Trophy Gold: The Book (Sans Megadungeon)

 

I already considered the zine version of Trophy Gold and Dark to be the tightest designed games in my library. Nothing felt out of place; Jesse Ross had codified a vision. Reading the zine version impacted me and my designs in a powerful but subtle way.

The book only increases my respect.

What do I think of it so far? I say so far, because I haven't tried the megadungeon, although I'm curious. The wording of the rules has been vastly improved, making the core loop the clearest storygame mechanic I've ever read or used at the table. But the book goes further, adding town and journey rules. They're not super involved, but add context to the characters and the world. You may not want to use them, sure, and the core gameplay would not suffer for it. But there's a lot added by these mechanics.

The gist of Trophy Gold is thus: when the GM tolds you to roll, gather as many d6s as you can (usually between 2-4) , and look at what the highest die is: 6 and you get what you want, 4 and 5 you get what you want with trouble, 1-3 you don't get what you want and it all goes wrong. There's three different kinds of rolls that interface with this base concept: Hunt, Combat, and Risk (the catch-all for doing something risky, including casting spells), and they all have different effects based off of what you're trying to do. You may take a Devil's Bargain (a bad thing that happens no matter what) for an additional die... and these are meant to be group activities; you're supposed to goad each other into greater and greater heights of stupidity. The amount of laughter this one mechanic has generated at my table is hard to overstate, folks.As dark as this game gets, as horrifying as it frequently is, it is hilarious. I've not laughed so hard at a game in years.

The Hunt roll is one of the smoothest  systems I've ever run into, provided your players know that to ask a question is to roll dice. The GM then tells them if they get an extra die to throw in or not, usually basd off a skill or some story advantage.  Everything, and I do mean everything, funnels through the Hunt roll. The GM need do nothing except go off of the results of that one roll. If you are an OSR player you know this as someone taking a turn and the GM making a roll for a random encounter. In Trophy Gold it's just the one roll. It's elegant. The Hunt roll will kick back tons of wrinkles, all the time, and will keep everything moving on a constant basis, either because the player knows where to go or because something will interrupt them. The players are just rolling dice and you're jumping in to tell them what dice to roll and how many, and everyone's throwing in ideas of how badly it can go and the GM is just sitting in the back, laughing, taking notes. It's fantastic. The Hunt roll is the type of mechanic that every single game should aspire to imitate in spirit, if not outright.

The Combat roll is fantastic because of the ecosystem that it's hooked into more than the actual roll itself. Which isn't to say the roll isn't bad!  Combat is dangerous, with lots of chances to get hurt, especially if your teammates chicken out; the more people that drop out of a combat due to wounds the worse it is for everyone else. When you do the kill the monsters you can get Gold off them in the form of body parts that can be sold, as well as examine the creature for creatures, name it, and enter it into the shared journal bestiary the group is supposed to maintain. As time goes on combat will turn from "WHAT THE HELL IS THAT THING" to "Oh yeah, take its knees out!" It's a fun little advancement technique that cuts out one of the most problematic parts of RPGs, numbers. Whenever a game finds ways to do advancement that qualitatively change the experience, rather than just up numbers, you should pay attention: it's a sign someone has a clear vision of their piece.

The Risk Roll is the most "normal" part of this game, with the least implications on it. And that's fine; not everything can be this huge groundbreak innovation in a game, you've gotta have something to just do the hard work. The Risk Roll does this.. .although its expansion into spells is extremely cool. Spells are just a name with a short description, and you and the GM figure out if it applies best to the situation or not. Given the consequences for casting a spell can be extremely nasty.. be wary if the GM just keeps saying "yes". The balancing factor of spells in this game are that you may succeed and not like what you get. And that is going to be a lot more common than you think.

There are Journey and Town mechanics in the book version of Trophy Gold. They're not meant to be anything more than a small narrative beat between dungeons, something to contextualize why your (possibly not so) lovable losers are out doing what they're doing. It's simple, to the point, and poignant stuff. These are a great upgrade from the zine.

My favorite addition, however, is the versus and helping rules. The original zine didn't have anything for those situtations, and if there was ever a game I have run into where you will want to help or hinder your fellow players Trophy proper is that game. You could kinda hack something in, but Ross has clearly done a lot more testing and thinking on the subject and has crafted rules that are hilariously awful to deal with, cementing the mood of dark humor and despair that is a Trophy game.

