Down the Rabbit Hole - Troika!

My immersion into Dungeon Crawl Classics has served as a sort of gateway to other, stranger RPGs. DCC has some weirdness, sure (and books like Black Sun Deathcrawl dive off the deep end), but there is more and stranger, stuff which feels as much like art as game. One of the first I stumbled across was Mork Borg (sorry, umlauts missing), a sort of art piece made of death metal covers and the back wall of old LP shops disguised as a sort of RPG system. I mean....you can probably play it, but I've been perusing it for weeks now and I have no idea precisely how it is all supposed to come together. 

Less confusing but much weirder is Troika! from Melsonian Arts Council (though hard to find in print in the US anywhere other than Exalted Funeral right now. I have seen Troika! mentioned as the source system for some odd sourcebooks on Drivethrurpg on occasion, which left me wondering why some publishers were providing system content for DCC as well as Troika! RPG. Book/zines like Terrors of the Stratosfiend left me wondering: is the DCC game the better system for their vision, or is Troika? After digging around and finding a copy of Troika! I found that the reality was a stranger tunnel than I had imagined.

If Mork Borg is what happens when someone channels a coke-filled death metal concert into a chapbook, then Troika! is what happens when someone Reads Lewis Carroll, watches David Lynch, and then takes too many funny mushrooms at the same time. Not to suggest that what is happening in Troika! is exclusively a weird, hallucinogenic bender-based excursion into nonsense, but rather that the game seems to exclusively revel in concepts and grounds which not only defy genre expectations (the game seems deliverately determined to avoid the tropes of the RPG and fiction genres it borrows from) but it ends up feeling like a game designed to emulate a weird dream state. It's not billed as an RPG of "weird fever dreams" but it sure feels like that's what it is.

Unlike some other fringe indies out there, Troika! doesn't even feel especially gritty or "adult" and  in fact even feels like a game you could invoke in the presence of kids. This is a welcome change from the traditional focus of a lot of the alt-OSR crowd, which seems overtly focused on recovering the narrow slice of a late teens/early twenties mindset from the 70's with all the accompanying sex, gore and debauchery they can throw in to a product. Troika! invokes the weird, but in an accessible way that is designed to spark creative expression.

Troika! also spawns from the UK OSR crowd, which is heavily influenced to lesser and greater degrees by the old solo gamebooks comprising Fighting Fantasy, which is a rough foundation for the slim mechanical rules of the system. The only part I have found suspect so far is the way initiative is handled, which is essentially what sounds to me like "take a bucket of colorful stones and pull them out one at a time until there are no more colorful stones." 

I'm intrigued enough with what Troika! is trying to do that I've picked up a couple more supplements, and will scrutinize them when they arrive. If your goal is "simple mechanics plus a setting/approach designed to maximize creative input in an environment entirely unfamiliar to the norms of the RPG landscape," it seems that Troika! does this exceedingly well. 

Hero System 6th Edition Dethroned by Grimtooth as "Game most Likely to Stop a Bullet."

I picked up a copy of the Silver-Foil leatherette cover, 620 page edition of Grimtooth's Ultimate Traps Collection. The book is larger than all three D&D 5E manuals combined. It looks larger than all of the Grimtooth's books it holds within, combined, probably due to thicker quality pages than the originals? It looks terrifyingly large.

This is a glorious collector's edition, and worth it to secure the special silver/gold goil version with 160 extra pages of content, including Traps Bazaar and Grimtooth's Dungeons of Doom. It remains suitably generic (although in the back are some notes on AD&D and T&T conversions for some bits), but note that Goodman Games also released a special module 87.5 for Dungeon Crawl Classics titled Grimtooth's Museum of Death, so if you want the totally complete Grimtooth experience not even the massive Ultimate Grimtooth's Traps book will cover it! Sadly the DCC module does not offer DT&T conversions, but it's easy enough to extrapolate DCC into DT&T mechanics (hint to any DT&T fans out there: if you love DT&T, I can promise you that you'll also enjoy DCC, which covers a very similar aesthetic and gritty fantasy-meets-high-weirdness feel that DT&T does).

The big book is $80 MSRP but I found a copy for $64. It's worth $80 though, so if you want to have the final, definitive resource on dungeon delving traps, find a copy.

Grimtina is actually in this module, with a terrifying chainsaw. She's like Harley Quinn if Harley were the love child of Hades and Ereshkigal.

OSR Problems; on finding a way to run OSR games, and settling on a system...

...and one day I looked up and realized three sections of my shelf were entirely OSR. The biggest chunk by far was for Swords & Wizardry Complete, which is of course supported by the Frog Gods with gigantic tomes of various and sundry....but there's a lot more:

Swords & Wizardry Complete
Dungeon Crawl Classics
Labyrinth Lord
For Gold & Glory
Beyond the wall and Other Tales (my new favorite darling of the moment)
Spears of the Dawn
Castles & Crusades
Iron Falcon
...other stuff I have no doubt forgotten about. Let's not even bother mentioning the actual original B/X D&D, 1E AD&D or 2E AD&D tomes.

