Ruins of Gygar Troika! Crawl Sessions 01-16 Retrospective
Play reports are important folks.... We all know it and that's why we gotta write them! I don't remember the beat for beat stuff as this campaign has been going on for a while but will try to bring a timeline as I understand it
Timeline
- The players explored the first level engaging in a fair bit of combat against the chaotic beastmen. They befriended Boris the Ogre and used his room as a base of operations for the first level.
- The players pretty much cleared level one to a room. They found the blue gem and got the tuna can!
- At some point they defaced a shrine to the God of the Sea and have earned his wrath after profaning his shrine.
- They moved onto Level 2 and quickly met with the Gnome nobility who they quickly learned had a pocket dimension filled with Cyclops slaves.
- They helped kill the quicksilver beast guarding the exit to Level 3 and befriended some Dark Elves.
- The King granted them a manor in town which turned into an adventuring hub.
- They then took a job from a lesser Gnome noble and jumped into a Golden Sphere to find the priceless artifact the Eye of Aeons
- The players meet the Empress and Yorg, they side with Yorg because he is so handsome and his desire to break his doomed fate is something the romantics in all of us can understand.
- They meet a Wizard who warns of a horrible god trapped in the eye.
- They blow up the Eye with a big fucking gun and contend with the chaos god, fleeing to finish it off with another cannon shot.
- They return back to Gnometown to find the nobility killed and a new union of Gnomes and Cyclopses ruling the town.
Lessons Learned
A full after action review for The Eyes of Aeons is forthcoming but I want to address some of the lessons learned from this campaign thus far.
- Don't listen to anyone who tells you a game can't handle a certain kind of play. Also don't listen to the negative shit you hear about a game until you run it. The popular perception of Troika! and my experience running it are so very far apart.
- Don't bolt a bunch of stuff onto your game before running it. I added nothing to the core game until after a few sessions of play. I developed an understanding of the game before I added stuff. It's important to understand the logic that rises from play, not white room thinking.
- Make the players map shit.
- I've written about this previously but running the game you wanna love instead of what outside pressures or expectations make you think you wanna run is going to make the game feel much healthier.
- Powerful players are going to be callers almost naturally. So long as they allow their ear to be bent by the quieter folks this is a fine slot for them to fill.
- If you want players to use your homebrew you should be prepared to compile it in a way that's easy for them to reference.
- If you want your game to be consistent run for who shows up and don't pussyfoot if it's just one or two. Keep that time filled.
- Controversially, just because a system doesn't have something doesn't mean its incomplete. This hobby does not have a want for resources for anything you might want.
- The Gygar maps get very hard to map for a player and don't fret about letting them riff of your sketches or just leaving it representational.
I am now doing the work to move the game over to the Gay Beholder OSR server and run it as an open table there. I look forward to all the terrible things that await us.
I am sure I will learn even more lessons as I continue the game.