#trophy gold

[juddgeeksout]

Carcosa when the leaves fall

I was talking to my friends in the Thursday night gaming group about changing it up from September to November and playing a horror RPG. I have noticed that when the air turns cool and leaves begin change color we get a hankering for something spooky. Keeping in mind that in our previous fantasy RPG session there was a ghost that left blood on a character’s hand when she tried to touch it to…

Carcosa when the leaves fall

[the-ampersand]

Since I am still chewing on the DIE Stapling post, I am going to do another about effort mechanics in ttrpgs because I am trying to write that Blasphemous inspired Trophy Gold hack (placeholder name: Penance). And one of the coolest mechanics for Trophy is its Risk Roll, which is basically an effort mechanic.

"But, Ampersand, what is an effort mechanic?" I hear you ask, dear mutual I am making up in my head. An effort mechanic allows you to reroll an action you have already attempted but failed or to get a bonus to a roll at the expense of some resource. Usually, that resource being the character's health. But it can also be something else like clues in an investigative game or even a narrative consequence (but that's usually called a Devil's Bargain).

The important part is that it gives a benefit but requires a sacrifice. And that's when the whole fanfare of psychoeconomics start. Because you need the sacrifice to be big enough to give the player pause and not use it every roll. And also you need the benefit to be significant enough to make it worth the risk and the expense. If properly adjusted, an effort mechanic can become a slow but sure spiral into the characters downfall.

Let's look at some examples!

Numenera is the first system I learn that had such a mechanic (but certainly was not the first ever). It is pretty straightforward in its implementation, too. You spend a fixed amount of the appropriate life pool and you get to reduce the difficulty of a task. Easy enough. But Numenera, being a tradgame as it is, the power creep upends any weight of the sacrifice. Once you level up enough, your pools become deep enough as to make effort something to just add to whichever skill roll you thought it needed a bit more oomph. This is not something wrong per se, but it can easily make your characters overly competent!

On the other hand, there's Dungeon Crawl Classics. DCC is a peculiar OSR game in that it is a really spiced up retroclone, wriggling DnD B/X ruleset to a point where it is almost unrecognizable. I am sure there are plenty effort mechanics peppered in the text, but I want to point out its magic system because I absolutely adore it. To be a wizard in DCC requires active dedication. That is because almost every spell has a writeup of about an A4's length, filled with the various effects a spell may have once the dice is rolled. And the effect can be wildly different from a roll of 5-10 to a roll of as high as 30 or more. There are many ways in which you can tweak your narrative positioning to get bonuses to a spell roll (components, helpers, magic foci, whatever), but when the die is cast and the result is just not good enough you still have a last chance: to sacrifice your own atribute values to get one last push that might be the difference between a proper spell and a fiasco. This is the main cause of withering of elder wizards: they have sacrificed too much in order to achieve the power they sought.

And then, there's Trophy. Both Trophy Dark and Trophy Gold have excellent effort mechanics baked directly into their ADN thanks to the masterful procedure that is the Risk Roll. These are games in which you are tempted first and consumed later by an evil forest. You have a really small ruin pool and once it is filled, you are lost to injury or its dark influence. You are also a destitute adventurer that needs to get any gold or face almost certain death. So you need to get shit done, you need to amass enough successes as to bring bread home and you need to survive the process (or try to, at least). And that's when the Risk Roll comes and lures your with the most satisfying effort mechanic I've ever seen. You can always make a reroll, adding an extra die to your pool to boot. But if those extra dice, dark dice, ever become the highest ones, you automatically mark ruin. You get your success, yes. But you become closer to losing yourself. It exactly hits the spot between actually worth it and inescapably dooming the character.

Obviously not all games need to be about losing oneself to fate or circumstance, but I feel an effort mechanic very much pushes the narrative in that direction. You are sacrificing yourself, in order to achieve your goals.

And I think that's a quite powerful narrative device.

[guildmageashleah]

Just picked up this book and I’m immediately impressed that more than half of the page count is adventures and their equivalent of a mega-dungeon.

