Last year, I checked out Troika: Numinous Edition and ran a couple of one-shots (well, three-shots) for groups from both of the gaming Discords I socialize on. I wrote up an entire post about it, only to… entirely forget to publish it.
So anyway, here it is, many months late.
I have a confession to make: when I was a kid, I definitely read some of the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, but… I cheated. I treated them like Choose Your Own Adventure novels, in part because I couldn’t be bothered to carry dice and a pencil around, but also because I didn’t feel like I got much out of solo gaming with a book. That said, I still enjoyed the books: they were widely available in their Puffin printings, with the green spine, during the 80s in Canada. I can’t say the same for the Advanced Fighting Fantasy tabletop RPG, which I gather was popular in the UK; I didn’t even know about its existence until a few years ago, thanks to a discussion on the Fear of a Black Dragon podcast.
So when I first encountered Troika, it wasn’t through a lens of nostalgia. I can’t really speak to how the rules diverge from the game books or the RPG, though I can speak to how they read and play for someone with a lot of experience in old-school games, and especially as someone with a passion for the rules-lite end of old-school flavored games. I’ve been an enthusiastic gamemaster of Electric Bastionland, for example, and an eager adopter of Into the Odd-like games such as Mausritter.
Troika is both like and unlike that. It’s like that in that the rules are brief and mostly simple. They don’t fit on a 2-page spread, but they also don’t require that many pages to be fully explained… well, kind of. They’re written in a retro fashion, though, with numbering for each rule, and occasionally I found myself confused by a term or rule, only to find it was explained a few pages later than I’d first encountered it. I’m not sure if part of the issue is that I’m unfamiliar with the original system on which this one is based, though: one reason I can grok Mark of the Odd-type games is because I grew up playing the system on which they’re fundamentally based. Would greater familiarity with Advanced Fighting Fantasy make Troika a little easier to grasp from the outset? Maybe.
The good news is that, after playing it with my group, I found that it was worth the effort. Even the part of the system least easily adaptable to online play—the crazy initiative system—worked ridiculously well for us in play. I’ve always been a fan of rolling initiative anew each round when a game drops into combat or other high-stakes action, because it keeps things unpredictable and forces players to be flexible. However, the token system kicks that up to a whole new level, forcing players to cope with the fact that every exchange in a combat might result in them dealing—or receiving—damage, and also driving home that combat need not be turn-based: sometimes, you don’t even get a turn. (This, I think, drives home that one ought to avoid combat whenever possible, but also gives it a compelling edge when it does happen.)
Beyond that, there are simple dice mechanics, and while the rules for spellcasting can be quite punishing—one character almost killed himself by repeatedly trying to cast a spell and failing, bleeding off his Stamina uselessly—the magic is as weird as the worldbuilding. Character generation is, like in Electric Bastionland, an absolute riot with random generation resulting in characters of a bewildering variety. (As their starter characters, my group generated a Gremlin Catcher, a Sorcerer from the Society of Friends, and a sentient bag of vermin. And that last one isn’t even the weirdest option available.)
Once again I’m going to make a comparison to Electric Bastionland: the implies setting here is pretty open-ended, albeit with elements strongly implied by the character options. These build a fragmentary and kaleidoscopic picture of a science-fantasy setting rife with weirdness: witch hunters and giants stand on display alongside golden space barges and lawyers and dining club members. The monster section, spells, and sample adventure in the book, “The Blancmange & Thistle,” all reinforce this peculiar mishmash of strange elements, and somehow the result is… coherent incoherence? I’m a fan of that, so don’t take that as a criticism: more and more, I prefer games to imply worldbuilding in other sections of the game like this, not just as we find in Electric Bastionland but also in Blades in the Dark, where a lot of elements are mentioned by name but left to the GM to fill out in detail as needed and/or desired.
I also like how the sample adventure is very blunt about the work of the GM: there’s one point where the adventure text warns the reader that they will have to improvise and they won’t have all the information and they will have to make something up. This is great! I think more introductory adventures should model this: how GMs can’t plan for every eventuality, how players are prone to throwing adventures off-track with wild, crazy decisions nobody could have anticipated; how sometimes you need to just manufacture more setting, more NPCs, more whatever. It’s also quite fun that the opening adventure is really just a big houseparty at a kind of hostel, through which characters are trying to wade in order to get to their room(s).
For me, running Troika was a reminder of how reading a rulebook isn’t necessarily sufficient to judging how well the game suits you or your group. Obviously, sometimes it’s possible to know when a game is not going to work for you, but sometimes, when you encounter something just a little different from what you’ve experienced before, it’s easy for the differences to be inflated in your mind to the point where you feel a little intimidated about internalizing the rules. The key is to be straight with your group about this, to find yourself a handy cheatsheet (or make one), and give the game a try. You might be surprised how you feel after a few sessions! I know with Troika, I definitely am.