“Everyone Should be entitled to be in an old country, to own one’s land, to place one’s trust in priests, to want to live in peace within secure and organized borders. Humanely and politically that’s a beautiful project. It so happens that it’s the opposite of what my ancestors have been doing since the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem.”1
Respect the Premise
Troupe is a Wyrd fantasy roleplaying game designed and written by The Original Cockatrice, with additional writing by Legendary Vermin, proofread by Xander, with layout by Danielle Osterman, and art by Krormwrorm and iafwStatic. It was released in April of 2021 and is still in active development with multiple expansions and related media.
The core of Troupe is not plundering the dungeon, it is putting on a show. The players are given three days to interact with the people and reflect their lives back at them. Will you judge them harshly for their beliefs? Show respect so your hosts don’t chase you out of town? Finish the ancient rituals they’ve been carrying on so long they forgot how they work? Troupe offers lofty questions beyond “how many things can I extract from this place?” all the while trying to make enough to eat tonight.
Troupe lives within the world of folklore. It is not a structured realm of recipes, ranks, and university-cum-magical hierarchy, it is a place of traditions and practice. Troupes perform to ward off Shedim, witches practice magic to provide for their community, villagers draw runes so deep into their lives they are part of society itself. Troupe understands the connection between religion, folklore, philosophy, and society on a level that traditional ttrpgs struggle with to this very day.
Characters have shallow pockets – You can only carry six things. Your wagon can hold any number but it takes precious time to sort through. This is not a game of amassment and hoarding. You must adapt to challenges that outnumber the things you can carry.
Many games, particularly in the OSR vein, makes claims to the kind of hardscrabble challenge they present. They do little more than twist the numbers to make a hackneyed dungeon crawl feel more desperate than it really is. Troupe actually is about surviving. It understands that the world is not some wealth of unplundered gold and power waiting for an entrepreneur-libertarian mercenary to take. It is a place where people horde the power they can take and anything left unclaimed is only because it’s profoundly dangerous2. In the DnD oeuvre you run from a fight because you underestimated your enemy, in Troupe you run from a fight because nobody with a hint of survival instinct would raise arms against the things that live in the woods. Or even worse, the cops3. It’s far easier to beg for change than to stand against the ancient beings that were here before humankind began, that will exist long after you and everyone you know have died. Beings whose curses are the entire reason parts of the game even exist.
It's a well-trodden commentary to say that the typical ttrpg overly focuses on violence; the interiority of characters left up to the imagination of the players while seven eighths of their mechanics detail the ways in which they inflict or resist harm. Troupe goes beyond that. It goes far beyond the base expectation of this artform; characters are people, and mechanics should give them the skills to interact with people.
Characters in Troupe are delightful. They are grounded within the context of wandering performers; costuming, repairs, outdoor survival, a diversity of folklore, politics, crafting, and more. They are about people, about getting things you want from people, about befriending or pissing them off. Troupe characters are not meant to simply extract wealth from their audience, they are intended to become tangled in their lives. To develop friendships and rivalries, romances and betrayals, and then to rip these relationships out by the roots. It’s a rush. It’s wanderlust. It’s freedom.
According to the Rules
Troupe’s rules, like its characters, are spartan. Resolving fights, tricks, escapes, parleys, all managed efficiently using a couple dice and related skills. Where Troupe shines is its traditions, its flow, and its negative space4. Three days to put on a show. Three days to meet new people and solve their problems (or create new ones). Three days to learn the history. Three days to survive. It’s never enough. It’s almost too much for the desperate leisure of the troubadour. When you have nothing to your name but time you have all the time in the world, and it’s always running out.
Combat is brutal and direct to resolve. Less concerned with the minutia of grievous wounds and more with the actual point of combat; survival. Many games claim to have “lethal” combat, but what they are really focused on is the documentation of violence. Troupe understands that violence is cruel and generally not worth it. The winner will walk away bleeding and bruised, all the more tired from a lifetime of being tired. The simulationism is not about severed limbs and spilled guts, it’s about escaping a fight and wondering how you’re going to perform for food with a broken arm.
Many games purport to enjoy randomness, to overwhelm you with tables upon tables upon tables. Many games believe rolling the dice is satisfactory enough that players will be content with gamic trash; short swords, maces, boots, knives, helmets, shields. The basal layer of endless violence. Troupe delivers tables that are concise but extremely deep. One of them composed of literal trash.
No one cares why the graverobber showed up to the job with three daggers and a ten-foot pole. These are not stories; they do not invite a sense of imagination. They exist in spite of it. Troupe’s junk table is an actual story. The scrap and detritus of society are tools for the vagrant; bowls and bottles for carrying food, tools for crafting, costumes and machines for performing, all of it begging for more. Is a chain of paper dolls for amusing children? Or is a magic totem? Is a jar of dirt from your childhood home a memento? or a treasure to the things in the woods? The hackneyed dungeon equipment is random keys for random doors, Troupe’s junk are lockpicks that show you doors in everything.
The same goes for food. How many games are plagued with the imaginative dead end of “rations”? Perhaps they deign to describe meals when they are luxuries, turning even the act of eating into another pile of loot. Eating and drinking is paramount for the Troupe wanderer. Maybe you get lucky and have a type of ration that’s nonperishable. Maybe it’s functional, but boring. Maybe it’s a rare wine; should you hold onto it to impress a wealthy patron? Should you give away magical sustenance to save someone else? Troupe does not create detail for detail’s sake, or even worse; simulationism. It does so because the things in our life have meaning. From the food we eat to the possessions we covet to the art we make
We Experience Games as Art
5Troupe is wonderfully, passionately Jewish. Not just in its background and references; although they’re there. The shedim, malachim, and other folklore divorced from classic Western fantasy is a delight. But it’s the culture. Not the culture of the modern Jew6, but of something older, something deeper. The fear and vivacity and scrappiness; the chutzpah. It speaks to those of us who are lost and wandering; from our history, from our families, from our people. It reaches back across time to tap the well of Diaspora. I hope we see more games like this, not just of Judaism but all the cultures decimated and abandoned by the crushing weight of colonialism. Games that speak a forgotten language and invite us to learn. To recreate the dances and songs and stories of our ancestors.
Troupe delivers an experience sadly lacking in the ttrpg space; making art. It’s about experiencing life, with all its struggles and joys and victories and horrors, and reflecting it, refining it, embellishing, exaggerating, softening, sharpening, lying, for the audience. Troupe’s caravanners are terribly free; no home, no country, no safety, but they are free. It is from that freedom; that cruel paradox of boundlessness and survival, that art is born. It’s about forging bonds through creating something together, and I can’t think of a better reflection of what ttrpgs are supposed to be.
Sfar, Joann, Klezmer (2006)
It is not a world for people, it’s a world of people and monsters
How many games have you seen where the default fighter character has a skill that lets them immediately defuse a fight?
Actual negative space, not “figure it out yourself” cop outs but actual “and now you’re free to do what you want”
Forgive me for the overly romantic prose but I’ve been listening to Klezmer while writing this critique and I am feeling quite romantic.
Not to disparage its richness and complexity