forget everything you know and play a game.

I feel swamped. I have so much to read, to play, to analyse, to steal from, to collate, to collect, to admire, to critique. 

Troika!OSEB/XWorldWithoutNumberGodboundScarletHeroesDungeonWorldStarsWithoutNumberElectricBastionlandHeartseekerMorkBorgMausritterIntoTheOddFKRStarFrontieersKnaveTypewriterFantasyMazeRatsGammaWorldWarlock!TekumelGLoGFightingFantasyLabyrinthLordOtherDustCallofCthuluCthuluDarkIronsworn5e4ee3.5eAD&DOD&DChainmailWhiteHackBlackHackMachiattoMonstersTunnelGoonsPbtAFatePathfinderPF2eIndexCardRPGTravellerRuneQuestAnyPlanetIsEarthWeirdNorthDungeonCrawlClassicsWarhammerFantasyRPGMesserspielShadowrunFiveTorchesDeepOffWhiteCubeWhiteBoxFantasySwords&WizardryLamentationsoftheFlamePrincessBestLeftBuriedMothershipNumaBasicFantasySpearsoftheDawnWolvesofGodPariahandandandandandandandandandetcetcetcetcetc

Let's be clear. The best games have been played with nothing but a crappy rulebook, half-understood principles, and some dice. A match was lit in the dark room of Pen & Paper Roleplaying and revealed majesties you still struggle to comprehend. 

All you love was borne from stumbling in the half dark - until, slowly, you began to understand a shape of things. And now you are bored, glutted with syrups and processed mulch. 

Forget all of it. The assumptions, loves, stories and hates. Throw it all away. 

Pick up a book, get some friends, a place, paper, pencils, some dice

and play.

I despise being unable to process

I live with what seems like a pretty mild (but nonetheless debilitating) form of anxiety and/or depression. I am on treatment, and very carefully control my sleep hygiene, try not to drink alcohol and not to eat extremely chemically flavoured foods, and try mindfulness/meditate every day.

It's been central to how I now view the world. I became quite aware of just how absolutely different my thoughts would be about exactly the same person or situation one day to the next, or minutes after meditation. I realised just how much it seemed to do - a jokey comment would grow malignant in my head, swallowing all thoughts, leading to (sometimes painful) tension in my breastbone. 

I am well aware when I do feel like that - once I would try to think myself out of it, but alas, that fed the fetid beast. No, the only ways it would retreat would be to target the...sympathetic (in medical terms), or emotional content of the situation. This for me is impossible without medication - I really tried sleep, food, exercise, meditation. 

Once I calmed the mind, and examined the emotional earth out of which my thoughts grow, was when I could process events. Instead of the maddening two-dimensional emotion-thought, I could layer it. See the other joke, why I should not care, why it was not this impossible situation, but a product of my own mind - created by it, fueled by supposed logic.

And I wonder how many live like that? Unaware of how much anger, pain, anxiety or happiness clouds simple thought, simple perspective. I'm sure many are aware of how anger can do that, but otherwise?

"Into the Bronze" from Lantern's Faun

Sumer and the Bronze Age - the aesthetic, are the shit. Bias outta the way, here goes.

click the cover to buy the game

This book is a a startlingly short hack of Into the Odd by Chris McDowell. I have actually not looked at ItO specifically much, but have come into a lot of contact with its hacks; namely Electric Bastionland, Silent Titans, Death is the New Pink, Maze Rats and Mausritter. For brevity, it's excellent.

Writing

Terse, to the point. Almost everything makes perfect sense on the first reading. If not, it is the Referee's prerogative to make a ruling. The only problem is that the book leaves us with very little of what constitutes a ruling - the empty space is nice because it allows each game to morph to the tables expectations, but considering the firm aesthetic (portrayed through tables), this can be seen as a pro or con. I, personally, see it as both.

Layout

Firmly, firmly Artpunk. It takes from public domain art and edits and formats it to create something absolutely a pleasure to look at. The author is a graphic designer and has made many other things here. An excellent use of Sumerian imagery, and the white space.