Very excited to dive in

[ostrichmonkey-games]

Hissing Darkness is a dark science fiction incursion for Trophy Gold, and guess what? It’s now live! 

It made runner up in the recent Gauntlet run Trophy Gold Incursion Contest, and not to toot my own horn too much, but it’s pretty awesome. 

Here's some nice things said about Hissing Darkness;

"I can't overstate how beautifully rendered this dark, science fiction setting is. The set pieces, the descriptions, the monsters, the environments—it all feels like an HR Giger painting come to life. It's vast and consuming and alien; it worms its way into you as you read it."

- Jason Cordova, Trophy publisher

But what’s it about? And what is Trophy Gold?

Trophy Gold is a rule-light (but tight rules) dark fantasy roleplaying game about horrible things happening to hubris filled treasure hunters. I decided, while that is pretty great on its own, what if it all happened aboard a supermassive spaceship engulfed by a malevolent darkness. You play a desperate Survivor trying to reach the Engine of the Ship before what little lights are left go out forever, and you are consumed by the absolute, perfect darkness. 

It also features an amazing illustration by Madeleine Ember (you can see the whole picture on my twitter).

Check it out and get ready to die horribly in space. 

[nosamyrag]

[juddgeeksout]

Perspective Shift: From Lore Dump to Lore Confetti

“I’ve got all of this lore for this world I’ve created and I’m not sure how to share it.” Let’s talk about covering the entire setting with this lore. Think of it like how when you throw confetti you find it all over the place – that is lore. When there are arts and crafts with glitter (confetti’s shiny cousin) and you can’t touch anything in that room without getting glitter on you after that.…

Perspective Shift: From Lore Dump to Lore Confetti

[snakeswithttrpgs]

Trophy Gold, Bees and Betrayal

The longer you play, the worse it gets

Dark Fantasy

Character Generator with interesting results

You can influence the world AND create problems for other players

You'll probably die, so *not* dying feels pretty amazing

Since I've only played this game once with <5 brain cells this is more like recalling a fever dream instead of an overview.

Dice checks were pretty simple, 1d6 if there's nothing helpful and 2d6 if you can convince your GM that you're competent somehow

At times you get additional dice, the price being new problems introduced by your beloved fellow players

If your amount of ruin gets too high, you die. If shit hits the fan, you die. If you don't bring home enough gold, you're doomed too. I've never seen such unhappy adventurers.

Thanks to the character generator, our group was made up of a widowed blacksmith (the normal one), a half-dog person with an additional dog (there's a chance that the player was secretly the small dog), and a cook with a goat (for emotional support)

My characters gathered wisdom:

Bees are evil

Bees trying to murder you to steal your identity are even more evil

If you spend 20 minutes discussing how to get the treasure without triggering the traps, just do something instead of walking away to look for tools, because if you do, you'll get attacked. By bees.

If a person changes their appearance to match yours, don't try to rip their mustache off to see if it's as fake as your own, because you'll rip a hole in their face, find out that the whole body is made out of wax operated by hundreds of bees, and then you'll get attacked. By bees.

If an apparently nice woman tries to tell you that she only murdered her parents because they were evil, don't trust her

If she stops you from saving someone to question him, claiming that he's evil too and therefore has to die, don't trust her (more so if your GM sounds way too happy about it)

If you hear weird voices from dark caves claiming that bees are evil, don't follow that voice, because it could always be a flesh-eating plant trying to eat you. But it's also telling the truth, as it turns out.

If the weird lady gives you drugs to see in the dark and tells you that the bees have a weakness against them, she's lying (and you'll find out in the worst way possible, right before dying)

Splitting the party can save your ass - can't die if you're locked out of the boss fight

The true treasure was the trauma we got along the way (and the knowledge that bees are going to rule the world)

I hate bees

[upsidedownsmore]

A little pencil sketch of my Trophy Gold character Gourn, a fanatical woodcutter who takes pleasure in freeing souls from particularly twisted trees