Talislanta… TROIKA Edition!

I’ve been working on this on and off since last summer, so almost a year.

The idea to convert Talislanta archetypes to Troika! came from a comment a friend made about the descriptions in Elves or No!¹ who noted that some of them read a bit like Troika! backgrounds.² The more I thought about it, the more Tal seemed like a good match for the weirdness of Troika! When I began working on the conversion itself, Troika! turned out to be a better fit for Tal than I anticipated. Not only did the freeform skill system let me add skills as needed, in general the Troika! spells fit without any need for modification.

The conversion itself was finished quickly, but towards the end of the process I went through and drastically reduced the average number of skill points. Even still, in my experience with Troika! I thought that it was better to have more initial skills, so as to provide a clearer path for progression. Since I’ve encountered some issues with how the rules as written handle advancement, I considered including the homebrew rule I used, but ultimately decided against it.³

Most of the background descriptions were derived from existing Tal books, but I had a lot of fun writing my own as well. Many of those became my favorite archetypes, especially the Aramut, Saurud, and Zagir.

What’s missing? Well, besides the fact that you need a copy of Troika! to run it, I intended to add a section with monsters, but scrapped it when I realized how big the project had become. In working on the animal companions I also found that I was not super confident in designing Troika! monsters.

I enjoyed making the art for this one. Most of the character art was reused from EoN, but with added backgrounds and color. Honestly that took the majority of the time.

As for whether or not I’ll ever run this… hard to say. Maybe if I ever run for a group that really loves Troika!

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Footnotes

1. Which I realized shortly after publishing should have just been called “No Elves!”

2. A part of me still wants to rewrite it with an explicitly Troika-ey feel…

3. The main difference was that you add a tick to a skill on a failure, but I didn’t run the game long enough to see if I liked that better.

Talislanta Troika! Conversion is an independent production by Kaya Kurdak and is not affiliated with the Melsonian Arts Council. Like Talislanta, this conversion and the associated drawings are released under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 international license.

Stand Proud

So awhile ago I was running a game inspired by Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. We tried a few systems but the one that functioned best for us was this one that was cobbled together in like 15 minutes. It works alright.

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At last… Advanced POCKET

I’m not great at editing myself. I started making this game in December 2019 with the goal of creating something that approached the depth of games like D&D or Pathfinder, but which needed fewer decisions to create a character and allowed for more creative play. While I don’t know how well I succeeded, I certainly managed to capture the bloat that both of those games are often said to have. I like classes, but choosing between over fifty is paralyzing. While my earlier drafts had their own issues, they were also more polished, and I found that each subsequent update I made increased the number of classes and their variants. In the end, I abandoned it and started from scratch, and from that came POCKET.

At the same time, I now find myself looking fondly upon my original version. In particular, I like that it provided a basic sandbox in which I could explore all manner of mechanics and optional rules. The core of the game was consistently enjoyable, and required little iteration. I certainly intend to continue running it as my primary game, despite its clunkiness. At the very least, there may also be value in showing it as an example of the process of game development – the various experiments that went into the final polished game. For that reason I now present the progenitor of POCKET in its unabridged form. Much of it has been playtested, and much of it has not.

While the original manuscript was a single document, for readability I’ve organized it into three parts:

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Advanced Pocket contains the full rules for combat and character creation, the Arcane, Divine, and Primal spell lists, as well as a set of optional rules and advice for GMs. The following classes and subclasses are detailed:

Smashy: Barbarian (Berserker), Fighter (Swordmage), Monk, Paladin, Warden (Totem Warrior), Warlord

Versatile: Bard (Skald), Ranger, Rogue (Thief)

Magical: Cleric, Druid, Sorcerer, Theurge, Wizard

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Guns, Wyrms, and Steel adds rules for crafting and enchanting magic items, brewing poisons, firearms, and gridless play. The following classes and class variants have been added:

Smashy: Samurai

Versatile: Artificer, Assassin, Commoner, Dragon Warrior (Metallic Dragon Warrior), Gunslinger

Monk: Drunken Master, Elemental Monk, The Masters of the Five Schools

Rogue: Battledancer, Swashbuckler

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Finally, Flim Flam! provides four new types of magic, including Psionic and Occult, a (somewhat janky) domain system, and the following classes and variants:

Smashy: Battlemind, Blackguard

Versatile: Vampire (Vampire Lord), Warlock

Magical: Archivist, Illusionist, Necromancer, Psion

Monk: Master of the Forbidden School, Taiji Shadowboxer

Rogue: Beguiler, Investigator, Jester

Theurge: Haruspex, Mystic, Witch

I eventually intend to put out a version with a clickable table of contents, as well as a bestiary for the game, but for the time being, note that it is relatively compatible with the monsters from POCKET.

As with POCKET, this game owes an immense debt to Here’s Some Fuckin’ D&D by Dustin R, for its origin was in an expansion of that game’s rules.