System

Like I said, an Into the Odd hack. Classically has the Str, Dex, Wil, with HP, and Obsidian as its currency - reference the two to get your background. Additionally, it makes has a fun if slightly confusing traits table (it has physical traits which include animals as items, as well as animals in background equipment lists - simple to rule at the table but a weird choice.)

Its lovely innovation is that all damage is d6 but the strength of the weapon is dependent on the roll it Explodes at, and deals double damage. Fun and swingy.

What is very odd (heh) is that for skills it uses a d20, for weapons d6, and on the "Dead or Dying" table the only other dice - a d8. For those who play Pen & Paper RPGs (which it plainly states it expects the reader to be familiar with), they should have these dice, but again, a strange choice.

Sorcery

Choose words, imagine an effect which uses all the words, and a price. Made for ruling by the Referee.  I would have liked a Sumerian translation for fun, and real-life reading of the spells. Hell! Even a simple language system! Consider that my first hack. (If you're aching for that check out the PbtA game The Bloody-Handed Name of Bronze, has a list of Sumerian-like syllables)

Referee & Adventure Creation

It works well as a framework to throw your, and your groups personality in. Doesn't say it explicitly, but encourages the Referee to make plenty of rulings.

In that same vein, I would encourage the person running the game to give the entire game a good read through. There are tidbits in the backgrounds, creature descriptions and adventure creation tables that hint at a strange world. Whether you interpret it as Cosmic Horror, Science Fantasy, Fantasy or anything else, what it does do well is beg for interpretation.

The tables, as setting, work well. But there are tables where I would have liked more content, which are oddly sparse considering their subject matter (Looking at you Secrets table)

Conclusions

I love Sumeria, I love the Bronze Age. This game is in my ballpark. It has beautiful graphic design and is nicely streamlined, and I will assuredly run it, even use it for a campaign. Only quibble is the pro/con that that due to its minimalism, it leaves a lot for the person running it to interpret or create. If only for the art, I would buy it.

TROIKA!

If expounding my love for the 6 stat system is lecturing in the community hall to a bunch of bored boomers, then explaining my love for Troika! would be me selling my worldly goods, taking out my savings, buying out the Royal Albert Hall to perform a grand one-man opera with accompanying New York Symphony orchestra to those willing to watch.

It has sparked my love to create, so, so much.

I like my characters like fireworks, they burn bright, hard, and may or may not pop into darkness and disappear, only for a new light to burst again. I inhabit every character with gusto, and lament their death. But am eager to make one anew.

This is Troika! A ridiculously simple system with the explicit instruction to make whatever for it and play whatever you want with it. Dungeon-Crawling? Sure! Cyberpunk? Sure! Parisian Opium Poets fighting Nazis? DO IT!

Creating a character is simple as rolling a couple dice, and making a background is a wonderful exercise in popping that multi-coloured pimple of creativity that pops up in your head once in a while.

Making a monster is literally jotting down a couple numbers, and writing a couple words for a Mien.

So.

Buy it, cradle it, give it to your Gran. Make whatever you want with it, and gods be damned those that think the implied setting is somehow "the one true way to play." Let them molder in their quickly decaying huts of primary colours and scream as you dash their self-etched Troikan commandants upon the earth.

Or don't buy it. Just have a glance at it, huff, smile, and let its visual scent, its personality and beautiful prose spark a memory or dream. Go to your set of game notes and write rules and ideas and scribble others out. Don't let this post tell you what to do.

I love Troika!

Old-School Roleplaying

I really like Pen-&-Paper Tabletop RPGs. A lot; it's almost debilitating.

I've been looking at a lot of systems. D&D of course, because most people enter from there. I started in 4e, with a Dwarf Artificer, and looked at 5e when it was published. I know Fate, I know the Powered by the Apocalypse games. I've looked at Pathfinder, played with Dungeon World. I've read plenty, but was always slightly dissatisfied. I was enamored with online discussions about how mechanics facilitate play, and was unknowingly pretty convinced by it. Playing around with game mechanisms is enormous fun, hence min-maxers. 

