Friday, April 2, 2021

A Troika! Detour - Broken Luck Zine WIP #1

> BTW there's been progress on the Troika! zine development, check here <

So I'm taking a short detour from The Lost Bay development.

I've been asking myself a lot of questions lately. Questions that can end into an unsolvable loop, like: D20 or D6? 3 stats or 1 stat? PC backgrounds or tables? I feel that I need to answer those before continuing to write the TLB zine.


As I decided to get to know better Troika!, for that research purpose, the Troika!Fest Game Jam 2021 was announced. So I took that opportunity to dive into the Troika! SRD, knowing that the limited time at my disposal would prevent me from getting stuck at the bottom of an unclimbable too big of a project. 


I am reworking some tables first drafted for TLB and designing a small supplement for the Game Jam. The theme is Tarots, not as playing helper tools, but as in-game magical objects. The supplement revolves around an unlucky character, The Roaming Fortune Seller, that can be alternatively a PC background or an NPC (yes, I like the unlucky ones)


There should be 7-8 tables, which is not too much, but enough to be challenging as I am trying:

  • to design all the tables in a consistent way
  • to imply some sort of micro setting
  • to avoid redundancy.


I guess this is my first closed project, as opposed to the open ongoing development of the GM Tools, which is more a work in progress prefiguration of The Lost Bay.


It has been super helpful to read again Crapland by HypatiasAngst, a Troika! super crazy setting, super inventive, super effective in delivering the fictional world. And the same can be said of A man on the road by Ian Yusem, a two-page supplement that delivers a kind of game agnostic great wicked NPC, that I've been studying with attention. 




The zine/supplement/whatever will be adorned by several illustrations made by Perplexingruins. And by the way, most of the super evocative drawings I'll use come from the Patreon benefits one gets when supporting him.


So without spoiling the zine, here is the Background description, and a drawing (check the crazy mesh work!). The Jam ends in 27 days, and I'll try to share the zine in a couple of weeks max.


ROAMING FORTUNE SELLER BACKGROUND


You used to chitchat and drink cocktails with the Gods. You told them their fortune with frightening precision. One day you became overconfident and pissed off an Immortal. They banished you from their palace and cursed your Tarot Deck: it’s broken, useless and soiled by weird magic. Now you wander restlessly and can barely predict what you will have for breakfast tomorrow.




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