Creative Corner

Whimsicality. It's in games like Troika, Break!!, many of your Final Fantasies and in adventures like Garden of Ynn and in settings like Ultraviolet Grasslands. My media consumption injected me with a hankering for more of it recently. I've written about how my eternal GMing duality is Whimsical and Grounded (although Gritty is probably a …

Advertisement

Concessions (and Surrender) to Troika!

I love Troika! but not for the system.Me, a month ago And then I had realization while watching Samurai Champloo, a bizarre anime that swims in musical-historical dissonance. The story is about samurai in feudal Japan, but the music and cinematography style comes from hip-hop. And despite the two things not matching at all, the …

Union: Troika! + Red Ink Adventures

Confession #1: I don’t like roll-under systems. Don’t get me wrong, I adore Into the Odd, but that’s mostly because of the simplified tri-stat characters and razor-sharp, wicked fast combat. The math is opposite and it feels wrong. Confession #2: I love six-sided dice. A lot. Most gamers use d20, which is fine. But nothing …

Fighting Fantasy is to Troika as Tolkien Quest is to Middle-Earth Adventure Game

The title. I made a character sheet for a Lord of the Rings RPG game based on the Tolkien Quest books (which apparently was also called Middle-Earth Quest at one point?). Essentially, I thought "well, Troika is an RPG based on the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, why not make one based on the Tolkien Quest ones?" …