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Piercing the Veil of Whimsy, or How Monstrum Prodigium Helped Me Run Troika!

Posted by atanamar August 13, 2021

Melsonia Philip Reed Games Troika!

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Piercing the Veil of Whimsy, or How Monstrum Prodigium Helped Me Run Troika!

Troika! had been glaring at me from the shelf for a good long while. I love the system's take on Fighting Fantasy mechanics. I love the ideas and the art and the community that churns out zines and content with frantic aplomb. But I get to the end of the book and read the introductory adventure and my enthusiasm comes to a screeching halt. An adventure... in a hotel? Daniel Sell, Troika!'s author, is showing us that the book's whimsy isn't a joke. This weird is real and you just have to deal with it. I'm sure some folks can take this adventure and roll with its vibe, but the thing just stopped me cold. So the book stayed on the shelf. Naturally, I continued to collect every Troika! zine I could find because the art is exquisite and the ideas are infectious and I am a collector/hoarder. I even stacked up a pile of adventures I thought I could run. I imagined I could concoct some kind of Planescape/Spelljammer flavored Troika! adventure I ...

Using Rolemaster Critical Tables to Describe Weapon & Spell Damage

I started playing tabletop games with Middle Earth Role Playing (MERP), and then Rolemaster in times of yore. Both systems use d100 tables to describe the results of critical hits. When I picked back up the dungeon mastering mantle with D&D 5E, where damage is meted out in mere hit points, I cracked open that Rolemaster red box and pulled out the goods. Those crit tables are always on my mind when I run games. It's probably unhealthy. The tables are full of colorful, brutal, realistic, and hilarious descriptions of weapon attacks, divided up by damage type (in Arms Law). There are incredible descriptions of spell crits for various damage types (heat, electricity, cold) in Spell Law. Those are especially useful for when "Foe freezes solid and then shatters into thousands of pieces after falling down 20 feet behind impact point." As my players will attest, I try to describe the realistic impact of each weapon and spell attack. It helps to keep folks engaged (I...

Realizing the Ninth World

Art by Grzegorz Pedrycz Running Numenera is an exercise in cognitive dissonance. As a game master you have to paint a picture of a world and culture that are billions of years removed from our own. The people of the Ninth World live in a medieval state, but are awash in artifacts of the previous worlds. The inhabitants of those previous worlds are unknowable, and their technologies are charged with super-science and magic. Numenera Discovery, the latest core rulebook for Numenera, has an entire chapter dedicated to the topic, and I feel like I’ve pored over it more than the Cypher System ruleset itself. I’m relatively new to Numenera, having recently decided to pick up that beautiful Discovery & Destiny slipcase off of my bookshelf. After a few one-shots, I’m now a couple of sessions into an ongoing campaign. We’re certainly having fun, but we’re also dealing with the underlying dissonance at every turn. One tool handed to you by the...

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