Daniel Sell

State of Siege

If I was put on the spot and asked what is the one that that would make me do more and better, it would be 3 days a week every week spent just reading full time. Not spare time reading, full-on 8 hour days with a notepad. If I only have one talent it is using every bit of the animal and making it last all winter.

Bits O' Troika (working title) is a self imposed siege. I will maintain the blockade until the populace have started to eat their boots. 500-600 entries that must be interestin...

Guilty August

Skill: 11

Stamina: 8

Initiative: 3

Armour: 2

Damage as Polearm

Mien:

1.      Wild-eyed and intensely friendly

2.      Chatty and easily insulted.

3.      Thousand-yard stare

4.      Giddy and teary eyed

5.      Controlled and efficient

6.      All business

Kilitomb

Kilitomb

Skill 9

Stamina 24

Initiative 3

Armour 3

Damage as Polearm

Mien:

1.      Deep in thought

2.      Prepared for you

3.      Baiting an ambush

4.      Wondering when you would turn up<...

2024-05-14 15:14:08 +0000 UTC View Post

Malbolg

Skill 8
Stamina 14
Initiative 2
Armour 1
Damage as Spear or Modest Beast
Mien:

1.      Surveying

2.      Prodding

3.      Searching

4.      Standing deathly still

5.      Gulping down something unspeakable

6.  ...

Peculiarities intermedian-mortem

This list has been kicking around for years now, in various forms. It started as a simple mutation list to create some granular variety in Troika characters, and then spiralled into a fractal infinity that could never be finished.

In my project to create Troika 2 I'm ensconcing or burying every unfinished idea. Everything that didn't make the cut on the first edition will be addressed and judged. Peculiarities will be in the book, probably much like it is now (see attached PDF) but edi...

Hex Crawl Procedure

This is the current hex crawling procedure we're using in the office campaign. It's missing the detailed encounter charts, but they're specific to the game you're running anyway so they shouldn't be too missed. I'd love to hear about it if anyone uses them in an actual game, playtesting is red hot on this one, anything goes.

Anyway, here's how to hex crawl in a Troika wilderness:



# Movement
Pay Stamina equal to ...

What Everything is Worth

As I said last time, work on Troika 2 is proceeding. One of the things on the list is an equipment and price list, which is what you will find attached here.

Doing this list has sent me halfway to madness, everything I see now is translated through the lens of how many hours a labourer would have to work to get it. I'd be very interested to hear if anyone finds anything egregiously out of whack in the pricing, or is there is some big chunk of consumer life that I missed. I'll expand th...

Electric Boogaloo

First thing first, I put up a member only room on the Discord for you folks: https://discord.com/channels/474663403470716928/1227754074833944576

It's a place for me to dump smaller bits of what's going on, and for you to make yourself heard if you're into that kinda thing.

Secondly, this is not exactly news since it's never not been a thing, but we're making much mor...

Organistle

[I've spent the last month doing Kickstarter stuff. This guy has been looking at me funny so long, so I dedicated the weekend to figuring him out. I'll have more time for writing in the period between kickstarter ending and post beginning, so there should be a fair few more soon. More than the others, this is rough but it's got all the points down I wanted in there. I'll catch it in the edit. Once we have a couple more of these I'll collect them in a nice PDF for convenience.]

2024-03-03 20:26:20 +0000 UTC View Post

Bit O' Troika progress

I've been speaking about this for an age. It was meant to be finished in September, but I got stuck doing more fulfilment than I had hoped for. The parts of the map that are crossed out in pencil are finished, which means every building and its primary occupants are described in some way or other. I'll share some of the better ones once I type them up, which will be soon.

INTERESTING FACT: I always draw my own maps for books, and the maps come first. Slate & Chalcedony was a doodle ...

Who are they and what do they want?

This was meant to be a cute little table to stretch my fingers but it tumbled out of control. Use it to add a few wrinkles to Troikan NPCs.

 
Start with a name and a job here: https://perchance.org/4tpvv57r56

## Table 1 - Below the surface   
1-2. Very boring, exactly as they appear  
3-4. Has a hobby (see table 2)  
5. Obviously odd  (see table 3)...

Adventure design?

Yea I dunno. I make the adventures I want to play/run so they usually end up being exactly what I wanted and therefore perfect inside a narrow band i.e. me. If something is written with sincerity and joy it will find its audience and hit them hard. If something is written with arbitrary best practices and a target audience that doesn't include you it'll probably be boring or bad. 

That being said, here's what I like:

1. Mysterious things to touch and figure out the...

Saint Bernadino and Cultists

Also added the image to the main post below.

Grigori

One day I'll make a monster that isn't to do with the Saints of Troika, but not today. Enjoy this raw and wriggling first draft.

# Grigori
Skill 6
Stamina 12
Initiative 2
Armour 1 (thick hair)

Damage as Unarmed or Knife

Mien:
1. Staring accusingly
2. Moving with purpose
3. Swaying
4. Shouting at someone
5. Being driven away<...

Saint Bernadino

BEHOLD! Another enemy. Again, image incoming, which I will update as it happens. Here's my awesome map though:

# Saint Bernadino
Skill 11
Stamina 22
Initiative 4
Armour 2 (amorphous head)

Damage as Barrelling Saint or Head Flail

Mien:
1. Dribbling
2. Mumbling
3. Counting
4. Snoring
5. Compressing
6. Oozing

Above the old dock...

