TROIKA! It’s just fun to write down. The caps and the exclaimation mark are part of the name, even. It’s a silly game of nonsense lands and people and animals. I think of it as a less-complicated version of Hypertellurians - you don’t have a crazy selection of powers, or stat damage across three stats. Instead, scatter a couple of points across Skill, Stamina, and Luck, and then pick or roll a background. Backgrounds are things like Befouler of Ponds or Questing Knight rather than “urchin”. They give you some belongings and some skills; like spells or the ability to fight, scry, or dive. Like a very light class.
So, I had a single session to fill, and I thought this would be a perfect pick. I’ll just run a lightweight pointcrawl across a city for a bit, what can go wrong?
That’s what.
Story
The PCs consisted of two Monkeymongers and a Cat-catcher. The GM gets to roll for the behaviour of the monkeys, which was very satisfying.
So, my plan:
- Start in a tavern, but a bit more Mos Eisley spaceport than Ye Olde Pubbe
- Immediately have a brawl
- Someone blame the PCs
- Chase through interesting locations
- See what happens
What actually happened, was that the PCs were in a bar deep in the City of the Thousand Lights, somewhere near the Round Quarter. The brawl started and they fought back to back against gremlins, with very little problem. Particularly as cat-catchers get to use their cats as missile weapons, and can grow claws. The gremlins that aren’t killed either surrender or melt back into the crowd. The very last one shouts out to blame the party before trying to run away.
However monkeymongers are excellent climbers, and one of the party climbs after the gremlin and wrestles with them on one of the beams across the ceiling of the pub. The gremlin falls and cartoonishly explodes, scattering blood everywhere.
Including over a human bride in her wedding dress.
The orc groom is incredibly angry about this and while others summon the guard he looks like he’s going to take matters into his own massive hands. The PCs then try to stop the fight by starting it. They are very downhearted when their best attacks do not put down the orc, and his first punch near-kills the cat-catcher.
Discretion is indeed the better part of valour and they run. To distract the groom, they throw a lit lantern of oil at him. The resultant fire engulfs the whole wedding party very rapidly.
The mandrill guards1 arrived as the PCs left, and the chase begins. Finally! They cross under the floating market, and enter a dingy building on the other side of the plaza. With little time to spare, they decide to lure the guards in, and kill them2. Monkeymongers are good at trapping simians, and have monkey-treats. One person stays to trap the guards, while the others flee down the corridor.
The trap is successful, but takes some time - as the first thing the mandrill guards do is have a smoke and talk about the trauma of seeing that dead wedding party. Meanwhile, the two fleeing run into a sentient patch of haze that has many interesting pamphlets about the new Space Pope and would dearly love to talk about them. However this patch of haze is not breatheable.
After trying to fight an orc, this is too much for the cat-catcher to bear, and they slowly choke out to the ground. And there we fade to black.
Tools
I ran for three players, remotely. The game took about 90m once the characters were generated.
I used Discord for audio, and everything else was theatre of the mind. I shared my browser window for initiative (see below) in case my players got confused, but they either got it instantly or just trusted me. We rolled actual dice.
The initiative question
Something that has always put me off Troika is the initiative system, which is “everyone put in tokens, then the GM draws them out one at a time per round until the “end of round” token is drawn. Players will get 0, 1, or 2 actions. Monsters get 1-4 tokens depending on the monster, but the GM can pick whichever monster moves when a token turns up. I don’t have any tokens, and I don’t really fancy buying some and then trying to keep all the players distinguished.
But then I learned David Schirduan made a website to do it for you. And it just works, it’s great. It’ll also generate characters for the players.
My tips:
- Tell players to disable the extra content before generating a character to save you wondering where they’ve found half their background from because they aren’t in the book (or be less stupid than me)
- Practice using the turn tracker as I kept pressing Start New Round at the wrong time
Lessons
- Some of the rules of Troika didn’t quite make sense until I played it. I kept forgetting in the run-up that advanced Skills are on your sheet but a normal Skill is just a character’s Skill stat.
- Crap enemies are really crap - I don’t think the gremlins hit once.
- Didn’t use Luck much. I probably should have reminded players they can use Luck for breaking ties in combat and to add extra damage. Mind you, the alternative is probably that they’d burn through it in 30m and kill everything, so I suspect this is the kind of mechanic I will always doubt myself with.