I've run a few of the sample dungeons in the book and have found myself really impressed by what happens with these barebones outlines when you throw the Hunt roll at them. If there's anything that I resent about these sample dungeons, it's that you technically don't need them; you could just draw up a general structure and use the Hunt rolls to figure out the rest. Hell, probably could grab a bunch of OSR tables and throw them at the GM to answer questions. If anything, the game and how it's written at this point obfuscates the reality of what a GM would actually need to prep for the game and why. 

Ultimately, Trophy Gold in book form is an absolutely fantastic time. I've not heard people laugh this hard in a very long time at just some of the absolute worst situations one can orchestrate. The mechanics are simple but extremely deep when people decide to play with them. The book is a marvellous and dark beauty. The guidance could be clearer, sure, but that's usually a problem in most RPG systems. This is an amazing time. It's worth figuring out.

Revisiting Trophy Gold

 

So I was really happy with Trophy Gold after the first campaign. I had run what I imagined to be the perfect OSR game: lots of puzzles, scary monsters, and so much blood. I. Was. Happy.

I think Will may still be sitting in a corner, gibbering in incoherent ramblings of triggerdom.

When I asked my players what was wrong (because the rest of them were in shock as well) it was explained to me that they had no idea that was coming. These were storygamers: characters needed to matter, a narrative needed to be forming in the fiction, and so on. Kinda hard to form an acceptable narrative when everyone's dying left and right! I reveled in my blood and told them that Trophy Gold was not for them.

Alas, I am not a complete asshole. 

Cause I wanted to play again. And I knew that in order to do that I would need players. And those players were not going to try the game again. I mean, I could find another group, but I wanted to see if maybe I'd missed something. A negative reaction that strong means I may have done something wrong, regardless of how much I enjoyed it. So I had to ask the question, if only to satisfy my at-times crippling self-doubt.

And before someone says it, yes there are objective markers on whether or not you're running a game as was intended. Whether or not you enjoy how you're doing things is, as always, a subjective thing. I am making no claim as to whether or not "YOU'RE BAD' for sticking with the intent of a design or not. I am claiming that I find that objective reality important to my enjoyment, however. The sanity of that importance may be argued. But I have what I have. And so I decided to look it up. Turns out that The Gauntlet folks have released a number of podcasts on the subject. I've listened to almost all of them.

Dear God I did it all wrong.

First off, Trophy Gold is not an OSR game in the sense that many of those games are. Lethality is supposed to be rare. The game does not entirely hinge upon gold gotten, although the more gold you get the faster your character advances and heals. Trophy Gold is an OSR game because of the narrative built outside the game, as OSR games are mostly the story of the players braving the dungeon, with characters as avatars. There are explicitly two stories being told in Trophy Gold: the story of the characters making their way through this awful awful place they found, and the players trying to screw each other in the darkest and (sometimes) most hilarious ways they can imagine. Two thirds of the rolls have you polling the group, asking either "what could go wrong" or "what do you want to go wrong". 

Yes, there is a difference. 

Almost every time a roll comes up you're polling the group for bad stuff. This has the effect of letting the players be a lot more okay with bad stuff happening, as it's their ideas being selected from, almost all the time. Even if your bad idea isn't selected by the GM or another player, be patient; you can learn your group and sharpen your bad idea pitches. There's a level of collaborativeness that I've not really seen since Tenra Bansho Zero... in a system with half the crunch. Which means all you're focusing on is this delicious back and forth. It's a multiple-way game of chicken as everyone goads each other into a game of mutually assured destruction.

It's amazing.

And I never would have done it if my players didn't have the guts to tell me "No, we didn't like that." Turns out that listening and re-examining pays off! Who knew?

A Chat with Jesse Ross

Not going to lie, still seems surreal this just happened a few days ago. Thanks Jesse! That was amazing!

Choosing an OSR Base (Whitehack, Basic Fantasy, Trophy Gold)

So I was asked by a friend what I thought of Basic Fantasy. I knew nothing about it. Instead of telling him I'd never looked at it I thought I'd take it upon myself to look into the game and see what it was all about. Keep in mind that I'm a mostly "narrative" gamer, who rarely dabbles in the OSR, although Trophy Gold has definitely turned me on to the concept. Eventually it's my goal to have an OSR group to run things with. So I was curious to see what Basic Fantasy was about. And how it would hold up to the other two OSR games I own: Whitehack and Trophy Gold.

