Spoilers - You have been warned . . .For the past few days, I have soloed my way through the adventure that is included in Troika! Numinous Edition (120 pages, at DriveThruRPG). I used the six characters in Active Time Battle!!! (8 pages, free/pay what you want at the same place). The adventure starts at the front desk of The Blancmange & Thistle. They are told that they can have the last room that is available. It is on the eighth floor which is also the location of a big party. After the PCs pay, they are invited to that party. In the lift they try to converse with the lift attendant, but that is a one-way conversation. On the second floor, The Old Lady enters the lift. She asks lots of questions. The PCs answer her questions and get awarded with a bonbon apiece.

On the second floor, The Gas Form enters the lift. The PCs can’t breathe, so they get out on that floor. They take the stairs up (no more elevator trips for them). They find the merchant on the third floor and they sell their bonbons for coins. On the fourth floor the PCs encounter a woman and her tigers. The PCs do not bother the tigers. On the fifth floor, they notice that their group has increased to seven. He is the Mysterious Friend. Further down the hall they are attacked by Spiteful Owls. The PC mechanic has a drone which does take damage. The PCs kill three of the owls and the others fly out the broken windows. For loot, the PCs collect owl feathers. On the sixth floor stairs, they encounter puddles of Demon Seawater. Two of the PCs can’t get past the puddles and the PC Android attacks the PC named Kunai. The wounded Kunai follows the advice of his ancestral totem. This enables him to bring back the Android to his senses. Kunai makes sure everyone gets past the puddles and he drags them if he has to.

On level seven, they encounter The Slug Monarch and his Heralds. The PCs pay the toll with owl feathers. In the hallway they see two Mysterious Strangers, but the PCs do not interfere with what is going on. They climb some more stairs and do not take The Alien Maw option. Instead, they make attempts to jump from step to step to avoid falling down into the Wide Carnivorous Sky. The PC Felicia and the android fail the attempt and fall. On the top step, the rest of the PCs find a sleeping woman and their two friends who had fallen. Next to the woman is a spellbook (missing some pages). The PCs quietly take the spellbook and continue on. This puts them in The Dream World of Madame Belloza, but this is an adventure for another day.

Give this fun system and adventure a try!

Another triumph from Daniel Sell! If you always thought Troika was full of glee and mirth, get your galoshes on, this one gets grotty. And not just for Troika, this would be a blast to run in almost any system I can think of.

Reading Daniel Sell's work always has a miraculous way of making the reader feel inspired, and Slate and Chalcedony is no exception. Andrew Walter's art is sublime too, as always and, being a Melsonia product, the setting and design aspects are on point also.

Lurid, crawling, and pleasingly impure, this adventure is a joy. I am surprised the pdf costs so little; but this only gives you less of an excuse not to buy it.

Thank you all for making this!!

I love the writing in the book, the eclectic artistry, the subtle colors of the pages, the system, the simplicity, the overall vibe; and for the physical copy I have, the size of the book, the textuers, the way it smells, etc. Troika! stands out to me amonst RPGs I have looked into. It is intentionally vague and does not define every skill the built-in backgrounds grant -- at every turn it tries to demonstrate its philosophy of getting out of your way.

I've run a number of Troika! sessions, and my players like the generative, imaginative space that the game tries to inhabit.

This system is easy to run, has a purpose, and accomplishes its purpose effectively. It's a work of art and it is functional.

This is a fantastic supplement that leaves plenty of room for development and is fertile ground for building things out as you like them. Gearing's humor cuts through the bog like a sharp breath of fresh air. I wrote more thoughts on this one here: https://sky-spire.bearblog.dev/review-19-fever-swamp/

I ran the adventure in the book for a group a few weeks ago. None of us had played Troika! before. It was a fun very short whimsical adventure and gave a good feel for the kind of game you might run with Troika! We all had fun. If you run it you may want to think about fleshing out what happens if the players pick up some of the plot hooks at the end. I'd like to play more Troika! It's a good change of pace. I enjoy the character backgrounds. They are all evocative and let your imagination fill in the world building. It could be fun for a group to figure out more about each of the backgrounds and co-create the setting. I'd like to learn more about other peoples' homebrew Troika! games to see what they do with the system and setting.

An Endzeitgeist.com review

This book contains 46 pages of content (6’’ by 9’’/A5), not counting editorial, ToC and front/back covers.

This review was requested to be moved up in my reviewing queue as a prioritized review by my supporters. My review is based on the print version, as I do not own the pdf.

