Monday, July 13, 2020

Ongoing Troika! backrounds

So as you may very well know, I love Troika!

The initial idea was to take my dime-a-dozen/snowflake setting and just use Troika! as a rule base, and add all those juicy ideas I had for the setting from the beginning. Most of the descriptions I had were pretty neat, and perfect for Backgrounds.

I took the original document, copied it, and started editing, and editing...

...and editing.

It started with the Shajzean Elves. I always had a vague idea that they were encrusted with Salt, and it all whirled out of control from there. I'll update this as I make more. It's enormous fun.

Anyway, here you go!

11 Arrixian Merchant 


Excellent Arrix! Heavenly Arrix! Who can compare the lofty guildhouses and murmuring Jenever Bars of the Old Stadt, the perfumed gardens of the Reaches and tenements of the Moulin Quarter!


You are a socialite, a haggler and merchant of this grande floating metropolis! Armed with the word of Council, Gold of the Battle Spheres and an excellent sense of style you swindle your partners and friends, and sail Air Barge to new markets.


Possessions 

1d6 Battle Gold

Gaudy Pantaloons

A Rapier (As Sword)

A license to trade

3 dubious rumours


Skills

2 Swindle

2 Etiquette

2 Evaluate

2 Run

1 Rapier Fighting

1 Air Barge Piloting

1 Spell - Assassin’s Dagger

1 Spell - Amity


Special

The Guildhouses are notorious Rumour-Markets; you yourself take ample compensation of your knowledge of the world.

Once per session you can claim knowledge because of a rumour you bought.


12 Academie Wizard


Those pompous Magi know nothing. Nothing! Your thaumic geometries are flawless, phlogiston dating confirmed by Ray Imp! The calculations triple-checked! How dare they claim it was “derivative” and “chromatically unsound”! 


You’ll show them! You’ll show them all!


Possessions 

1d6 Unfinished Papers

Sword-Cane (As Sword)

Ruby Lorgnettes

Tweed waistcoat (Imbued with 1 Spell - Ward)

A battered grad student (Named...Starts with an S?)


Skills

3 Lecturing

2 Evaluate

2 Mathmology

-2 Etiquette 

2 Spell

2 Spell

1 Spell - Ward (in Waistcoat)

1 Spell - Random

1 Spell - Random


13 Vanara 


You are the contemplative curious, a percipient pragmatist who will always strive to know more. A simian philosopher, weavers of wise words and the caretaker of an estranged wood, seeking to unravel its mystifying machinations. With wisdom as your guide and your weapons your wits, you wander the wooded wastes of Kuru’Jisu following its intangible twists. But, despite all you have learnt, you are aware that enlightenment is infinite and are still ignorant.


Possessions 

A Ribbon-Scroll, stitched with your philosophy (As Whip - |1/1|2/1|3/2|4/4|5/6|6/8|7+/12| )

1d6 Glass-Sap Fruits (as Provisions)

A reason to leave

A prehensile tail


Skills

3 Acrobatics 

3 Climb

2 Awareness 

1 Ribbon Fighting

1 Glass Weaving

1 Second Sight

1 Spell - Thought Vapour

1 Spell - Helping Hands

1 Spell - Sentry


Special

Once per session you may attack a creature within sight with Mind Spike (As Longsword, ignores Armour)


14 Dwaemor Monk


Atop a peak you stand and practice the routines  Llamas and Masters. The icy wind catches your hands and stings your toes but you know the Stillness, the Placidity of Heroes. The eternal doldrum and ever-dripping water of the will. You steel yourself and strike out into the cold, the forge of your heart and body burning bright, melting, subliming the creeping fingers of frost. 


Possessions 

Magnificent Beard, braided in the style of your Order

Bright Gi (as Modest Armour)

1d6 Dwaemor Bread (As Provisions. As Club. Test Luck to consume)


Skills

4 Fist Fighting

3 Acrobatics

2 Awareness

1 Evaluate

1 Inexorable Will


15 Aethalfsfar


Sometimes, when the light catches the desiccated peaks you remember the Shine spires, Uberbaum Gardens and Golden Barges glittering across the heavens. The iridescent Aetheric Rays your people fed into the fabric of creation. 


Now?


This ancient world only remembers you as a half-rumour. Your mundane - their divine. 

Your eyes search the horizon for just one of those baroque vessels…


Possessions

1d6 Plasmic Cores

Crystalic Phaser (as Fusil)

Ruby Lorgnettes

A dear memory of before

1d6 lumps of dream sludge (as provisions)

Aetheric coverings (as modest armour)


Skills

2 Language - Auld Sprache

2 Secret Signs - Aethalfsfar

2 Second Sight

1 Phaser Fighting

1 Remembering

1 Spell - Random

1 Spell - Random

1 Spell - Random

1 Spell - Random

1 Spell - Random


16 Siquian Aristocrat


Long ago Siqui nobles decided to uproot their estates, grow them into walking complexes which now traverse the landscape, scraping at the sky. 


Once, you peered down your ivory nose at the salted flats, scoffed into your ElmWood Liquor, gossiped about court, the latest fashions. 


If it wasn’t for that innocent, simple dalliance.

 

Possessions 

A flask of Elm Wood Liquer 

An unfashionable Peruke

Aster Bough Court Makeup

A set of fine (and worn) clothes

Your tale of Court repudiation


Skills

4 Etiquette 

3 Gossip

2 Scoffing

1 Botany

1 Makeup

1 Second Sight

1 Spell - Babble


21 Salt-Bound


Your people made a deal with the Salinic Demons of the Unterzee for a good life on land, 


Indebted, they became a voracious, violent extension of their master’s hydrophilic appetites.