But before we get into it I need to get something clear with you, the person who's reading. A lot of systems in the OSR are deliberately interchangeable. The OSR is largely built off of BDnD, which means that the movement often resembles Model T's: you can just swap out parts and tech with very little difficulty. Even systems that aren't similar at all, like Trophy Gold and Basic Fantasy, aren't that hard to hack into each other, especially since the systems are so simple that it hardly even takes a statistic class to know what is going on where in the system.

So the goal of this little versus post isn't to say which game is better. Honestly there are elements of all three games that I would use in an OSR campaign; that is a feature, not a bug. The question is what chasis would I use? And that's a very subjective question. Your answer will not be mine. That is part of the point of the OSR. So this post will cover what I look for in a game, just in general, and why I would pick an OSR game.

So, for me, the OSR is the other half of the RPG coin from "narrative" games. When I play a "narrative" game I want characters who can survive long enough to tell a good story about them. I give a crap about theme, about the meaning of the story. I deliberately put in recurring symbols and ideas and spend a lot of my time thinking about how on earth to make something that is purposefully edifying to me, the player(s), and anyone who reads any of the blog posts (assuming I write about it). That's my goal with a "narrative" game. I want something that becomes a form of mythology for everyone at the table. I do it on purpose. I also want to strip the player characters of what they think the are, until there is an answer, way down at the core of them. So, while my campaigns can be really brutal and dark, there is a purpose beyond just making the players suffer: what's down there, way down, at the core of someone? What's their primary choice?

When I get an OSR game? I flip that around. I don't want to hold hands and prevent deaths. I don't want to sit around and ask questions about the deeper meaning of things. It's not that it's not there; I've read too much about story structure and mythology and I care way too much about it for it to not show up. But honestly? The real world is a bloodbath. And sometimes it's nice to sit down and make sure the other asshole can't get dinner reservations anymore. So I want something simple, but flexible, and definitely something that allows people to make characters again quickly, because the dungeon just chewed up the last three people and we need another sad sack to go in and feed the need. Life ain't fair, buddy, get back in the meat grinder!

I do not pretend that there are not other ways to do the OSR.

That's the point.

Nor do I think that meaningful stories cannot be constructed using those mechanics. I know they can. But sometimes a hammer is really good for bashing in a head, as opposed to making a house. And the OSR makes really, really, really awesome hammers.

So how does that square up with Whitehack, Basic Fantasy, and Trophy Gold?

Well, let's take a look.

Whitehack is a modern riff off of BDnD. I say modern because there's only one resolution mechanic (d20 roll under the character's stat), character classes are more or less balanced, and the emphasis is upon streamlining down to the bare essentials, something that older games seem to know very little about. That being said, the character classes are pretty robust for the OSR, allowing for players to really sink in their teeth and care, no matter how much they don't want to. A lot of the game is deliberately collaborative, giving the players the ability to define  the setting almost as much as the GM, right there on the fly. And I love that! You can get a passive-aggressive war of canon between the players. I like that feel. It's a good antagonistic back and forth. And c'mon, The Auction (which is a conflict resolution mechanic that is meant to be used for everything but a fight to the death) is just an amazing mechanic. I love how quick, dirty, and decisive it is. I'd like to put in some room for compromises and whatnot, but as a base system it's far superior to only having combat. I'm surprised the innovations in Whitehack haven't spread further, considering how easy and simple they are to implement.

Basic Fantasy is a modern facelift of Basic Dungeons and Dragons. No, really, the rules are almost entirely lifted off that venerable ruleset. That is not always to its advantage. Multiple resolutions mechanics that don't really mesh with each other are a pain to explain to new players. The multiple saving throws of the system also don't really make much sense to me, given how the differing throws are used for things not explicitly covered by the monikers of said throws. I find that annoying. I know some don't. But it was enough to make me not use Beyond the Wall as much as I should, so that should tell you how much I hate multiple resolution mechanics!