 The interior of the front cover is a nice, full-color isometric map depicting Shurupak, the most stable city ruled by the many-crowned monarch, and from this place sprawl the Thousand Sultanates, with their ever-changing identities, rulers and customs; the spread that includes the interior of the back cover contains a generator for these transient micro-states: With two d6 rolls, you can determine the title of the ruler, and two d6 rolls let you determine competing fads; the interior of the back cover also has 6 troubles afoot and a list of stuff to do.

Beyond these sprawls lie the wastes, where the worms exist and dune-riders (as seen on cover) roam; four-armed metal-workers rise from duneholds to sell exquisite merchandise; in the North, the verdant jungles are the territory of the Azure Apes; the old steel gods that wrought the apocalypse lie to the west, and to the east, the massive plastic sea looms, where the Coated Men travel to have their skin coated in plastic…which promises power, but also an early grave.

If all of this sounds impressive, then because it damn well is just that; this introduction to a campaign setting of sorts is provided within the first two pages, and it had me STOKED.

The remainder of the book contains a total of 36 backgrounds (on reddish pages), and 36 monsters/NPCs (on greenish pages). The aesthetic, as you probably have determined right now, is one of very long after an apocalypse, with a quasi-techno-magical touch and aesthetics deeply infused in (stoner) doom aesthetics, blended with Heavy Metal F.A.K.K., minus the sex/adult angles. Add a touch of Dune, et voilà.

Now, as for the backgrounds, it is very much recommended that the GM read them, for much of the lore for this setting (?) is implied in the backgrounds. Aforementioned Coated Men, for example, are one background, and their text obviously implies that the Plastic Sea mentioned in the intro isn’t instantly fatal at least, and instead serves some weird, quasi-religious function. And WEIRD is allcaps, throughout: For example, one of the backgrounds makes you one of the last Bear Men. You see, Bear Men became somewhat anti-natalist and depressed as a culture, but the background, the Shaved Bear, rejects that, brimming with hope. Yes.

You can play a shaved bear person. The design of the backgrounds is generally pretty well-rounded, and features some interesting ideas, like e.g. a lizardfolk species’ cold blood represented by a reduced number of tokens in the stack if you’re too cold. You might be a worm-rider, a survivor of the old world, or perhaps you’re one of the agents (current or former) of the freshwater grubs. Possessions and skills generally serve alongside special abilities to render the overall power-level within the rather broad parities that Troika allows for; in contrast to many other supplements I’ve read, the backgrounds here feel pretty well-rounded and playable.

The monsters all obviously come with their stats and mien, and include murder cacti, scorpions and various lizards. Of course, the horrible mastermind freshwater grubs (think human-faced grubs in freshwater tank/thrones) are included here with a brief plot-generator, and we learn about dunesharks and beetles that carry massive ultra-hard papier-mâché tower-crèches. Several of these creatures do some neat things with Troika’s basic rules-chassis, for example when it comes to a kind of escalated damage chance. From nanosands to the last hover-tank Hyperion and ancient robots, this book manages to provide an amazing INDIRECTLY-defined backdrop.

And I wish it didn’t have that "IN"-prefix. But that belongs in the…

Conclusion:

Editing and formatting are very good on both a formal and rules-language level. Layout adheres to a one-column standard, with page-use different between sections: Around 1/5 of the page tends to be empty on every 3third or so page, since there (usually) is 1 background per page, sometimes 2; in the monster section, there often are 2 critters per page. The full-color artworks by David Hoskins rock and adhere to the same style you see on the cover; artworks are expensive, so I get why there aren’t more (there already are quite a bunch of them!), but for the bestiary in particular, it’d have been awesome to have an artwork per critter. The hardcover is really gorgeous, with sewn binding, color-coded pages, name of the book on the spine; all in all, high quality.

Luke Gearing does a fantastic job at indirect world-building herein, mostly via backgrounds and monsters; while that worked, kind of, to establish Troika’s aesthetic in the core book and hint at the weirdness of the humpbacked sky, this book presents a more conventional (and, to me, more accessible!) campaign setting that ticks off a TON of my “OMG, HOW COOL IS THAT?!?”-boxes.

Alas, this more grounded setting also perfectly highlights the grating effects of this indirect narrative approach; you don’t read a cohesive sourcebook; instead, you have to piece together setting-information from backgrounds and monsters; there is no place that really explains how anything really works in this world. The setting is as ephemeral and disjointed as the hallucinogen-induced visions that inspire its amazing aesthetics, providing only the barest minimum of contexts, and spreading these contexts out to boot. This would be less of an issue in a super-abstract setting, but in one that is pretty consistent in its themes, it does mean that the GM should probably take notes while reading backgrounds and monsters.

