A couple weeks ago, most of my gaming group was missing from one of our sessions and so instead of our usual, ongoing Pathfinder campaign, three of the players and I tried Troika instead.
We used the Blancmange and Thistle sample adventure in the back of the core book. Spoilers for that adventure ahead if you haven’t read it.
Character creation went incredibly swiftly, even though I was the only one who’d read the book before sitting down for the session. It honestly took longer to figure out why one player couldn’t get a PDF loaded than to actually build the characters. Troika is definitely taking a permanent place in my “ready for one-shots” folder just for that.
I feel like the “advanced skills” were maybe not explained as well at the time as after my third or fourth reading and were helped out greatly by having read some writing by Chris McDowell in Electric Bastionland about diagetic advancement (that is, story-related character growth rather than arbitrary you killed enough toads this adventuring day).
Anyway, the team we ended up with was an Exographer (sci-fantasy adventurer who makes maps of weird places), a Questing Knight, and a third member whose background is escaping me at the moment. They arrive at the titular hotel to take part in a great festival going on in the City. Caveat: everyone else is here for the festival too. There is only one room. (And here, there were “And let me guess, when we get there, there’s only one bed” jokes.)
The adventure largely gives two paths you can go by (though if you don’t like one, there’s still time to change the road you’re on): the elevator or the stairs. The layout of the adventure presumes that your party will take the easy route and go by elevator, listing that path first. So, of course my group ran to the stairwell.
Their one room is on the sixth floor, and the adventure structure is basically that going up, each floor has its own encounter, these encounters are different between the stairs and the elevator. So You could actually tweak some stuff and run this multiple times and have it come out differently. Which, replay value in a prewritten RPG module? What is this? A 1990s 16-bit video game?
So our party wanders up the stairs and encounters a bunch of owls who are being jerks. So we get to learn how Troika combat works. Turns out that it’s pretty speedy, failing to damage an enemy lets it damage you, and initiative is unpredictable. It was fun, I used a deck of cards to set up my initiative stack and shuffled it each round. The damage charts for various weapons allowing a single die to serve all purposes was great. The owls were made short work of pretty quickly.
On the second floor was probably my favorite encounter of the night. The pool of water. But its a pool of demonic water. This was where I did my best to come up with things I could describe that were totally normal water but also just felt off. Great practice for narrating a scene to players that. So there were weird shadows cast across it that didn’t match things in the room, reflections moved just slightly differently from what they portrayed. The party seriously sat around for ages figuring out what they were doing.
And then the knight decided that puzzles are no fun. He went stomping straight through, we tested his luck and… nothing happened. So everyone decides that this is just a normal puddle and go wading right through and they ALSO have nothing bad happen to them. But just hold on to the thought that there was a luck mechanic attached to this water, because we’ll be returning here very shortly.
Leaving the pool, the party encountered a slug monarch whose retinue fully blocked the stairs. The monarch is having some digestive trouble on the stairs and is too embarrased to move. So the Questing Knight decides helpfully to rush back down the stairs to a mop and bucket back where the owls were faced. And then run back up the stairs to help the monarch.
That’s two more trips through the demon water. And in Troika, each time you test your luck, you luck gets lower. So each time, something going wrong gets more and more likely. And something does go wrong on the return trip. Our knight fails his check on his trip back up and the result that is rolled is that he is possessed of demonic rage until snapped out of it, attacking anyone who gets between him and his goals. So uh, yeah, that slug monarch who was in the stairwell? Getting attacked. Friends? Attacked. One party member is nearly killed and most of the slug retinue is brutally murdered before someone manages to land a hit on the knight and break him out of his demon rage. The player decides that this guy is having a mental break, and running far far away, never to return. So he rolls a new Landsknequet (different knight) who joins the party at the next landing.
The next landing is mysterious strangers having a mysterious encounter exchanging identical bags. The party decided they’d seen nothing worth sticking their noses into and continued on.
The finaly landing before their destination gave me another really cool non-combat that was up there with the water. As they reached the fifth floor, the dimensions fall out around them leaving them in a weird space as stairs and doors are shifted into a different thing all together that they have to find a way to climb up or be lost to the abyss for good.
Because a wizard fell asleep without taking the proper protections and her dreams were leaking out to warp reality. They could have wandered the dreams and had different adventures, but instead they woke the wizard and the MC Escher painting of the staircase collapsed back into normal reality.
And then they reached their destination, their room, and the party on the roof.
Troika was such a fun system to run. I had a blast, my group had a blast, and like I said everything ran so quickly that this is definitely a system that’s going in my “Need to GM Right Now and Have Nothing Ready” folder on my tablet.
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