except from the point of the view of the cultists.

Character creation is simple; we played a version of the game with a reduced list of character options to make the choices more apt to the specific setting. I created Dottie Wentworth, a disgraced academic and taxidermist, with an unsettling number of hat-pins. We chose our occupations and backgrounds from pre-determined lists, and each choice gave us a list of skills that we could use to improve our chances when we rolled.

In a Trophy game, you cultivate a dice pool using two kinds of d6's: light die and dark die. Light dice come from your Background or Occupation, as well as from a Devil's Bargain, which will feel familiar if you've ever played Blades in the Dark. Dark dice can be taken when you are willing to risk your mind or body, and increase the chances of taking Ruin, which is kind of like a doom track: fill your Ruin, and you become lost.

Similar to Blades, success is determined by the highest dice rolled: a 6 is a full success, a 4 or 5 is a success with a complication, and a 1-3 is a failure. However, if you don't like the result of your roll, you can always add a dark dice to the pool and re-roll. This gives you a better chance of success, but it also propels you closer to Ruin. For a horror game, this makes perfect sense.

As you play, your characters will move through 5 circles of danger. Each circle heightens the stakes, and consequences become more drastic, the dangers less mundane. It's meant to replicate your characters becoming more lost and isolated, and while we were at sea rather than in a forest, it certainly felt like we were drifting farther and farther from safety the further and further we went. By the end of the game, we were all on a little island in the middle of a dangerous sea, with no boat to bring us back to civilization.

I don't know what regular Trophy games are like, but the simple rules reference and the limitations in character options definitely allowed me to pull together a character very quickly, and I didn't have to worry so much about choice paralysis. Our table also went over themes and content warnings ahead of time, which gave a good idea of what our limits were, and what kinds of themes I could expect.

In one-shots like this, one of the biggest aids to players can be a quick run-down of what kinds of beats or characters the GM is going to expect. Our GM prepared us by telling us that our characters should not be good people - they were cultists, after all - and that bad things would happen to them. I took this to heart, and my taxidermist Dot became a ruthless woman grasping for power, in whatever way she could. She bullied some characters and betrayed others, and in the very end, she got what was coming to her: a death at the hands of an eldritch being.

When it comes to resources, I really liked the Google Sheets the GM provided for us, especially since the sheets included a step-by-step guide to character creation. The dice and dice roller are also really pretty and make online play very streamlined. This made learning the game as you play very easy, and I think I understood the basics enough to be able to pick up the game in the future without getting too confused.

Because Trophy seems to focus on characters that are likely terrible and almost certainly doomed, relationships don't seem to be as baked into the game. In our session, the GM would ask us questions that propelled us to act in opposition to each-other, although I could also see him going in the other directions and asking us questions that might make us care about our fellow PCs instead. The option of leaving character relationships by the wayside reminds me of an experience I had with Troika over the summer, where if I wanted my character to care about what was going on with the other PCs, I had to figure it out on my own, rather than look to a rule to help me make a decision.

Trophy also seems to be well suited to pre-written modules - in fact, there's a word for adventures in Trophy, and that word is incursions. A cursory search even found these incursions in an itch.io tag, most of which are for a Trophy game of some kind. This might be a great option for GM's who love modules, while also appreciating some of the GM principles that often show up in the storygame house of design.

Written by Jesse Ross et al, published by The Gauntlet

Trophy Dark is a narrative-heavy horror oneshot game about doomed and desperate treasure hunters diving into a haunted forest/ship/temple/labyrinth/mine/corpse that fundamentally Does Not Want Them There. It’s structured as a dungeon crawl and the players progress through multiple Rings of the setting, where the challenges they face morph from the physical to the mental and emotional and time, space, and reality begin to bend around the characters as they move closer to the center.

"But, Ampersand, what is an effort mechanic?" I hear you ask, dear mutual I am making up in my head. An effort mechanic allows you to reroll an action you have already attempted but failed or to get a bonus to a roll at the expense of some resource. Usually, that resource being the character's health. But it can also be something else like clues in an investigative game or even a narrative consequence (but that's usually called a Devil's Bargain).

The important part is that it gives a benefit but requires a sacrifice. And that's when the whole fanfare of psychoeconomics start. Because you need the sacrifice to be big enough to give the player pause and not use it every roll. And also you need the benefit to be significant enough to make it worth the risk and the expense. If properly adjusted, an effort mechanic can become a slow but sure spiral into the characters downfall.

Let's look at some examples!