6 TROIKA! Backgrounds Inspired by The Book of the New Sun

To celebrate what is possibly the best work of fiction I've ever had the pleasure to read, as well as the majestic Numinous Edition of one of the most original RPGs ever published, here are 6 backgrounds for TROIKA!, inspired by Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun (references of which TROIKA! is already full of!)

      1. Exiled Journeyman of the Matachin Tower

Falling in love with a prisoner it’s a grave crime for a Seeker of Truth and Penitence, but even worst is granting said prisoner a quick death. The guild of Torturers does not grant quick deaths. As punishment for your actions you’ve been given the tools of your trade and sent into exile. Your destiny: to forever roam the wide world, earning a living by practicing your trade. Or is it?

Possessions

Executioner Sword (Damage as Greatsword)

Whetstone

Small Brown Book

Fuligin Cloak (of the color that is darker than black)

Advanced Skills

3 Ritual Beheading

2 Inflict Torture 

2 Executioner Sword Fighting

2 Intimidation

1 Swim

1 Climb

      2. Dubious Sorcerer of the Forest

There’s nothing more difficult than studying the dark arts when surrounded by prying eyes and judgmental minds, so you left the city behind and moved into the forest. The forest never scorns you, never calls you a charlatan. If anything, it encourages you, murmuring your name through the leaves, clapping at your achievements with the shaking of its branches. A shame so many others had the same idea.

Possessions

Metal Claws (Damage like Modest Beast)

Robes made of animal skin (Light Armor)

Totem, wood-carved, supposed to resemble an animal but it’s hard to tell

Advanced Skills

2 Claws Fighting

2 Magic Duel

2 Spell - Call Upon the Wild

2 Spell - Assume Animal Shape

1 Spell - Babble

1 Spell - Read Entrails

New Dubious Spells

Call Upon the Wild (3)

The sorcerer begins to emit loud, distressing sounds with the hands cupped in front of his mouth in order to summon a wild beast. Once present, there is no accounting for its actions (Since making noise does indeed attract dangerous animals, some say this is no magic at all)

Assume Animal Shape (2)

The sorcerer growls painfully and his body contorts until it has transformed into a ravenous, clawed, four-legged beast (Detractors of this practice claim there’s no actual transformation. Instead, the sorcerer simply crouches and lets its furry robes and metal claws play on the imagination)

      3. Memory of a Dead One

You lived your life and served your time. By the end, it felt like a relief; a shroud of nothingness slowly embracing you, along with your pain, fears and regrets. But then one of the other party members had to exhume your corpse and feast on it. Now you live inside someone else’s body.

Possessions

None, unless you count those of the body you inhabit, which technically are yours too.

Advanced Skills

3 Take Over

2 Suggest

2 Instill Emotion

2 Assist

1 Skill of your choice

1 Skill of your choice

1 Skill of your choice

1 Skill of your choice

New Skills

Take Over

Allows you to take over the body of your host and act in his stead. It lasts until ended or until your host decides to get back in control by testing his Luck (or a Skill such as Resist Possession). To be rolled only when the host is not willing

Suggest

This skill allows you to discuss ideas, opinions and facts with your host. To be rolled only when the host is not willing.

Instill Emotion

You can force your host to feel a specific emotion towards a certain event, person or object

Assist

Your memory becomes a fully accessible library, allowing you to lend expertise and knowledge to your host. He gets to add +1 to the roll whenever he attempts a task you are skilled at.

      4. Duelist of the Sanguinary Field

Many would argue that fighting to the death using a sharp, poisonous plant as a weapon is not the smartest way to earn a living. But that’s because they never experienced the thrill of stripping an optimate of its most treasured possessions, while ecstatic voices call your name. And you get free meals at the Inn of Lost Loves.

