Troika! RPG (Melsonian Arts Council)
I've gotten behind in September. Time to catch up!
What it is: Troika! is a reimagining of the Advanced Fighting Fantasy game system (the one made for tabletop multiplayer gaming, rather than the solo game books). It's not only a restatement of that game system's mechanics, but a completely new envisioning of the game world, now represented as a bizarre space-fantasy with what are arguably no limits in terms of its scope of imagination. In reality, there are some limits....unless you are deeply into the "yes, and" level of improv which is so heavily catered to by many of these indie zine rpgs. Troika! is also fueled by an exotic art style that evokes turn-of-the-century (19th century) art conventions in books such as Alice in Wonderland or Wizard of Oz, eschewing any more conventional style of gaming for this fairly unique, surrealist style.
The System: Troika! is at its core AFF and anyone who knows AFF will feel at least somewhat comfortable here. What's interesting about Troika! discussion online is people complaining about the roll under system and other basic elements of the game such as initial random stat generation, which are completely logical elements on an OSR style game system that is not D&D derived, but still very much a traditional style of play....the many critics (including those who "like the system, but...") try to find equitable workarounds for non random stats or roll under vs. contested roll-high mechanics. I am not sure why this is an issue for so many, other than that the Troika! edition of these rules is essentially a very traditional old-school approach wrapped in the sheepskin of an artsy improv RPG aimed at high-concept, imaginative tale-telling as opposed to the original purpose of AFF, which is gritty solo dungeon delves without too much book-keeping.
What Troika! does strangely is initiative. Without looking back in my copies of AFF I am reasonably sure that the token system of Troika! is not what AFF did. In Troika! you determine initiative by assigning colored tokens (beads, poker chips, cards, dice, whatever) by foes and allies and throw them in a pot. You pull from this pot until you get the "turn ends" token and start over. It's in concept sort of neat, but in reality it's a horrendous pain in the butt, and can lead to odd situations where long pulls from the pot are of tokens only for certain (usually GM) enemies and such. For a game based on one of the original ultralite RPGs, its needlessly cumbersome and potentially weird in an unfun way. I noticed someone released an alternative initiative system based on cards for Troika! on Drivethrurpg, so I suspect I am not the only one who dislikes the initiative system (okay, a large Reddit forum is also dedicated to working around it, too).
Ninety percent of Troika! is not rules or mechanics at all, though: it's character types, which you can roll randomly for on a D66 to determine your Background. The backgrounds are evocative and interesting reading for the players, but ultimately necessary for the GM because almost all of the implied setting is embedded in these background descriptions; there is no other GM guidance on the world beyond what is inferred here and in the meager sample scenario. Later books such as Acid Death Fantasy take a similar approach and also ditch the core book setting entirely (sort of), meaning that if you are the sort of GM who likes a section that helps you out, Troika! is maybe not the ideal game for you.
In any case, backgrounds give you an evocative description that alludes to a weird world, some possessions, skills, and a special trait. Some examples of base backgrounds include some very interesting and at times extremely abstract descriptors, best exemplified by quoting from the text. For example:
Cacogen: You are Those-Filthy-Born, spawned in the hump-backed sky lit only by great black anti-suns and false light. Your mother was sailing on the golden barges or caught in some more abstract fate when she passed you, far from the protective malaise of the million Spheres. You were receptive to the power and the glory at a generative time and it shows in your teratoid form.
And:
Demon Stalker: You stake your reputation upon your ability to hunt and kill demonic creatures and those who break bread with them. Goat men in the wilds or the Angel cults of the slums, all need to be driven back off the edge of the map and onto the shores of chaos.
Also:
The Fellowship of Knidos: Mathmologists honour the clean and unambiguous truths of mathematics and coordinate them with their observations of the multiverse. All things can be measured and predicted with the application of the correct mathmological ratios, those methods applied to penetrate the ethereal surface and glimpse the fundamental numbers below.
And in case it isn't obvious enough that Troika! backgrounds are expansive, here is one more:
Zoanthrop: At some point in your past you decided you didn’t need it anymore: you found a Zoanthropologist and paid them well to remove your troublesome forebrain and elevate you to the pure and unburdened beast you are today
Those are all backgrounds for the same world/multiverse of the spheres. There are 36 such backgrounds, ranging from the familiar to the completely ephemeral. Sometimes literally! The backgrounds are generally simultaneously neat and also filled with questions for which few or no answers are forthcoming. So when I say that Troika! is designed around the Imrpov playstyle, this is what I mean! No two games are going to be quite alike, and your enjoyment of the game will be inversely proportionate to the level of contribution you and your players are willing to engage with on the fly.
The Setting: Troika! has an implied setting when you read the backgrounds and sample module. It's a multidimensional world of Ptolemaic nature (perhaps), crystal spheres or something similar, working in a realm which seems to be a city lying adjacent to or amidst many different aligned worlds. Magic is a thing, but steampunk, technomancy and other dalliances may also exist. Physics as the real world knows it may not exist, or maybe it does and no one interprets it right. There are a lot of things to worry about, and in general if its existed in a fantastic tale somewhere, it probably exists in Troika! At least--that's what I got out of it. The sample module is especially vexing to me as it implies a great city, as is alluded to, an takes place in a fabulous hotel filled with weird encounters. It has, to its credit, a dreamlike quality, but maybe not always the good kind of dream; sometimes it feels like the bad dreams induced by food poisoning, too. Who knows! The bestiary is similarly vexing and oddly stated, as are the backgrounds, filled with suggestions of a world envisioned like a dadaist painting, filled with interpretive shapes that could mean everything or nothing. A page or two stating that Troika! is a realm of dream might have been all I needed for this to make more sense to me, but then it might have been a bit more plebian than its hidden goal of randomized exoticism.
Despite that sense, I think it's an admirable effort in creativity. It's just....so much disorganization in the conceptual space is a burden for many when you're trying to conceive of a coherent plot or setting for an RPG, and from what I have read this ends up true for many, who find it suited at best for short term one-shot game sessions as a result; the inherent incoherence makes it hard to expand beyond surface level experimentation. If you like verisimilitude in your gaming, know that Troika! is in defiant opposition to your will.
Support Material: Troika! has some decent support. I don't have any of it in print, but did grab some in PDF. There are some sourcebooks from Melsonian Arts Council which are (without having dived too deeply) just as eerie and abstract as the core game. I like Acid Death Fantasy, which is a Troka! powered post-apocalyptic setting that provides a more concise initial world overview before diving into myriad backgrounds and creature...enough to hang the mental coat on, if you will.
Who is this For? Well, right off the bat I doubt any traditional Advanced Fighting Fantasy fan will find Troika! to be to their liking, if the main goal is an old-school and well-defined fantasy gaming experience. Troika! will appeal if you want to embrace OSR rules and a highly unstructured but evocative improv play environment. Troika! does not borrow (yet, that I have found) from the extremely focused and utility-driven style of module design seen in OSE, Mothership or other systems so the module content I have seen is a bit oddly traditional, but its still fairly brief in approach so shouldn't pose much issue. I concede that a lot of this book, despite in principle being of a design bent I should really like, left me mildly discomfited, again as if I had awoken from a disturbing dream brought on by food poisoning. It does not, needless to say, motivate me to run it. But...Acid Death Fantasy is really cool, and I think I could be tempted to give that a swing. Just need to house rule out the nightmarish initiative system!
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