Running Troika! with family

it's also legal to buy and sell drugs if you do it through a mandrill

A while back I bought Daniel Sell's Troika! RPG. It's... strange. The Troika! game universe reminds me more than anything else of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, but with rather more fantasy elements. It's very whimsical, very British, very surreal, and very silly. As for the rules, after playing Into the Odd with its very, very pared-down ruleset, I found Troika! a bit long-winded (even though its rules are pretty minimal compared with many games). But I absolutely love the rule for determining who goes next in combat, which can produce really interesting results. It allows participants to carry out one, multiple, or no actions during a round, depending on the order in which a bunch of cards or tokens are drawn.

The game book includes a truly great introductory adventure, one of the best (certainly the silliest) things I've ever read, called the Blancmange & Thistle. I played through it with 2 relative RPG newbies: my wife (who'd previously played 1 session of Into the Odd and 2 of I'm Sorry Did You Say Street Magic) was playing a Chaos Champion called Minx, while my 26 year-old daughter (who'd only ever played a session of Honey Heist) played a Thaumaturge called Thora Turd. A report of their play is given below - contains some spoilers (although, given how far they got in the adventure, not many).

Into Into The Odd

Into the Iron Coral

This weekend I ran my first game of Into The Odd. I was also my first in-person TTRPG since the pandemic started, my first in about 30 years in fact. And it was also also the first time I've talked my wife into playing an RPG. But not the last! (Actually, I had previously persuaded her to play I'm Sorry Did You Say Street Magic, but that was verrrry different from playing an old-school dungeoneering type game)

Running Lasers & Feelings

I ran my first game of Lasers & Feelings last week. The scenario I rolled up was: zombie cyborgs seek to bond with an alien artifact which will bring about a war/invasion. I was scared of having to improvise the entire scenario beyond that sentence, but actually it went great - the players' actions prompted me to come up with ideas I'd never have done otherwise, and the desire to have a complete story by the end of the (90 minute) session kept things moving forward, and kept me finding new ways to allow the players to save the world. The hardest part was probably combat: it's hard to get away from thinking in terms of rolls to hit. Actually, combat should be played out quickly, with single rolls covering large chunks of the action rather than individual attacks.

Here's the session report written by one of the players, Tom Baker:

From the personal log of Science Officer T J Turing23:

As our Captain is currently in a coma, and in the absence of a sufficiently qualified Fist Officer, I am preparing to take over command of The Raptor. The only Officers on board currently are Stan Frenk, our emotional Engineer, and Dr Lovebeam, who is a competent physician, but somewhat dangerous. I have activated my swearing subroutines in order to more effectively integrate with these oddballs.

We spotted a ship falling out of orbit towards an unexplored planet, and decided to persue, bringing the Raptor into orbit, to be close enough to transport across to the vessel, which we have identified as an older Consortium cruiser. Scans revealed movement throughout the ship, but no actual life signs.

On arrival at the ship’s Transporter Room, we were assailed by several entities, who seemed to be some kind of hybrid cyborgs (still wearing out of date Consortium Uniforms). Our phasers were enough to deal with them quickly, and we headed for the bridge (deciding that this was more important, given the rapid descent of the ship, than trying to harvest energy crystals for the Raptor’s energy guzzling Warp Drive).

We passed the Med Bay, where we found another unconscious Cyborg, and an unconscious Human who had evidence of interrupted surgery. ~I attempted to interface with the cyborg’s tech to find out what was wrong, but was immediately attacked by malware in the bot, and only saved myself from infection by quickly unjacking.

We managed to revive the human, but only for long enough for her to say “ Don’t let them get there” before expiring.

At the bridge, we found more cyborgs piloting the ship towards a crash landing on the planet’s surface. Incapacitating the monstrous hybrids, I took the Helm, and managed to avoid a total wipe out, and we managed to crash land the ship. While the Cyborgs on the bridge were dealt with by now, we soon realised that two parties of six cyborgs had left the ship and were now making their way towards a large alien building.

Following them, I determined that this was an abandoned alien spaceport, and the cyborgs were heading towards a large military ship, armed with a massive bomb. Hoping to find a ship to destroy the bomb-ship, we entered a cruise liner, whose crew and passengers were in suspended animation, but swiftly left when we realised it would have no weapons.

As the bomb ship launched, we beamed up to the Raptor, and considered our options. We had barely enough fuel to apprehend the ship, which we now realised was on a course for Earth. Beaming back to the spaceport, we commandeered a military freighter and leapt to pursue the bomb ship. We approached close enough to beam on board, and found our way to the alien bridge, where we managed to jettison the bomb, and destroy it safely.

We will perhaps never know exactly what alien virus infected the crew of that ancient Consortium ship and turned them into cyborgs, but they’re all dead now, so problem solved. I believe.

I'm Sorry Did You Say Street Magic?

Illustration by Shannon Kao for ISDYSSM

 In the last few days I've discovered and played 3 games of I'm Sorry Did You Say Street Magic (I'll call it ISDYSSM from now on) by Caro Asercion. I've also introduced a number of people to the game, including several who'd never played RPGs before. All have fallen in love with its beautiful, simple system of playing, and the genuinely magical creations that result from playing it. One RPG-newbie I played with, a counsellor for autistic young adults, thought that the game would be an ideal tool for playing with her clients, helping them to come out of themselves and express their hopes and fears through directed creativity. 

ISDYSSM is a GM-less game - all players take an equal role in determining what is possible. This is a concept which, when I first encountered it, I couldn't envisage how it would work. But it does. It is, more than anything else, a loose structure within which people can explore the extremes of their imaginations to collaboratively build a story.

The rules, as I said, are simple and lightweight. After loosely describing a city by choosing three adjectives and then discussing the setting and what kind of beings might live there, players take it in turn to add either a Neighbourhood, a Landmark or a Resident to the city. Each of these involves a slightly different process, but all require the creation of true names, words or phrases that make that Neighbourhood, Landmark or Resident unique. These are a lot of fun to come up with, and can be as weird as you like: examples might be "slow-moving tourists", "big stain underneath", "oxidisation" or "braised tofu smell".

Declaring a resident involves an additional step of roleplaying a vignette, wherein the current player acts as the resident, and other players play roles of those interacting with them - perhaps customers, employees, or more abstract elements such as the weather or the nearby buildings. This aspect of the game was a lot of fun!

Finally, compasses - a word or phrase to inspire the round - and events - during which the city may be changed, and questions asked - help to make each round of the game unique, and determine the story of the city's growth and progress. The end of the game can happen whenever the players want - or you could keep on playing forever over multiple sessions if you prefer.

As well as being a lot of fun, it's a great tool for generating unique and characterful city environments for inserting into other RPGs or as a location for works of fiction.

In our first game, we invented the "Walking City of Lig⤦" (we think it may have once been called the Walking City of Light, but some of the letters have clearly fallen off the sign). It's a "sprawling, ornate, kinetic" city with something approaching a faded steampunk feel, where the buildings walk around on legs and the districts rearrange themselves over time. Quite unexpectedly, around halfway through the game, the city exploded into a battle between humans and robots, instigated by an android dishcloth-selling magnate in a tiki bar. You can read the summary of our gameplay here. 

In our next game we created an alpine city of cable-cars, where the building of a tunnel led to intrigue and death.

ISDYSSM is enormous fun, easy to play on the tabletop or online with only minimal resources (pen and paper), and a great introduction to RPGs for newbies. The rules are simple enough to learn that by my second play I didn't need to refer to them once. I can thoroughly recommend it, and will definitely be playing it again.