That being said, Basic Fantasy has a really wholesome feel to it. This sucker is cheap as hell and bound nicely. My wife normally doesn't remark upon the quality of my RPG books but she definitely took a minute to admire it, especially for its five buck price. But there's mechanical stuff in here that I like too! There's ascending AC, instead of THACO, which is nice to not have to figure out. I prefer Whitehack's system for AC but this works as well. And the bestiary is just wonderful. So many publishers sorta skimp on the bestiary, thinking about making it its own book. And that's fine. But this bestiary? Man, I love it a lot.

Trophy Gold is the weirdest of the three games. It's not a d20 system. I know that plenty of OSR games these days are not OSR, but the archetype certainly is that of a d20 game, at least for now. Hell, it's not even a "full" game, as it's still in zine form, with rules spread between two zines, Gold and Hearthfire (which is still behind the Patreon paywall), not to mention all the incursions they've made in other issues. I greatly prefer the base dice system. I don't think most d20 games take advantage of the mercurial nature of the d20 nearly enough, which 13th Age turned me onto. Trophy Gold, borrowing from such amazing games such as Blades in the Dark and Cthulhu Dark, has something I enjoy a lot more than "standard" d20.

For those of you who don't know, the system in question is a d6 dice pool, probably 1-3 dice are being thrown (3 is you being stupidly lucky). After rolling look at the highest die of that pool:

1-3 is a horrible failure. Things twist out of your control and something bad happens.
4-5 you get what you want, but something bad happens too.
6 is an unqualified success

It should not take a rocket scientist to figure out how a typical session of Trophy Gold is going to look. If you roll those dice you are done. Done. And that means you do not want to roll, at all, ever. Which I think is half the point of doing the OSR in the first place. And the thing is that I want to keep that experience, always. There's a power ramp to many OSR games, bafflingly enough. I think some OSR games handle it better than others, but I don't think most handle it as well as Trophy Gold, because of how freaking evil that dice mechanic is.

That alone is enough to sell me. And that's before we get into the awesome Bestiary mechanic, which allows you to make up monsters on the fly. The monsters are then entered into their own log, unique to the group, which passes down the group, getting added to. It becomes an artifact of the group. Which I think is just so freaking cool! The Hearthfire rules, which further flesh out the loop of dungeon to home and back, create a mood that I just cannot ignore. It's a very melancholic sorta game, where people fail a lot more than they succeed. Which just makes success that much sweeter.

Well, in theory, assuming you don't sell off your friend to a lich so you can get out of the dungeon alive. Cough.

Cough.

Trophy Gold wins, for me. It's innovative, with a fantastic set of base mechanics that keep the core experience of exploration and player skill at the forefront, and you can have wildly different bestiaries coming out of each campaign? Not to mention those Hearthfire rules? I'm sold. This, for the record, is not a dunk on Whitehack or Basic Fantasy. Both are extremely good for what they do. But I find a bit of my "storygame" roots breaking through here. I like the way that Trophy Gold in particular is set up. I'll happily hack a little bit more if it means having a mechanical experience that appeals to the tastes that I already have.

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Slither: Session 5

Last time on Slither: After Kiva and Desarim fought with goblins on a rope bridge and Pella selflessly sacrificed her body to save the others. They went to an armory where they found Aram, an elf rather traumatized from his imprisonment by the goblins. They found a doorway to a room full of chanting goblins. When Desarim opened the door to explore more, he was promptly shot in the face and died instantly.

Kiva and Aram in shock from what they just experienced, try to regroup their thoughts, they hear a cage rattling in the opposite corner of the chamber and go to investigate. Approaching the cage, they find another human who simply just stated that his name is Toram and that he had been imprisoned there for as a long as Aram had been.

 The moment Toram finishes talking, the goblins rush the door. The new companions run out back across the bridge to the collapsed Trodgor chamber. Here, they see a glimmer of precious metal, Kiva convinces Aram and Toram to search the chamber, saying “we need gold from this place or we can’t leave”. They agree so they take a few moments to further explore the ruins of the room, until each person found at least one piece of treasure.

Afterwards proceed down a side hallway, having to cross near the remains of the trogdor in the process. The sight of this giant fallen corpse causes Aram and Toram to shudder in the fear but they press on anyway. The hallway turns into a wider chamber. Pausing for a moment, the group can hear some mysterious scraping sounds somewhere in the unseen depths.