And don’t get me wrong, I am very much aware of the design-paradigm here: “Insinuate, hint, inspire the GM!” Good idea, but it works better if there is a functional skeleton to wrap those insinuations around. Acid Death Fantasy genuinely infuriated me when I realized that a paltry 1.5 pages of brilliant setting would be all I’d get, and while I appreciated and genuinely loved “discovering” more details when reading the backgrounds and monsters, I proceeded to become even more annoyed when I realized that these pieces of information were strewn about like that.

In short: As a person, I absolutely LOATHE that writing this evocative, this inspired, chooses to hamstring itself by adhering to a mode of information presentation and design focus that sells short its brilliant setting.

As an analogy: This is a bit like one of those campaigns where you get a player’s book with basics and hints, bits of lore strewn about, and a GM book that features the monsters and actually provides the information that lets you properly run an immersive game in the setting. Only in this instance, the information that lets you have an easy time running the setting has been cut, and your monsters have been grafted into the player’s guide.

I know next to nothing about Shurupak. Power and Water are leitmotifs of the setting (even set in title case + italics!), but what to do with that? No clue. The bird-like warflock and their culture, the coated men…there is so much greatness TEASED at. In a sentence or two. The barest of minimums of contexts given. Enough to make you want more.

…and enough to frustrate me to hell and back. Where’s my actual setting? Yeah, I am probably intended to improvise that and cobble it together…but I don’t want to.

As a person, this book pisses me off for what it could have been if presented as a more traditional setting, perhaps cutting a few of the less-inspired backgrounds and monsters (which, admittedly, are the exception). As a person, I probably wouldn’t get this again, as all its promise remains just a tease for me, the equivalent of creative world-building and lore blue balls. For me as a person, this is a 3-star book at best.

Then again, if you hate it when settings come with consistent lore and define/explain their concepts in more than rudimentary hints, then this might be exactly what you’re looking for; it is probably with you in mind that this was written!

…

However, as a reviewer, I try to rate books for what they are, and not for what I want them to be.  And frankly, if you love aforementioned indirect approach, if you want your settings to be fragmentary, full of high-concept tidbits, then this will be right up your alley. In fact, if you didn’t mind these issues in the core Troika book, and figured that the setting in “Fronds of Benevolence” was almost too well-defined, then this will be pure gold for you.

When viewed neutrally, then the whole cadre of backgrounds can be considered to be well-rounded and versatile indeed; the monsters, similarly, are often inspired and endeavor to do interesting things with Troika’s rules-lite chassis. The only neutral gripes I can field against this would be the rare less inspired background (like the hermit, who gets 4 Philosophy and three 2 random spells, no possessions. Boring.) or monster (ruin degenerate being a particularly bland one). That being said, for each such outlier, there are at least 2 great ideas that send the synapses firing.

And considering all of that, it wouldn’t be fair to rate this anything other than 4.5 stars, rounded up. This book may not be for me, but you might adore it. Oh, and if there ever is a “proper” setting book for Acid Death Fantasy, I’ll gladly back the hell out of it.

Endzeitgeist out.

An Endzeitgeist.com review

This module clocks in at 48 pages, 1 page front cover, 1 page editorial, 1 page hyperlinked ToC, 1 page back cover, leaving us with 44 pages of content, laid out in booklet size (6’’ by 9’’/A5). My review is based on both the pdf and the offset-printed hardcover-version. Let’s take a look!

This review was requested by my supporters as a prioritized review.

On the interior of the back page, we have a total of 36 common names, and 36 common occupations, which include cockfight referees, thinking engine specialists, etc.; similarly weird in a good way would be a 36-entry table of golden barge meals, and the inside of the front cover provides two d6 tables of rumors, which state that they want the GM to state whether they’re true or false; one d6-table is for the Northern part, the other for the southern part; facing this would be the point-crawl-style flowchart of encounters/regions that the party may explore. A pointcrawl is a way to depict overland adventure: Scripted encounters/locations are noted on the map, travel distances between them as well; it’s like each encounter/location is one dungeon room. Simple and elegant.

In the back of the book, we get a selection of 12 critters/NPCs and their stats, with some of them featuring Mien-sub-tables.