And for each of those I have a big fat mess of modules and support, and some of the support is ephemeral and easily transits from one system to the next, such as Yoon-Suin, Deep Carbon Observatory and the D30 Sandbox Companion which are all easily utilized with any of the above titles.

I have a real desire to actually run one of these, not merely convert content over to D&D 5E like I've been doing lately. My thought is that my local gang of players might put up with a couple nights of one, but it's not going to have legs for the long haul....and I do love D&D 5E, so not interested in forcing that system into competition, anyway.

My Saturday group is pretty much dedicated to Pathfinder and I know them well enough to know that that boat must not be rocked any longer; delving into 13th Age and D&D 5E was enough for them. My Wednsesday group is more flexible, but I have some players who, when I break from established D&D, will simply vanish in a puff of smoke and I'd rather not make that happen just because I happen to want to play some OSR stuff.

My thought then is to delve into online gaming again...Roll20 or Fantasy Grounds. I ran Fantasy Grounds for my old players in Seattle a lllloooong time ago when I first moved to Albuquerque....surely it's gotten even easier to work with since those hallowed days of yore. Plus, Roll20 seems pretty cool. Maybe what I need to do is find some games to get in to as a player first, see how it works....I'm thinking Mondays and Sunday nights are good for me. Hmmmm.

But when I run...it's definitely going to be one of the above titles. Probably DCC or S&WC but For Gold & Glory is damned tempting. Labyrinth Lord would be more tempting, but to try it out only begs the question of why I don't just run the original.....and ironically, I know I will find the race-as-class element distasteful once I'm actually dealing with it. This doesn't bother me with DCC strangely, because my sense is that the Tolkienesque races have no real place in DCC anyway and can be ignored.

But then there's Beyond the Wall....have you seen this book? It's pretty amazing. I'll have to talk more about it and its supplement later.

There's other stuff, too: Perils of the Purple Planet. The Chained Coffin. The Haunted Highlands. Tranzar's Redoubt. A Red and Pleasant Land. Razor Coast.....these are all begging me to run them. And yet I'll probably ignore them all and do my own thing anyway. I always do.

Sifting through D20 Debris

With Wizards of the Coast announcing their 3.5 edition reprints even as their 1st edition remasters are imminent, and with so many D&D-variant systems popping up every day (most recent of which is Dungeon Crawl Classics) I have to say the market for RPGs now seems utterly clogged with dozens of games all trying to do basic variants on the same thing.

I gave a fair amount of thought to the 3.5 edition situation, and contrasted it with Pathfinder. I realized I probably don't care to do anything with 3.5 (though as a collector I may still buy them, we'll see) as Pathfinder really has done more than I often give it credit for to advance the game in meaningful and structured ways. Pathfinder needs a "real" revision, I feel...an actual "Pathfinder 2nd edition" sometime in the future to give it its own credence as more than a 3.5 spin-off, but I am pretty confident that Paizo will do it right when the time comes, by simply cleaning up and advancing the actual system Pathfinder fans enjoy rather than ditching it for an entire revision.

WotC seems to be really bad at this for some reason. AD&D 1st and 2nd edition may have been different, but 2nd was clearly an evolution of 1st. 3rd edition was decidedly a different game that accomplished the same thing in meaningfully similar ways and so was fine, but 4E was a whole new beast (worthy of its own identity apart from D&D)....and my first playtest impressions on 5E leave me feeling that rather than building on what has come before they are instead reconstructing it, and fairly arbitrarily at that. So I don't have high expectations for the future of D&D right now.


Games like Dungeon Crawl Classics are fascinating beasts in their own right. I've finished reading DCC and I am keen to try it out, although I doubt the chance will ever come. This is a system which manages to capture D&D's essence but packages it in a unique fashion, a manner which stands on its own in contrast with both classic editions and retroclones alike. I might honestly be looking forward to the 1st edition reprints more if DCC hadn't come along. As it stands, DCC has stolen a bit of that thunder with a fresh take on a classic experience.


Anyway, just some random musings....

Dungeon Crawl Classics: Scene Stealing DDN? Stealth Takeover of the OSR? Or Just Good Timing?

Have you seen all that is going down with Dungeon Crawl Classics? Seriously, Goodman Games has two editions (standard cover and collectors cover, below), loads of modules planned, and lots of third party support. Great covers, evocative of classic D&D art, and Emirikol. Yep, check out the launch page here for all the news.

I was a little leary of DCC last year, due to the whole weird dice snafu (no idea if it still requires them) and also the fact that the last time Goodman did this it kind of flubbed (Eldritch Wizardry, RIP). This, however, looks like a strong lineup and a load of good material, focused, and determined to sweep away the OSR crowd, the nostalgia crowd, the "easier game system" crowd and the retro-is-fun crowd (all crowds that could be one and the same, I am sure) in one fell swoop.



Plus, the rulebook is 480 pages long. If that doesn't have a fully functioning retro ruleset in there that does everything but the dishes I would be disappointed. So I think I'll be ordering a copy this Friday.