troika tuesday: troika is always right
To understand this post you will first need to read up on 'dnd is always right'.
My encapsulation of this is that rather than assume that wonky bits of a game don't work, imagine a world where they do -- the result is original and fun.
Part of why this works is that when reading ODND we can sense -- but not see -- the long tail of storied play and experimentation behind it. ODND is a piece of gaming ephemera.
troika is this generation's ODND
I was 15 or 16 when I read troika for the first time1. It blew a fucking hole in my brain, into which wierdness has been flowing ever since.
Over the last decade I gradually learned more about what went into the making of that book. More pertinently, I learned what didn't go in. The vast volume of Daniel Sell's setting and rules that didn't make it into the core book. I was obsessing over Troika long before I understood that different editions of DnD even existed.
That's why it felt so familiar when I discovered the OSR tradition of interpreting and extrapolating from ODND. They both are artefacts of the long tail, a tail that is missing, that the text invites you to reconstruct for yourself.
This is also why I feel like the critique of this game as too 'random' is down to a lack of curiosity. Finding something that defies initial understanding and instinctually casting it aside, when the instinct should actually fascination, to play with it, to roll it around in your hands until you have its every facet planted firmly in your mind. We should be assuming that Troika is Always Right, and that anything that feels 'random' was placed with an intent and justification that we are not privy to.
writing for troika
The infinite-multiverse concept of the Crystal Spheres is tantalizing, but I think writing new spheres is better avoided. There's enough wonderful, lovingly crafted, community made Spheres out there to populate an actual multiverse, and most of them have fuck all to do with Troika.
A lot of the things I have made for Troika are an effort to build on the setting and rules scaffold it provides. It's a book full of questions, and it's crying out for you to answer them. Why are there owls everywhere? Who are the Autarchs? Why is there so much stuff from Urth in this book? What happens when you cast Zed? Who are demons, what do they want, where is the Demon Sea? (demons are not described at any point in the core book). Were Mandrills the native inhabitants of Troika?
By trying to answer these questions, there is a 0% chance that we'll accurately recreate Sell's troika. But there is a 1000% chance that whatever we make will be straight JUICE, my man
my plea
is twofold. First, can everyone please start freaking out about Troika a little more. We aren't giving it its damn flowers. This game is a fucking monument.
Second, if you're gonna write some Troika stuff: start by cracking open the core book, reading until you hit something that bemuses you (it won't take long), and then endeavouring to make it make sense. The result will make you richer.
Sorry if that makes you feel old.↩