POCKET

A couple of years ago someone mentioned that with D&D (specifically fourth edition), we always ended up spending too much time making characters when we were really only planning on playing a session or two. It was an off-hand comment, but it always stuck with me. I began to wonder how many of the decisions made during character creation were really necessary to the experience of the game? While there are many rules-light games that I love, I wanted something that would emulate the degree of mechanical differentiation we see between characters in D&D and games like it, and so for two years I worked on my own game, which despite some issues, I’ve ended up pretty happy with.

However, over time that game strayed from those initial goals. Instead of a game with quick character creation for one off play, it became a customizable game with an array of character options and optional rules. While I had noticed this feature creep for some time, it was only later that I began to reexamine some of the core assumptions to the game that I had otherwise ignored.

To remedy the bloat, I decided to place some limitations on myself in reworking the game. Although I generally prefer to roll for damage, I felt that only a d20 should be needed to play. Instead of a grid, a position and interception system would be used. And perhaps most key, I decided only one magic list should be used by all casters; admittedly, I did bend this rule later by adding in separate psion, assassin, and artificer classes, but I felt these allowed me to differentiate monsters to a greater degree. Finally, I knew it was important to have a set of monsters in the booklet, particularly for spur of the moment play.

While this ultimately became the business card game, I present it here in an unabridged, pocket-book form.

As POCKET was essentially built on its chassis, this game owes an immense debt to Here’s Some Fuckin’ D&D by Dustin R.

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Additionally, here is a letter-sized version with an expanded bestiary:

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POCKET – A Business Card Roleplaying Game

This is a game I made with the intent of fitting as much variety as I could into a small space, so that I can always have a reasonably interesting game ready to run on the fly. The mechanics are derived from a set of games that I’ve been working on for the last two or so years.

The name “Pocket” was suggested by a pink and ponytail-loving friend, as a title for my earlier game. I ultimately decided it should be a backronym for “Play Off the Cuff – Keep Engaging Tactics,” which broadly summed up my goals for the game.

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This is a sheet if you want to print your own. Just print double sided, long edge, and cut to business card size to make two copies. You can also print it on business card paper. Because of the small print, you should turn up the printer’s dpi settings if possible.

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A Royal Game of Ur

This was my entry to the 2021 One Page Dungeon Contest, reposted here in higher quality and with a typo fixed.

I made this in one day. The encounters largely came from a mix of Mesopotamian mythologies, but several of them derived from the iconography described in the paper “On the Rules for the Royal Game of Ur,” by Irving Finkel. A decision I made early on was to make the series of encounters more or less unordered, akin to the semi-random feeling of playing the actual game. I felt strongly that the player’s actions would ultimately create a story, and so as much as possible, I tried to design the dungeon without a clear idea of how its components should be resolved. Different players’ inclinations toward each encounter should lead to vastly different outcomes.

I had no idea what to name it, so I went with the one that was most on the nose. In hindsight, I probably should have gone with something else – “Game of Twenty Squares,” or something like that. I also wish I had spent more time on giving each demiplane a distinctive atmosphere. As it is they’re a mix of blank rooms with single encounters in them and large environments that’d each probably be worthy of an adventure. The whole “houses” and “gates” concept is somewhat confusing, and while I felt that from the outset, I never came up with anything I liked better.

I enjoyed making this, but I never really intended to ever run it. Honestly, I’d be surprised if anyone ever does. Play the real-world Royal Game of Ur instead. A couple years ago I made a board, inspired by this video with Irving Finkel and Tom Scott. If I get a scan of it I’ll put it here, but for now, check out these printouts from the British Museum and the University of Michigan’s Kelsey Museum. As Finkel says in the video “it lasted for 3000 years, and for that reason, one imagines it must have been a good game, and it is a good game!”

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Elves or No!

A couple of months ago I went through a phase where I was reading a bunch of hacks for the amazing Lasers & Feelings (made by John Harper, who lead the design on Talislanta 4e); games like Mechas & Monsters, Friendship & Fukus, and Tactical Waifu. At the time I was struggling with writing my own Talislanta adaptation that was going nowhere, so Elves or No! was a nice break from that.

I only got into Talislanta last year, so I don’t actually have any history with the old Dragon Magazine ads and the “No Elves” tagline, but it’s such a classic piece of RPG culture that I couldn’t resist using it. I also just liked the idea of a roleplaying game where the sole metric is “how similar is your character to an Elf?”

The first page took me two days to put together, with the only original idea being to split up the Laser Feelings bonus based on whether a character leans more towards “Elves” or “No!” Personally, I sort of see it as the only one that’s strictly necessary to play, particularly for a group that already knows Tal.

The idea to include a separate list detailing the races/archetypes came from Ray Otus’s Sorcerers & Sellswords, which describes its classes and their capabilities in purely descriptive terms. If I were redoing the game, I’d probably write them to be even more open-ended, like in Troika!.

I’ve been trying to draw more, so I figured it might be fun to draw the various peoples of Talislanta. It’s the art for the character types in the 2e Handbook that initially got me hooked on the setting, and I was already trying to pay homage to the layout of that book.

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