Reviewsday: TROIKA! and PROSPECT

Published by the Melsonian Arts Council, TROIKA! is a science fantasy RPG sharing a wavelength with Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion, Book of the New Sun, Vimanarama, Etched City, and the Archive 81 podcast (I’ll talk about these later). Humanity escaped the crushing grasp of Earth’s gravity a long time ago and things have only GOTTEN STRANGER. Bollywood space gods plunging through eldritch portals to explore the crystal spheres are the tip of the weirdo iceberg when you thumb through the randomized backgrounds. Some quick examples – questing knight, cacogen, thaumaturge, rhino-man, and monkeymonger for starters. The setting is filled out and explained in item and background descriptions, in the margins of the text like a Dark Souls or Bloodborne game.

Mechanically speaking, it does everything you want an OSR-style game to do – create tension and sense of danger – and only uses the D6. It also leans on D66 tables which I’m a huge fan of. The most unique design feature is how it handles initiative via a blind grab bag, very similar to the system used in the miniatures game Confrontation. You pull a token from a grab bag and the corresponding character takes their turn, but there’s also an End Turn token so… someone might not get an action that turn.

It’s elegant, it’s pretty, and gets the most out of the book-as-physical-artifact with tables inside the covers.

You can find a no-frills/artless version here under the SRD and a physical copy on Amazon here.

PROSPECT was released earlier this year and it’s a space western focused on activities nearly always overlooked – prospecting, mining, and claim jumping! Not gonna get too deep on this, I’ll just say – if your favorite parts of Ridley Scott films are the world-building via material culture and how the camera feels in the scene then you should carve out the time and watch PROSPECT before the year is over in…
13 days? That sounds about right.

You can watch PROSPECT on Hulu right now.

You can browse the props here and the concept art here.