Moving hastily, they explore further down the passageway, looking for a way safely back to the surface all while avoiding the source of the ominous sounds. The further they walk down the corridor, Kiva senses once again, the evil presence that has periodically revealed itself throughout this entire journey, only this time, the presence seems SO overpowering and strong, that every one of her companions senses it too. IN FACT, there seems to be a door at one end of the chamber from which this presence radiates. Shuddering they decide to go any direction but nearer to that Thing, whatever it was. The only other option was through a doorway opening to a set of stairs leading downward. Although not exactly the direction they wanted to head, the party begins descending the staircase.

  Halfway down the stairs, they hear growling.  Aram turns around for a moment but then decides that he’s more afraid of the malevolent presence than he is of the growling. He regrets this the instant he sees the source of the noise. A group of hungry looking goblins are crawling up the stairs towards them. However, these are no ordinary goblins. These creatures appear only half formed; their shape not yet fully coalesced. Thinking quickly, they use their makeshift weapons to shove the creatures quickly off the open side of the staircase avoiding a full-on fight. Toram takes a bite to the leg but otherwise, the party remains surprisingly alive and unscathed.

They get to the bottom of the stairs and realize to their dismay that it appears to be the spawning pit, filled with many more of the strange half formed goblins, only these are more rapidly taking form. Aram attempts to mislead the creatures with a spell of mirage, but due to an accidental misfire, the spell backfires leaving him uncertain if what he sees is reality or a hallucination. Racing past the goblins as fast as they can, they run through a doorway and shut it hastily between them and misshapen goblins spawning behind them. This room is quite different from the previous room, as the floor is covered with dank vegetation and water trickles through. After surveying the room, Aram decides to try to pull all the moisture out of the bricks, hoping this would indicate the source of the water and thus a way out of the dungeon. However, his spell is only successful in that it creates enough of a ruckus that all the goblins in the adjoining room are instantly alerted to their location. They burst through the once sealed door, now fully formed and ready for a meal. As Kiva and Toram draw weapons preparing for a last desperate stand, Aram gets a flash of insight and once again uses his spell to drain the water from the bodies of the goblins, instantly turning their enemies to dust.

A slow clap ensues, as all of a sudden, the malevolent presence makes himself known, finally revealing his physical form to the party. A Lich appears, what may have been a man once, long ago in a former life, now only a wizened old corpse, with the tail of a monstrous snake where his legs should have once been. Introducing himself as Xiximanter, he begins his diatribe “I have been down here centuries, conducting my research… what a pleasure to finally meet you after all the disturbances you have caused. However, I am a patient soul. I would be happy to let you leave this place in peace….provided you each provide me with a small vial of blood and assist me in finding three blue mushrooms from this room”

Aram arrogantly asked him “ why  can't you pick your  own mushrooms” 

The lich laughs and replied “ because I’ve no longer the sense to see, smell or  feel them” Aram and Kiva exchange a look, but decide this task doesn’t seem too onerous. They hurriedly find him the mushrooms he desired, digging through the strange vegetation with their makeshift weapons stolen from the armory.

 “This is fine thank you greatly” says the Lich.  Toram gives a sample of blood from his leg wound as requested.

However, if the party expects this to win their freedom, they are sadly dashed of these dreams. The Lich turns to them all and says “Unfortunately this isn’t enough, but I will make you an offer. I’ll let two of you live if one of you stays behind forever” Toram, half mad with pain from his wounded leg and desperate for any hope of healing, immediately offers himself up as tribute to the others. Aram immediately objects and offers himself up as tribute to replace Toram. Kiva also voices objection, not wanting to see them both die. There are several minutes of arguing on who will stay behind and stubbornly Toram prevails and insists “I’ll stay behind, if the others go free”

“Excellent and yes of course” the Lich states, a small cruel smile almost cracking the wizened face.

 The next thing Toram knew, he is teleported to another chamber where he finds himself strapped to a torture bed surrounded by goblins. He says “Oh crap” and realizes it’s going to be a long eternity. Kiva and Aram are able to leave the dungeon in silence and after dividing up the spoils of the dungeon they go their separate ways. 

Slither: Session Three

Last Session... Jelle and Kiva had fought a few skeletons and scraped off some gold. They swam under a statue. Oh, there's some malevolent force that knows they're there. No big deal.

