Troika!, and The Laws of the World

To describe the world of the Troika! RPG is to do it an injustice. It is surreal and macabre, a mixture of Neil Gaiman and Terry Gilliam, full of hilarious horrors and unbearable fantasies, akin to a drug-fueled homage to Jim Henson, Planescape, and 70s adult cartoons. It is a bizarre pastiche of a thousand different fevered imaginings.

The system itself is as unworldly as its world-building. Character classes are randomly chosen from a list, with each being little more than a short suggestive paragraph, a list of skills, equipment, and perhaps a single special ability. There is no established skill-list, you might know anything from sword-fighting +1 to bathing +3 or grilling +2.

Contrary to many modern RPGs, however, Troika! doesn’t have an established setting — at least, not a proscribed one. There are no chapters about planets or descriptions of races. There are no maps nor biographies of important monarchs. There are no named towns, no established tech-levels, not even an ancient quote written in italics as prologue to the rulebook. Troika! throws out any solid relationship to genre-tropes, allowing blood-soaked swordsmen to exist alongside philosophical computers, skeptical angelic beings, and living pieces of paper. A crafty assassin can be as much of a hero as a lost deep-sea diver, or a person who’s had a full frontal lobotomy.

Instead, Troika! establishes a feel of the game. Even the names of your character’s classes provide a form of world-building, guiding players towards a specific mindset. You can be a warrior sworn to collect swords for the coming apocalypse, an astrologer giant, a locksmith with a sledgehammer, or a wizard with a door in your head. Even the more plain roles have a narrative flair; there is a palpable difference, after all, between being an assassin and being a Journeyman of the Guild of Sharp Corners.

The same can be said of the odd skills. What does having +4 in vengeance mean? How does a +2 at grilling affect your use of a flamethrower? What about your attempt to charm the King of Backyards? That’s up to you and the other players at the table to agree on, and every little choice makes up a distinct and unique world.

It’s the alternative to world-building in the D&D mold. Most setting-rich RPGs have chapters — if not whole worldbooks — devoted to establishing fantastical histories, geographies, cultures, and setting. This method is all well and good, but it can clash with a certain narrative mindset: “Owlbears? Cloakers? Mimics, whose evolutionary niche exclusively exists to trick main characters? What kind of ecosystem supports things like this?” The obvious answer is: “A wizard did it.” It’s a dismissive answer that hides the real answer: “If the ecosystem couldn’t support things like this, we couldn’t have fun killing them.”

World-building has multiple jobs in RPGs: it has to be believable enough to support a fourth-wall and encourage the suspension-of-disbelief integral to all good stories and games; it has to provide a suitable foundation for interesting and engaging stories, inspiring and encouraging players to see what happens next; it has to subtly suggest certain kinds of reactions and behaviors, letting players seamlessly incorporate their own expectations into the world; and it has to be emotionally engaging.

So what happens when a world becomes rote?

Consider how, thanks to the ubiquity of both D&D and Tolkien, everyone knows what an orc is. The particulars might be different in this world or that, but even if you never use the word “orc” players will be able to suss out your re-skin. We find ourselves at a fascinating point in culture, where the oxymoronic “standard fantasy setting” can be as boring or predictable as our non-fantastical real world. It is the setting equivalent to metagaming and metastorytelling.

Perhaps the most obvious example of pushback might be Talislanta, whose “Still No Elves” tagline is a bit of cheek — there are certainly some very elf-like beings in the world, along with orc-ish, goblin-adjacent, and dwarf-akin folks — but I don’t want to undersell the importance of what Talislanta does with its anti-D&D ethos. In Talislanta, you can explore. When you first play the game, you don’t know which beings are predisposed to hunt you, befriend you, or ignore you. You don’t know how deadly this wiry looking bird or that angry looking bear actually are. You have to learn.

But given enough time, you’ll know what Sauruds are, you’ll be on the lookout for Omnivraxs (Omnivri? Omnivruses?), and always carry some extra pounds of food for any Heklers that latch onto you, and the lands of Talislanta will be as familiar as D&D’s. Troika! foregoes this possibility by encouraging narrative ecologies instead of scientific ones. Freed from the rules of genre and canon, every encounter is free to be unique.

But this highlights an interesting conundrum when it comes to setting in RPGs: can the players ever inhabit the same world?

Ostensibly, yes. A book can describe a town, dungeon, or valley however it likes. A GM can use words like “large” or “dark” to suggest towering trees or deep shadows. They could use words like “gargantuan” and “ominous” to be more emotive. They could describe a snarl as grating, a scream as horrific, or a storm as tempestuous.

But these words only exist inside our own heads. A narrator can describe stonework, the smells of a market, or sounds in a forest; but you are the one who decides how loud, pungent, or course these sensations are. Even with the most detailed descriptions, everyone’s imagined world will be different, and sometimes those worlds will conflict with each other. Consider too that good narrations usually forego breadth of detail in favor of letting one’s imagination do the heavy lifting.

This is one of the distinct issues with description as a tool. I can call a tree gargantuan, but without a photograph or exact measurement you will never know exactly how tall the tree is, only how tall it is to you.

This means five players will see five different worlds and possibly react in five distinct ways. A spooky forest might communicate intrigue and mystery to one player, while a horrifying forest might tell another to flee. Soulless-eyed soldiers might suggest caution, while blank-eyed guards encourage hijinks. Different worlds demand different responses.

Does this matter much? Maybe not, but consider how world-building is, in a word, limiting. Another word might be focusing, but in either case — much like narrative — worlds have their own laws. There are no guns in Middle Earth, nor are there spaceships in 50s New York. Every choice made when making a world at once expands and restricts the possibilities of what may happen next. Otherworldly magic may not suddenly flood back into reality in Beam Saber, but it certainly could in BALIKBAYAN. Aliens may have plans for the earth in KISHU, but they probably won’t in Yokai Hunters Society.

And that’s just focusing on game-setting; GMs alter gameworlds all the time. All settings have a Terra nullius where GMs can add dungeons, planets, or characters as they see fit. Even established canon changes due to our interpretations: one GM might view the Demon Lord of Hell as a force of nature, a cosmic entity that has existed alongside humanity since its origins, as unstoppable and inscrutable as the gnawing selfish hunger that churns in your gut in your darkest moments…while another GM might think a cloaked figure killing the Demon Lord would be a great adventure hook.

Again, we come back to the idea of “canon,” that the rulebook or wiki or even the GMs notes are somehow more “real” than what a player imagines in the moments between the dice-rolls.

Depending on how you want to count them, there are anywhere from 20 to 50 campaign settings for D&D alone. Some are completely different from each other, like Spelljammer and Dark Sun; while others are little more than re-skins, like Grayhawk and the Forgotten Realms. But really there are thousands of campaign settings. Millions, as each gaming group makes their own maps and towns and characters. If we reject the idea that we owe fealty to the teams or companies who create these settings, the idea of an established canon in RPGs is silly.

All RPGs are hacks, as I’ve said before, and I don’t see why that can’t include the world you play in.

So, is world-building bad? No, of course not. It’s complicated, certainly, and not everyone has the time to fill a wiki with enough history to fuel a full course at university. Borrowing a campaign setting is no more creatively bankrupt than borrowing a genre’s tropes or a game’s ruleset. Troika! simply opts for a different goal by having such a rich and absurd plethora of styles and tones that almost anything can fit in its expansive universe. There is no established place that you adventure, that’s up to the players. What Troika! establishes is the feel.

And boy oh boy is that a rich minefield. Next time, I’d like to talk about Game Tone.