Possessions 

A voice of your clan Demon

Magnificently Coloured Body Salts (as Modest Armour)

Coral Blade (as Sword)

Shell Shield


Skills

2 Sword Fighting

2 Strength

2 Tracking

1 Language - Unter Salt

1 Cooking

1 Spell - Affix

2 Spell - Leech


22 Air-Pirate Spelunker


Even as you sail into the Bay of Haut, or beside the Cliffs of Baraja, you see signs of ancient civilisation built into the dusty geography. An intrepid spelunker can find bizarre weapons beyond imagining, a smart Core prospector will walk between buildings crusted with sun-bleached coral and filled with gold and art. 


Treasure is here, but so are the other people who want it.


Possessions

A Weapon of your choice

1d6 Plasmic Cores

A map of a local ruin

1d6 gems that change colour in sunlight



Skills

3 Air Barge Piloting

2 Spelunking

2 Evaluate

2 Weapon Fighting

1 Climb

1 Run

1 Sneak

1 Second Sight

1 Secret Signs - Antiquaric


23 Imperial Antiquarian


The Empire fell, but you weren’t there. You came back dusty and proud after your last dig, to find barbarians and weeping widows.


Possessions 

A professional grudge (Please name)

Crossbow with 1d6 Bolts

Your latest find

Prospecting Equipment (A Hammer, Chisel, Shovel and various sizes of brush) 


Skills

3 Digging

2 Evaluate

2 Awareness

2 Secret Signs - Antiquaric

1 Second Sight

1 Sleight of Hand

1 Tunnel Fighting


24 Kthonic Spy


An industrial wasteland - for miles around you see smoking chimney stacks, metal, brick and grime. Below the Masters languish and scheme in gothic elegance.


Above the world builds and creates the weapons for the vicious overlords below. A factory above a palatial honeycomb.


Possessions 

Velare

1d6 Poisons

2d6 deadman’s thumbtacks

Obsidian Blade

A mission to fulfil


Skills

2 Gothic Elegance

2 Poison

2 Disguise

1 Etiquette

1 Sneak

1 Spell - Callous Strike

1 Spell - Invisibility


25 Traveller from Dreq


The photonic libraries  of the Madrassa speak of a journey, of a landing in strange land. Of struggle and sacrifice and rending change


You have been taught the ways the stars move, how glass bends and refracts, what aether  is and how to channel it. In the cool crystal houses under the gong of the desert sun, you were lectured in Kwariz and the notions beyond space, beyond time, beyond the physical.


Armed with eyes that may see beyond, you have left those multihued ruins  - nothing is beyond your ken. 


Possessions 

White Madrassa Robes

3 Dreqi Serum Naartjies (Eaten - As Provisions. Dried, Burnt and Inhaled - As  Spell - True Seeing)

Dreqi Lenses (as Ruby Lorgnette) OR Pythagorean Equipment (+1 Mathmology) OR A Hyperscope (as Star Map of Corda) 

2 stolen Photonic manuscripts (Name the subject for each)


Skills

3 Mathmology

2 Astrology

2 Second Sight

1 Secret Signs - Aethalfsfar

1 Spell - Read Entrails

1 Spell - Astral Reach

1 Spell - Find


26 Paladin of the Sower


Your people have tended the Vale for generations. Raised cattle and goats, farming rye and sorghum. 


So the Sower decreed; your tongue will sow his will in this fecund creation and your scythe will reap the unthinking corruptions.


Possessions 

Sower Scythe (As Longsword)

1d6 Packets of Seeds (As Provisions)

Leather Vestments (Modest Armour)

A childhood toy


Skills

3 Reaping/Scythe Fighting

2 Preaching

1 Healing

2 Spell - Life Line

2 Spell - Exorcism


31 Bureaucrat of the Ministry of Magic Allotments

No society like yours can function without careful checks and balances of every single magical transaction. To send off via the imp tubes triplicate signed form  and ensure that Mrs. Wetton gets her daily cantrip stipend for the month audited.

Possessions
A hefty accounting book (as club)
A ridiculous hat of your post. It is 5 metres per side. Reality will bend itself to accommodate (a 3 m ceiling will grow another 5 m)
A magnificent flowing bureaucrats robe (sleeves as Imp tube network within bureaucratic areas)
1d6 tube imps, saucer eyed and ink stained (4/2/4). One has an important message.
A set of thaumic pens and papers

Skills
4 Bureaucracy
3 Etiquette
3 Mathmology
2 Spell - Assassin's Dagger
1 Secret Signs - Arcane Loopholes
1 Spell - Babble
3 Spell - Zed
2 Spell - Presence
1 Spell - Languages
1 Spell - Befuddle
1 Spell - Random
1 Spell - Random

32 Graffiti Golem

The streets of Troika are awash with ambient magic, and when the poor mudskipper gave you life in his own idiosyncratic style, you coalesced. The streets
have so much to see, and you have made friends with hobos and urchins, alley-wizards and trashrakers.

Possessions
2d6 types of paint (Can be sprayed on an enemy for a ratio specific amount of stamina, can be replaced in a day)
The item you live on (usually flat enough for you to exist)
1d6 wall doodles, living as yourself
Hardened Chewing Gum (As Moderate Armour)

Skills
3 Secret Signs - Hobo
3 Secret Signs - Graffiti
2 Keeping still
1 Spell - Sentry
1 Spell - Illusion

Special - Spray

You are made of various paints. You can spray this on enemies to render them blind, or as a poison (a little obvious, cheap paint tastes foul.) The amount of paints you rolled is the amount of paints you were painted in, and every time you use a paint, you decrease your Initial Stamina in a proportional fashion eg. You are made of 5 different paints, Stamina 20, when you use one paint, your stamina permanently decreases by 4. This lasts until you take a full day to have it repainted by an enterprising painter. 

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