The following was kindly written by Will, the player of Jelle and... well.. you'll see in a minute, won't you?

Jelle and Kiva swim to an opening in the chamber that is narrower than the one they entered the chamber in, as they squeeze through the passageway and pass through the threshold. Kiva steps into the room first and she notices the gem-like ceiling and the marble-like floors and walls. Her gazing is interrupted by Jelle shaking off his fur to get dry and in the process soaks her even more. she glares at Jelle for getting her wet.”What?”, he asked.

 Out of nowhere a man with long dark hair and muscles that were about the size of Jelle's head and scars that suggests he was a seasoned adventurer. Jelle, paralyzed with fear, doesn't say a word. Instead Kiva questions him. He states that his name is Desarim and he was down here with another party but they all died in a large pit farther up the chamber. Kiva questions his sanity and trustworthiness, but invites him to join them.

 

They progress down the chamber and see serpa statues that overlook them as if they were formerly worshiped as deities and covered in gold, because of their buffed metal appearance. They walk closer to the pit and noticed a very foul smell coming from it, it reminded Jelle of sewage, because of the solid organic objects floating in the liquid. Desarim shutters with a paralyzing fear as they walked by the pit. Upon further review it appears to them the chamber is an octagonal shape that has five passageways, four of which look like they were sealed with the finest masonry of the time, but are currently worn and overgrown with algae and large roots. The only passageway that seems available is a door on the opposite side of the chamber.

Kiva prepares to use astral projection to scout ahead but as she begins to project, she feels that same malevolent presence she felt at the entrance, it appears to be coming from behind the door. She tells Jelle this and suggests that they loot fast and not go through the door.

 Jelle burrows under one of the sealed passageways, he is successful tunneling through the marble-like stone but as he enters the small sealed chamber the tunnel collapses and traps him in the room. Meanwhile in the main chamber skeleton hands emerge from the pit. After a moment in the tomb Jelle gets his bearings back and realizes there is a serpa with an axe that wants to kill him. Jelle attempts to fight him but he runs into a wall that knocks him off his feet and the last thing he sees is the handle of the axe and the feel of the blade against his neck.

 

Meanwhile Desarim fights off the skeleton hands and fends off one with his grappling hook but the other hand grabs him and pulls him into the pit, the skeleton begins to attack him. Kiva makes a lasso to pull the skeleton and as she pulls the skeleton off of Desarim she gets thrown into the pit. Desarim shoots his bow from a safe distance at the skeleton and kills it, dissolving it and it sinks to the bottom of the pit. Unfortunately Desarim broke a bowstring in the proces, rendering his bow a fancy walking stick at the moment.

 

Then a woman emerges from the pit in a very provocative manner as she gets out of the pit. She shoots a glance at Desarim saying “Hey babe”. There is a pause in the action as the woman fixes her hair and checks her nails. She states her name is Pella. Kiva, repulsed by her, asks Desarim why he brought that kind of woman down here and she's a disgrace to dungeoneering women everywhere. Desarim looks on in disbelief.

 

Seeing as she was getting no response about the new woman, Kiva pushes forward on her original goal, she searches the bottom of the pit for loot and finds a gold chain. The bodies of Desarim's friends start floating to the surface and he loots his friend Alfonzo's body. He finds a map that describes how to open the door a special way. Pella examines the chamber with a mirror she had brought and finds a beautiful bright emerald that she thinks would look great for a ring.

Then the axe wielding Serpa busts through the sealed passageway chasing Pella. She jumps the length of the pit; she clears it but not before she's nicked by the axe. She checks her nails as the serpa jumps into the pit with Kiva and Desarim. Kiva wields her sword and kills the serpa, who dissolves into a pile of bones that sinks to the bottom of the pit.

 Kiva gets mad with Pella and almost draws her weapon, while stating that Pella is worthless. How dare she lure that thing into the pit and then not help fix her mistake. She mutters to herself “Oh sweetie this isn't the place for you” and explains she'll be the first to enter the next room. When Pella gives a look of not caring at all, Kiva grabs her by the arm, she marches off furiously with Pella by the arm, she glances back at the passageway the serpa had come from and wonders for a moment what happened to Jelle.