Too Many Thoughts

Posted: 2018-10-16
Word Count: 565
Tags: rpg troika

Speaking of tabletop RPGs and way too many ideas …

For some reason I’m obsessed with Troika!, which someone described as “hipster Planescape”. Maybe it’s because the Fighting Fantasy-derived rules are dead simple. Maybe because the text drops tantalizing hints about a bizarre setting it never actually describes.1 Maybe because to date the only publisher that’s paid me real money for something I wrote is Melsonian Arts Council.

In any case Saturday morning I knew what my “pilot” for a Troika! campaign would be. A lot of recent influences dropped into place:

So all those collided into a “mirror universe” version of Troika the city: the mysterious dictator whose futuristic technology forged warring villages into a mighty empire. Generations later, he’s still apparently alive. I keep imagining a cross between Big Brother and King Arthur, or Doctor Doom and Thomas Jefferson, or Ming the Merciless and the first Qin emperor. After all, real founders of empires are both heroes and villains, depending on the storyteller.

Now imagine that this founder truly introduced everything: crop rotation, writing, hygeine, basic medicine, aqueducts, concrete, civic architecture, spinning wheels, steam engines, and on and on. Sure people are living longer and better, but under a ruthless dictatorship. There’s no freedom of speech, but there’s no war either. There’s no religious strife because the Imperial cult crushes all other religions. By our standards such a regime is terrible. But compared to what came before it’s a god-emperor-send. (Like Communism was supposed to be.)

Saturday I jotted notes on three index cards. Today I’m writing paragraphs and paragraphs about the Supreme Leader’s citadel, even though in a single session intro game there’s little chance they’ll end up there. (What did The Lazy GM’s Guide say about over-preparing?) I should put more attention into the outer boroughs and the Heights where the aristocracy live.

Hope I get to run this thing one day.


  1. In an interview writer/publisher Daniel Sell said that’s intentional. Planescape was one of the few D&D boxed sets he owned. All the mysterious unexplained bits fired his imagination. Then he found the other supplements that explained the unexplained bits in tedious detail. ↩︎