Regarding the theme, this book plays to Troika’s biggest strength: Full-blown strangeness in a playful manner, and the module, ultimately, is a road-trip like journey; it has a branching path of sorts, and is intended for 4 to 6 characters, but it does not focus on a riveting plot or the like. The module starts in the Duchy of Plandra, which is headed by Duke DeCorticus, a benevolent plant-overlord with a complex life-cycle that depends on rare earths; also known as star loam, this substance usually comes from “The Wall”, far to the south; now, no more shall be delivered. Is that due to the crazed pamphlets of seditionists that have been showing up in Plandra? It’s up to the party to secure the earths their patron/deity/ruler requires to survive.

Structurally, this is a broad-strokes type of module; the journey aspect caters to that aspect, and the GM is encouraged to move things along to the best of their ability; this is contrasted with something rather uncommon… …but to comment on that, I need to dive into SPOILERS. Potential players should jump ahead to the conclusion.

… .. .

All right, only GMs around? Great! So, on page p, the timekeeping aspect comes into play: At the module’s start, you roll 4d6; this is how long the Duke’ll have to live. Each day has 4 die-signs showing 6s, and every hour, you fill in a pip. On the pointcrawl page, a specific region lists its travel time, usually in days, to pass through it or to move to a connected locale; this means that, RAW, if the initial 4d6 roll is bad, the module can actually be unwinnable. I intensely dislike this. Say, you roll 4d6 and get 1,1,2,2. Then, the party takes the faster travel option, but might have to wait 1d3 days; the party is lucky and comes up with a 1 day waiting period and rolls travel duration for it: 1d3, comes up as 3. One day left; even with ideal actions by all players, they cannot return to Plandra in time to save the Duke. As an aside: The Duke’s life is on the line—the party should have an express barge set up for them. The delay to even start the journey makes no sense to me. Granted, a pretty bad scenario for the Duke’s life is not that likely, but a minimum value (it’s 6 days, fyi) noted for the GM to save the Duke, or a suggested number for a fair, a tough, an extreme challenge? That’d have been helpful.

Anyhow, I already mentioned branching paths and travel options: The party has two general venues when it comes to traveling from Plandra, first of which would be a Golden Barge; the other being a stilt loper, essentially a massive platform on two goofy mechanical legs. The stilt loper walker can set off right away, but it requires trusting the pilot, and is slower: the very first travel to the first associated area takes 1d6 days. You see where I’m getting at. The randomized deadline doesn’t do the module any favors.

This out of the way, the first of the most likely routes is the one with a stronger intrigue-theme: taking the Golden Barge also means that the party will probably have a fight with a void beast, and there’s a chance that the auric liquidators will attempt to blow up the Barge; these liquidators are the fanatical secret police that serves Green Overseer Feng, the delightfully goofy mastermind behind the brewing sedition and pamphlets denouncing Duke DeCorticus. If the Barge does crash-land, it might end up on an asteroid, which sports the one content-level gripe I could find; the rudimentary culture on this piece of rock is governed by The Calculatronicus, a vast engine capable of firing rays, but which lacks the stats for these rays. The rainbow badlands haunted by the (white) wine-colored raiders would be the second possible location to crash.

Which brings me to a structural nitpick with this module: While there are possible connections between routes and options given for, and where the barge crash-lands is actually noted in a table, there is no real guidance provided there; one silt loper pilot wants to get to the emptied city, which can be reached from the rainbow badlands, the asteroid, and from the eye-bleed badlands, but WHY the party would get there/the connection per se, is weak. The asteroid is another example: It can lead to the rainbow badlands, or to the emptied city, but how? The GM needs to fill in those details.

Thus, as a whole, the module does feel in parts like a well-fleshed out outline, but one that does not sport a consistent connective tissue between all locales, which, admittedly, tend to be outrageous and interesting.

As mentioned before, one way to solve this would be to reach the Wall and best Overseer Feng in his cupola; I generally like this route, but the society atop the wall and the unmapped chambers of the cupola have made this section a bit more opaque than I’d have liked it to be.

The second way to save the Duke would be to find an Yggdrasil-sized tree and reach its roots, where the psychic holy tuber is guarded by 3 undead gardener-knights with unique weaponry, all in a village otherwise only inhabited by grotesque mummies, whose heads have been replaced with roses, which struck me as a truly disturbing and weird imagery.