Possessions

Avern (Damage as Sword), a plant whose leaves are poisonous, causing drowsiness followed by unconsciousness and death upon contact with the victim’s blood

Padded Clothing (count as Moderate Armor)

A Creepy Mask

A Vial of Antidote

A Letter addressed to a lover, signed “Cadroe of the Seventeen Stones”

Advanced Skills

3 Avern Fighting

2 Dodge

2 Awareness

2 Etiquette 

1 Healing

      5. Armored Hipparch

We all tend to perceive life as a maze of difficult choices and ambiguous compromise, but that is a lie, for when it came to it, life gave you a simple choice: keep trashing in the mud like the lowborn you are until you die for nothing, or enlist and die for something. At least, that’s what those armored man said when they came through your door and threatened you and your family with a knife at the throat.

Possessions

A Sword

A Shield

A Lance

A Suit of Heavy Armor

A Warhorse

Military Rations (1d6, each count as a provision)

Advanced Skills

2 Mounted Charge

2 Holding the Line

2 Sword Fighting

2 Spear Fighting

2 Riding

1 Resist Extreme Weather

      6. Enigmatic Green Man

The green color of your skin is a byproduct of what people refer to as pond scum. Your race engineered  it so it could live and die in your bloodstream, becoming food for your body, which now requires no other nourishment. It is unfortunate, then, that after crossing the Mirrors, you ended up on a sphere cursed with a dying sun, whose heat is rather insufficient for your altered biology.

Possessions

Ragged Clothes

Manacles and Rope, with which you were bound so you could be exploited as weird attraction

Half a Whetstone, the one an equally enigmatic young man gave you to free yourself with

Alien Pistol (Damage as Fusil, ignores Armor), emits a ray of purple light capable of melting any metal. It can fire 5 times then needs a full day to recharge

Advanced Skills

5 Blend with the Greenery

2 Pilot Flying Machine

2 Alien Pistol Fighting

2 Repair Alien Technology
1 Wilderness Survival

On Interactive RPG Modules - An Experiment

While lurking around the Discord OSR server I stumbled across a post by one of the people involved with The Demon Collective KS (can’t remember who, and my lack of Discord skills make it impossible for me to recover it at the moment). The article was about the implementations of interactive features the PDF format allows and how nearly every single adventure module in pdf doesn’t take advantage of them.
This is something I’ve been tinkering with myself for a while, and reading about it made me want to put into practice.

If you click on the image below you'll be taken to an interactive version of The Kobolds’ Lair from the classic B2 - The Keep on the Borderlands, turned into a one page online pdf for maximum usability at the table.

Although this particular version doesn’t work on mobile or iPad (since the free hosting provider I’m using doesn’t support multiple devices), turning an interactive pdf into an HTML5 file and sharing it online should circumvent the compatibility problem interactive pdfs suffer from, when viewed with something different than Adobe Acrobat

INSTRUCTIONS:

• Click on the link to open the pdf in a new window of your browser
• Hover on any of the rooms to see their content
• Hover on the kobold's picture to see the random encounters table

Momentum/Doom Mechanic for OSR Play

(If you wanna skip directly to the actual mechanic, scroll down to where it says Momentum & Doom in bold)

As a GM, I strongly believe that being able to generate things on the spot not only supports player's choice and emergent play, but also allows the GM to partake in the thrill of discovery, that wonderful feeling players get to experience whenever they open a locked door, not knowing what lays on the other side. Nothing makes me happier than having new tools to help me make the world the players explore more dynamic and responsive. That's why I love the classic, sempiternal random tables and games that make use of them.

Another classic I'm fond of and that also contributes in making a game exciting for the GM as well as the players, is the use of a die (usually a d6) to determine a 50/50 chance of success for events and situations that are beyond the player's reach and not governed by any official rule. 1-3 something happens, 4-6 its opposite happens. And since I've been tinkering with my own sword & sorcery ruleset, I wanted to find a way to expand it a bit, by Crom! In a world of uncaring, possibly non existent gods, Fate plays a bigger role in the destiny of men, and I wanted something to reflect that.

To get some inspiration I checked the Momentum and Doom mechanic from the Modiphius' Conan rpg, and I found it suffering from the same issues that plague many other rulesets that try to do something similar, like pretty much all the Warhammer rpgs I've read.

