I Adore The Storytelling Mechanics Of It And The Worldbuilding Aspect - Tumblr Posts
Introducing Trilogy
Yesterday I released Trilogy, a new tabletop RPG crafted to support you in having grand adventures in worlds of your own making.
There are several reasons I started writing Trilogy, but the biggest one is that I ran a Dungeon World podcast called Crudely Drawn Swords for seven years and that was a lot of time to think about what we were playing. To a degree Trilogy is the game I wish that we could have had to run the podcast.
Starting from the question "what would a purely PbtA game for epic fantasy look like?" I started thinking more widely - what do I want from a fantasy game? And the truth is that I want a game that supports the structure of characters and their interactions but doesn't tie itself to a specific setting.
Trilogy begins with The Appendices - conventionally in epic fantasy these are at the end and document information about the wider world that might not have made it into the story, but here it is where you sit down as a group and decide what tone you want your game to have, and your world looks like. What kind of place is it? What magic is there? What is religion like? What are the major cultures where the story begins? How would it feel to be in this world? Trilogy doesn't tell you any of these things, it gives you the tools to think through how you want your world to look.
This creates a secondary challenge - without knowing what the world looks like, how could I design character classes for this type of game? Trilogy answers this by going back to the fundamentals - instead of a conventional character class, the playbooks in Trilogy represent a narrative arc. Some of them, like The Fighter, The Priest, or The Magus, look like familiar classes. Others, such as The Volunteer, The Mentor, The Weapon, or The Defeated, are a little different. Character arcs have a set of turning points, story beats that allow you to advance along your arc after you have collected a certain amount of experience. Some are positive and others negative, you choose which ones you want to hit and when, but every character's story has its highs and lows and to get the most from the game you need to lean into both. A character can pass through three arcs as they grow and change, like the three volumes of a trilogy.
The aim of the game is to create a slower but satisfying sense of progression - instead of hit points characters take Stress and Harm like in other Powered by the Apocalypse games that can have both mechanical and narrative effects. That makes combat feel dangerous, but the game also offers more ways to solve problems without getting into combat - I have played games where the player characters never got into a fight, instead resolving confrontations through an ingenious selection of alternative strategies including "lying" and "vomiting magic ink all over the floor." I'm genuinely enthusiastic about this game - I think I would be as excited about it if somebody else had written it. It leans hard into the joy of discovery and the excitement of adventure - you can play it as spooky and whimsical or gritty and hard-edged and anywhere in between.
Because I was writing it I even got to make most of the examples of play roll out as the story of someone's game, something I always appreciate when I read it. It also contains every technique I use as a GM in the hope that even before people get the chance to play it (heaven forbid any TTRPG afficionado have books we haven't got around to playing yet!) people who read it will still be able to use that advice in their other games. So that's Trilogy, the game I've been working on for the last few years. I think it's pretty great and I hope you will too:
Obviously it's a full-priced game and that's a big gamble from an unfamiliar creator - if you want an idea of what it's like in practice we've got the CDS team back together and we're starting a streamed campaign so you have a chance to see it in action. You can find that over on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxpXacko9Nc
The first episode includes me notably failing to use OBS at both the beginning and end, and I can't make any promises things will improve in that regard, but it should be a good opportunity to see how the game shapes up from this start and with this crew I know it's going to be funny and take some wild swings. If you're interested in reviewing Trilogy or you really want to give it a try but you can't afford it, drop me a message