A big plus of this module would be its significant replay-value; there are many ways to go about solving the module, and e.g. the cultural conflict between the red and white wine-colored raiders is but one of the various strange tidbits; having a species of pseudo-baba-yagas hunt silt lopers? Interesting. Terrain-features with actual impact on gameplay? Nice. I couldn’t help but feel, though, that the module would have been better-served by decreasing the number of locations, and instead providing more details for them…and being consistent in their connective tissues/transitions.

Conclusion: Editing and formatting are good on a formal and rules-language level. Layout adheres to a 1-column standard with a blending of original b/w and full-color artworks in the same style as seen on the cover. The pdf comes fully bookmarked, with the header of each page of the pdf jumping back to the pointcrawl map—nice. The pips of the die-timeline can be marked in the pdf version as well. Kudos! The print version is a solid, well-crafted hardcover.

Andrew Walter provides a nice, fast-paced journey when it works as intended; if the GM consistently pushes the party forward and hasn’t rolled too low on the days-to-live-counter, the module can feel like a truly strange and fascinating roadtrip that taps into the same kind of weirdness that the Troika! core book proposes; hitting this note is impressive. On a downside, if a party does want to think, linger, plan, act methodically, then this module might well be frustrating for the party and GM alike, as the connective tissue between locations, how to actually get from A to B, is more vague than it really needs to be. Quite a lot of pages have between ¼ and 1/2 of a page of free space, so the module certainly had plenty of space to put these final developments in.

In many ways, this module, to me, is slightly frustrating; with one final development pass and some blank spots filled out, this could have easily been a masterpiece. Having a player-friendly map of the pointcrawl, or parts of it, would also have been helpful indeed. In the end of one of the routes, some maps would have been helpful as well.

This adventure is certainly unique, brims with creativity, and has some delightfully outré ideas, but it does lack that final refinement to make everything smoothly gel together; not to the point where an experienced GM is stumped, but certainly to the point where this needs some serious planning to run smoothly. As such, my final verdict can’t exceed 4 stars.

Endzeitgeist out.

A very nice supplement for Troika. Plenty of backgrounds and random tables. About the only thing it lacks is some background on the world. Even 4-5 pages would have been amazing, instead there is only a 1.5 page summary. A good supplement, but for nearly the same price as the core book, lacking.

A wonderful supplement to a wonderful game. The Duke thanks you profusely for your servitude!

One of my favorite role playing games. Full of fun, with a twist of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchet infusing the writing. Includes plenty of random tables to help in a pinch, as well as a colorful cast of adventurers and enemies to face. New players can sometimes struggle coming from systems like 5th edition DnD, but it is all quickly rectified with some good old Troika fun. All in all, an enjoyable system that breathes life in every table it graces.

The majority of the internal art is hard to make out and not in the same style as the cover (and kickstarter page). In the print version, it's almost impossible to decipher due to being too dark, this especially makes the maps a chore to look at and reference. If you don't care about art this book is a delight, but if you expect the internal art to be along the same lines as the cover, you might not be too happy with this one :(

Just absolutely bonkers. Brilliant in every way. Play this game!!

For a longer, more coherent version of the little review below, pls visit my review blog!

Love this creepy crawl so much that I also bought the hard-back! This thing is jam packed with swampy goodness creepy denizens, dangerous locales, and unique creatures. It's small but potent, with every bit of page space used for the quite condensed sandbox (swampbox?). Even the front and back inside cover are, respectively, a hex map with key and a quite nasty random swamp diseases table. It's ostensibly a low-level area, but low level characters will want to be very cautious and may spend a decent amount of time hiding or running away. I could see it being a quite challenging mid level adventure with only a little extra GM prep time, and the swamp itself and the many tables in it could be endlessly reused. I'm going to use this for one little excursion Lankhmar based party is going to make into the Great Salt Marsh!

• it's a compete sphere, and a wonderful framework illustrating how one can flesh out a sphere to feel like a real, living and breathing place
• all the illustrations are fantastic, cover to cover! Sam Mameli and Evey Lockhart have very different styles that go together like some sort of weird combination of bubblegum icecream and a mint cappucino: it's poggers and it works.
• Melsonian Arts Council does not f^ck around when it comes to production values. The writing sings, the editing is smooth, and the layout and graphic design are top notch. Another fantastic book from Melsonia.
• IT'S A COMPLETE TROIKA! SPHERE PEOPLE!
• Writing by Evey Lockhart makes this an absolute no brainer purchase. If you're still reading at this point I assume it's because you don't know the wonderful force of nature that is Evey. Strap yourself in, you just found your new favourite RPG writer.
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