Although I appreciate the intention, to create the idea of otherworldly forces tipping the scale one way or the other while giving both players and GM more tools to affect the world they play in, they all seem to implement it in a way that goes against the experience I'd like to create at the table.
In the case of Modiphius' Conan:

• Momentum is a pool of points the players can draw from to trigger special abilities or get benefits for a task being attempted
• Momentum is generated mainly by players succeeding at tests particularly well
• Doom is for the GM, and allows her to create "complications" for the players, like trigger NPC special abilities, make a bridge fall down, or generate obstacles that "take one or more actions to overcome" (sigh)
• Doom is generated by a bunch of things, including players' failing a test badly, players' use of Momentum to succeed at a test, but also features of the environment (like, putting a dangerous bridge in a dungeon could give the GM one or two Doom points).

These mechanics generate three major problems as far as I'm concerned:

• More bookkeeping - Players generate momentum (keep track) by making tests, then they have a bunch of special abilities (keep track) that can be triggered by momentum spends (keep track). Doom is generated in a bunch of ways (keep track), which the GM can use to trigger NPC special abilities (keep track), etc...
• Enforces characters' skills instead of players' skills - a lot of this Momentum and Doom stuff is tied to mechanical skills
• If a wall crumbles on a player's head I want it to be because of a die roll or because the wall was there to crumble from the start, and the player acted recklessly or didn't ask enough questions about the environment. Certainly not because I can make it crumble with a point a player gave me two rooms before by failing to pick a lock. The book even make an example of how the GM could use a Doom point to literally empty a players' quiver while a foe is about to charge her. Bye-bye tactical transparency.

So here is my take on Momentum and Doom, hopefully more in line with that OSR style of play I'm a fan of (I'm sure someone else out there already thought of this and in a much better form, so if you know of similar things please link them in the comments)

Momentum & Doom

• Whenever a player rolls a critical success, add 1 point to the Momentum pool. On a critical failure, add 1 point to the Doom pool (on top of the normal critical hit/miss stuff)
• Whenever the outcome of an event that is beyond the player's influence must be determined, the GM rolls a d100. 1-50 desirable, lucky outcome. 51-00 undesirable, unlucky outcome
• For each point of Momentum that exceeds Doom, the chances of a desirable outcome are increased by 10, and vice versa. Chances can never be less then 0 out of 100 obviously, or higher then 100 out of 100, doesn’t matter how much more Momentum or Doom is gathered after that.
• Momentum and Doom never refresh. They carry on from one session to the next

Example

A player misses with a bow in a crowded area. The GM rolls a d100: 1-50 the arrow hits a wall or a tree, 51-00 it hits a passerby. The roll comes out 45 but the Doom pool exceeds the Momentum pool by 1 so the chances of the arrow flying harmlessly by are reduced to 1-40. The arrow hits a passerby.

This can be also used to affect the chances of a business making a profit, an army winning a battle over another, a politician succeeding over the adversary, etc.

This way, critical success and failures, which already represent Fate's intervention in the actions of the players, also end up affecting elements of the world around them.

Empire Generator for WFRP-style Setting

As the first post of 2019, here is a generator for an Empire in the style of WFRP's Old World, the Holy Roman Empire or any low-magic fantasy kingdom ruled by an Emperor.

I've always been fascinated by WFRP gritty, fairly realistic medieval setting. Unfortunately, I don't know Early-modern medieval history well enough to be able to improvise that sort of stuff on the spot, and sourcebooks of that kind are slogs of hundreds of pages, completely unusable at the table.

With this generator you should be able to create all the information you need for a game setting in the style of "The Enemy Within" campaign (in fact, that's where I took most of the features from) in a fairly short time

With it you can:

• Generate the empire's borders, provinces, provincial capitals, towns, main rivers and lakes
• Generate the basic relationships between emperor, council of state and local governors in order to have some political tension from the get go
• Generate the topography region by region as your players explores it

The blank Empire hex map provided is scaled at 60 miles per hex giving you an empire roughly the size of modern Germany.

The blank Regional hex map is scaled at 6 miles per hex and corresponds to one hex in the Empire map