First Impressions - Acid Death Fantasy (Troika!)

  

Acid Death Fantasy - a supplement for Troika!

TL;DR: I found Acid Death Fantasy gaming juice. Easy to read, with plenty of plot hooks which started my GM brain fizzing. I dug out my copy of Troika! and quickly re-read it; I definitely prefer this setting to the default one, but you could quite easily overlap the two as space travel in the Golden Barges is a thing. The setting has echoes of Dune, the Dying Earth and probably Dark Sun (although I've never read that). You could lift the material here into most game systems but why would you bother going beyond Troika! as that's so light. For me, this book is a win, big on inspiration. Admittedly, I'd have preferred some more development of the 'What to do next' section, perhaps with some basic adventures but I'm more than happy with what I have here. 

I picked up Acid Death Fantasy, a supplement for the Troika! RPG on impulse. I loved the cover and the vibe and was tempted by another review by Ramanan Sivaranjan which I stumbled on in his blog in my RSS Feeds. 

The book is strongly illustrated and is a forty-five page hardcover. Like Troika! the setting is predominantly provided through the text in the character backgrounds. There are two pages of setting, but this is just an introduction to the greatest city in the desert and the Thousand Sultanates, ruled by the Many-Crowned Monarch from her tower in Shurupak. 

There is a d66 set of backgrounds, all providing snippets of background and hooks for an adventure like the characters which I've posted. These excited me much more than the backgrounds in the Troika core book. Character generation takes five minutes at most, although you could do it in less if you didn't write it all out. Characters have skill, stamina and luck as core characteristics and then a set of unique possessions and advanced skills to set them apart. It's a shame that the backgrounds aren't all illustrated but the ones that have been drawn look fantastic. 

The next part is a d66 set of enemies, including the devious Freshwater Grubs, the young of the Great Worms, Azure Apes and even AI Hover Tanks. Their descriptions provide further inspiration and plot-hooks to draw upon. As well as the basic statistics, each has a mien table, which allows you to determine what they're actually up to. 

The book winds up with a random set of tables to generate Sultanates, and then a half-page on what to do next. There is a colourful and evocative map of the Monarch's domain (unscaled).

So what do I think about this? 

I found this gaming juice. Easy to read, with plenty of plot hooks which started my GM brain fizzing. I dug out my copy of Troika! and quickly re-read it; I definitely prefer this setting to the default one, but you could quite easily overlap the two as space travel in the Golden Barges is a thing. The setting has echoes of Dune, the Dying Earth and probably Dark Sun (although I've never read that). You could lift the material here into most game systems but why would you bother going beyond Troika! as that's so light. For me, this book is a win, big on inspiration. Admittedly, I'd have preferred some more development of the 'What to do next' section, perhaps with some basic adventures but I'm happy with what I have here.

My thoughts on Troika! itself are here.

4th October 2020