Spider Bankers of the Bureau of Universal Exchange

I'll put in a picture when I have one. We're working on these a bit at a time. The Spider Bankers have been in Troika since the beginning and I've always meant to get around to using them more. They appeared in Wengle Instrumentality, and they're in the upcoming Streets Of Troika book, but they deserve a proper entry I think. 

When picturing them I always imagine the presence of the triceratops foreman in that old puppet sitcom "Dinosaurs" or the baboon from Ren & Stimpy. Just ...

Dead Letter

Skill 5
Stamina 5
Initiative 2
Armour 0
Damage as Letter Opener or Small Beast

Mien:  
1. Collapsed in a puddle
2. Heckling post carriers
3. Vandalising post
4. Asking others to read their faded address
5. Menacing with a letter opener
6. Laying in ambush for someone to pick them up

In an effort to surmount the challenge of delivering twice daily post to every door in Troika, Master of Post Salvatore Flavius ...

Slate & Chalcedony digital

Hello hello wonderful people, it is me. I have sent copies of the book out via automatic methods but I don't trust them so I'm also putting it here to be safe. 

The book is done, tied up and at the printers, and I'm very happy with how it turned out. By the sounds of it players are enjoying it as well, which is the absolute best possible result (short of a $800k kickstarter and some kind of big gold trophy). Thanks for your continued support and patience, it is an often ...

Sutler's Opening TImes

Hello. It is time for me to overshare, you can forgive me this indulgence since I have been strong and constant in my flight from social media.

Melsonia is an oddity. It is a stubborn company in a poor industry, and at this point I think it has survived longer than most RPG publishers that have ever existed. Survived is the word though, you don't get super far by doing what you want to do. But! We have two whole payrolled employees now, and an office, and we have meetings. Bi...

Slate & Chalcedony

This book has finally entered editing. The cover above isn't final, still wanna play with the text a bit, plus there's still lorem ipsum on it. The text is atttached in pre-edit markup for those brave enough.

I've had the map and the rough shape of the adventure for an ungodly amount of time and it took the bossing of Andrew Walter to get me to finish it properly. I was initially worried about my first proper Troika book being a Svankmajer-esque body horror nightmare, and how...

New Troika PDF

Just thought you fine fellows might like to see the new Troika before it's ready to go out into the wild. Got to get a Backerkit up and running before the public can see it.

Strict Time Records

Against all expectations I don't run a loosy goosy game. Sessions start at home and end there as well, days pass, training happens, odd jobs are performed and then BACK to the dungeon on Friday. The Troikan week is only 6 days long so it has a nice syncopation with our boring yahweh-ey 7. Is syncopation the right word? Either way, they drift past each other like predictable planets.

We all live at the Blancmange & Thistle, and can't go outside because it is RAINING (and I haven't bu...

Megadungeons

It's been a long time since I ran a game. I've run games for something like 20 years and they still fill me with dread and a sense that I am a terrible hack. Writing games and selling then to thousands of people, no problem. Running a game for 6 people, existential doubt. It's how it is.

I've been convinced to run games again and my plan is to run the kind of game I'd want to play in. As a player I really don't care for storyline games at all, give me a playground or a mystery or leave ...

Work in progress folder moved

Just a quick FYI. Google Drive is a nightmare so I moved the shared folder to my Dropbox instead, which you can find at the above link. Sutlers' has been updated further and is now up to date with my hand written version. Time to pull away again!

We just need some more tourists, quiet day events, and to decide wether to expand out the Heaving Wall of Flesh day. My inclination is 'yes more'. We'll see if I can figure out something worthwhile to say about too many people.

Also this ...

I've Been Holding Back

It's true! I'm always nervous to let something out of my clutches before I'm done with it, ask my editors. I'm ripping that bandage off right now 'cos I'm looking at my work in progress folder and there are 5 almost complete books that are entirely readable. I've linked here today the one most close to being printed: Get It At Sutler's. I won't contextualise it too much, I don't want to pin it down yet, but it's essentially a book dedicated to a single downtime activity, namely working a part...

Wengle Instrumentality

Sometimes I come through. This is a booklet about a magic item and where it comes from. Eminently usable and highly disruptive.

Mikes

If I was a New Wave adventure I would be very concerned with form. Over the time I've been noodling with this city idea I've gone back and forth between extremes of control and conceit but in the end we're settling down on an intuitive understanding of how cities are. It's just an A-Z, everyone knows how that works. It's hard to let go of the fear of not explaining how things work "this is a book, read the words one after another in order" but I think we're better the more we take our hands o...

Original Idea Do Not Steal

Coming soon to no theatres and probably not any book shops either.

It's Books All The Way Down

Where have you been? Work, it turns out, is fractal unless one is disciplined and focused. Jobs spiral off into unlimited detail and are happy to consume you. Did you read that thing by the biologist, the one who said you could spend your whole life studying the life in one garden and not even get close to reaching the bottom of it? Just like that. A lot of time has been spent learning how to maintain a business that appeared out of nowhere, on things I never thought I'd be doing. Have you se...

This is what I look at every day

I don't know if this is interesting to anyone else, but I enjoy knowing how people work. It's a dirty habit, entirely intended to make me feel better for any shortcomings. Like how mean I am about seeing Wheel of Time books in "shelfies".

The shelves here are populated by whatever books are being used regularly for a project. Some are for deliberate, slow reference. Others are used exclusively for oracles. A lot of my work is driven by oracles and repeatable systems of quasi-reference....