So, I think anybody who may stumble across this blog will know, at least in passing, of the absolutely incredible hobby magazine of Knock! by the Merry Mushmen.
I have all of the issues and am consistently delighted by it. It is simply an aesthetic pleasure to page through after a long day or simply when looking for inspiration. Some people find it too art-punky.
And yet there are posts formative to my experience of blog-surfing that I miss. These may be posts from ancient dead blogs or a genius theory post from the start of a now entirely depraved blog. Things which you remember stumbling upon and have bookmarked, ideas which you still use, concepts which you still hold central to your thinking.
I have plenty of these I do not want to disappear into the realm of idle deletion or frank forgetfulness. I want to possess these posts as a personal act of preservation. The internet is fantastic as a library or as an indexing system, but it is absolutely terrible as a preservation medium - to that I would prefer to turn to clay or stone but we do not have printers for those mediums (at least none that are immediately accessible to me.)
What I do have is paper and a printer.
We easily acknowledge and then move on from the fact that the printing press was and still is an absolutely in-fucking-credible piece of technology. We should use it more, and learn to be more distinguishing with its use.
So I think I have listed the basic elements of my challenge. Go forth, find those blog posts and think pieces and print them in the act of preservation of your Old-School Renaissance. I don't care how you bind them, or in what format you print them. I am using a lever-arch file and printing them whole from the blogs with headers and footers. Make a table of contents or organize it by number of letters in the first word. Draw, write, note on these printed posts.
Just do it in the act of preservation. Make it so that a child in the future can find these pages, know why they have been printed, and then dive into what you loved about this niche-of-a-niche of a hobby. Make it so it can be donated to a historian or museum, and make it for yourself.
This is obviously, a quite personal endeavor for those who do want to take up this challenge. I do not expect there to be tables of contents posted which list notable posts as a form of in-group signalling (in fact if you have all of Knock! why would you). This should be yours.
Edit: I wrote this idly and with a great vision in mind - I now realise that I have made a mistake, and my eyes are too big for my stomach, and the blogs keep having links which have links which have links which have links and I need to see it all and tabs are increasing exponentially fuck.
The Troika! RPG is explicitly anti-canon, and although I have played a bit of it, again and again I am blindsided by where the city actually is. Sell does an incredible job of hinting at locations throughout his books (the main Rulebook as well as Get it at Sutlers) without fleshing them out.
One of the ways in which I nest myself in a game or setting (think of a hamster tearing apart newspaper or a weaver-bird spinning their nest) is by very explicitly putting myself in place. By imagining the space and its locations, individuals and their characteristics I am effortlessly able to improvise due to literal and metaphorical cause-and-effect. In a sense this is parellal to the Blorb principles - although that is more about playing a simulationist game.
So the question arises: Troika?
Troika is located in a local draining point of the spheres. There are others (Brass City, Bastion), but the Phoenix Throne lays claim to this particular plug/whirlpool.
(Ah, to elucidate on the nature of the spheres. From the multi-paved streets, canals and monorails of Troika above arcs the Humpbacked sky with the millionmillion spheres. They spin and dance in sometimes predictable ways. To travel to a sphere is different and similar every time. From every sphere one can jump via barge to other spheres. If left to drift under power you would, however, eventually end up in Troika (All roads lead to Rome.)
It is "nowhere" but also "somewhere". It clearly has certain bounds like Wall, the Sea, The Shifting Deserts, the Under City and of course the Hump-backed sky. Some scholars posit that these places are merely large portals to other spheres without an iota of firm evidence.
It has existed forever. Having existed forever it is the accretion of endless civilizations, building styles, periods, vogues and technologies. Perfectly anachronistic. Cobbles give way to tar pavements, to plasteel walkways covering venetian canals to moving sidewalks. One might travel by carriage, by silver gondola, or by vacuum tube. There is no sense of a progression to an idealized future because all futures have already existed - there is merely what is currently practical or in vogue. This fits in neatly with the tides and orchestras of the spheres.
The past epochs fad of spherical travel via portal is slowly becoming impractical as the inherent issues continue to build up, keys are lost, and attitudes change. The once magnificent Golden Barges which (in lilting and mesmeric odes sung by fossilized thinking engines) used to adorn the skies are being reclaimed and put to work once again, and their bizarre traditions along with it. Nearly all Barges suffer from poor maintenance, and those that do still fly are either museum pieces, kludged family homes, time-lost, nearly fossilized port ornaments, or family heirlooms
I feel the inexorable pull of Campaign26.
I absolutely loved Unturned Hovels small set of spells for Troika. See the First and the Second.
So, in my first Troika Tuesday post I will throw my spells into the ring - these were thought up several years ago and posted on the Melsonian Arts Council Discord channel, except for one.
You were cast out of a College (I sold the last Scroll of Tsepatus the Wise, I provided a Familiar pet to an adored noblewomen, I entered one of the old temples.)
This was a fun little creative exercise, mostly for myself. Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser are excellent stories; I had to riff. If you wish to truly see an Into the Odd hack of Sword & Sorcery stories, see Weird North by Classless Kobolds and for more backgrounds see d66 Starting Loadouts for Cairn, also by Classless Kobolds