But recently I've become...burnt out. All these systems, these ideas, and nobody really wants to play. Most want to play 5e, and create mad characters in line with Critical Role - and for me, that isn't particularly fun. The characters are overpowered, advantage is nice but consistently feels like a huge boost, the monsters aren't very easy to run, and its attempts at balance make me shudder. I want something simpler that isn't so hard to hack without a legion of Grognards coming down on you. Mostly, I've looked at DW, and have familiarized myself with how the 6-stat system works.

In the past weeks I've been looking at Kevin Crawford's work; Scarlet Heroes, Stars without Number, Spears of the Dawn, Wolves of God etc*, Ben Milton's Knave**, B/X D&D, and the B/X reformat Old-School Essentials***. B/X is on the face of it a homebrew system with odd table-specific rules, which boils down to the 6 stats and their associated bonuses. Knave is so bare bones it can be hacked into anything, and all of Kevin Crawford's work is excellent and deliciously compatible with most B/X based Old School Roleplaying systems. Reading through Mr Crawford's AMA, and came across this question and answer...

And he is 100% correct.

People want to play games, and everybody knows the basic D&D model. Game mechanics be damned - I want to play a game with friends. And the point of the game is a having a great time with people. Not "dice pool" or "+2" or "Flat Footed AC". If you and your friend like 'em, go for it. Flex on those numbers and plan your PC to Level 20 bois.

Not my vibe.

Unless the mechanics make it literally impossible to do certain things (which D&D shies away from, being a combat simulator with a "higher number wins" approach to everything else) I really don't see a good reason to play anything else.

The 6 stat system with bonuses is perfect. Allows me to concentrate on what I want, a fun time with people playing in the make believe world I want.

* Check Kevin Crawford's other games: Sine Nomine Publishing
** Ben Milton's Knave
*** Old-School Essentials Basic Rules (the best starting point; rip it apart to see how it works)

On Distraction

It's almost a cliche to state that the state of technology is using the human condition aggressively against itself. Entire industries have popped up around the anxiety that technology seems to create in us; mindfulness, exercise, drugs, self help, community etcetera. All available from the convenient little black mirror in your hand.

I realised, oh, about a year ago, that I had been choking myself on the sweet syrup of the internet. I stopped, at first, with facebook. Then deleted twitter. I still clung onto one "social network"; reddit. I thought it couldn't be too bad, I was learning so much from it. And I was. 

Every day. 

All Day. 

Most hours of my day. 

And still I persisted. 

I tried starving myself. And yet I still grabbed whatever content I could from other websites. I had an entire list of relevant, slightly clickbait-y news websites I followed - io9, the verge, vice, kotaku, to name a few. I would spend hours in class combing through their newest "stories". I would go back to reddit because it had even more.

I realised that the only thing that was actually making me be addicted to all of these things is the very medium they're attached to: The Internet. Our greatest invention of our entire history - putting thousands of bits of information at our fingertips, and thousands of specialised interests and communities seconds away. A glorious invention that allowed us to simultaneously talk to everybody and change minds around the world. To find whatever we wanted, and see it in any light we wanted to, because on the internet, you are sure to have somebody agree with you. It allowed us to bring such information so quickly to people. We could spread a lie to millions and trick people to believing that they have full control of their own thoughts, of their desires, that they are impossible to fool. It allowed the greatest predators on the planet, our very organizations, to finally become people. Entities with millions of dollars and enough computerpower to bend the instincts of billions to their own goals.

We're living in the arse-end of history where corporations who supply us with so many goods figured out that they can use technology to leverage the sub-conscious of man to their own ends. We're slaves to our own desires, and those desires can be carefully curated on the dopamine highway of the web.

The internet has allowed us to believe that the words on a screen are actual people and that communities are active when they are, instead, manufactured.

Facebook gives you friendship without that which makes it worthwhile - actual people. Twitter gives you the arena of soundbites and arguments without acknowledging that a name can be both a person and not - making you effectively vie against the idea of a person, instead of the tone, growl and blat of a real one. Reddit makes you think that it's constant stream of facts are somehow improving you, by simulating an agora. Meanwhile you're fed the intellectual equivalent of corn syrup - through a mouthtube. Your brain cannot process the vast information it's confronted with.

For us to appreciate anything anymore, we need to learn that the internet is ours. 

We are the workers in a factory we're convinced is actually a spa, our instincts hardly our own.