From what I’ve observed of the “Old School Renaissance” movement, it can be divided into two main categories. You have the “Reenactment” group, and the “Avant-Garde” group.

The Reenactors are people who focus on old editions of D&D. They research historical documents to learn how Gary Gygax and his group played, in order to glean all of the assumptions he thought were so obvious he never put to paper. They play those old editions, and write new material for them. They write and buy retro-clones, which are either old editions of D&D in different trade dress, or new games that attempt to precisely replicate the feel of old D&D without using the same rules.

The Artistes of the Avant-Garde category are people who looked at these retro-clones and realized that they were always free to write their own games set in their own weird settings without having to conform to tropes set by some guy in the 70’s. Perhaps they had already been doing that privately, perhaps not. But what the existence of these retro-clones did was give then a commercial platform for their personal weirdness. They could just slap a set of vaguely Basic D&D-ish rules on something, call it an OSR supplement, and earn an audience who was suddenly very interested in anything bearing that logo.

Troika: Numinous Edition is very much an Avant-Garde game, though its only real link to anything D&D is in its high concept. This is “The World’s Most Popular Fantasy Roleplaying Game”… from another world.

The art style is what first caught my eye in some advertising banners I saw on RPG.net. The core book was a bit too expensive for me given the current BRL/USD exchange rate, but fortunately it came with the Itch.io Bundle For Racial Justice and Equality, so I gave it a read.

The cover is quite trippy, and the internal layout gives the pages a pleasant cream background color, wide margins, and single-color text in a font that’s readable enough and is apparently meant to look type-written, as if you were reading a zine. The style for the internal art is equally trippy, and done in that mock-woodcut style in blacks, reds, yellows and blues.

The system is simple, and uses only six-sided dice. Characters have three main stats: Skill is what you test to do things; Stamina acts as both your health and your magic points; and Luck is what you use for “saving throws” and other similar tests. You determine them all randomly, and then roll on a big d66 table to add a background on top of that, which gives you additional specialized skills and some starting gear.

Combat is an opposed test of skill. Whoever rolls highest gets to deal damage, no matter who it was who initiated the attack. Monsters can have multiple actions, and PCs can only ever have one per round, but a skilled and lucky PC can still end up damaging a lot of enemies over the course of that round. The damage roll is always a single d6, which you then cross-reference with a weapon table at the start of the book to see how much actual damage you dealt. Three of the “weapon” entries are “small beast”, “medium beast”, and “large beast”, so monsters are covered here too.

There’s a sample bestiary with creatures of all types, and it’s easy enough to come up with your own, since they use the same three stats as PCs.

The setting is an entire psychedelic universe with infinite worlds, through which you can travel by means that range from spaceships to magical portals (so yes, you can travel the universe on foot). The archetypes I mentioned above all seem to be typical inhabitants of the most well-known parts of the universe, ranging from a civilization of nomadic giants looking for their lost home to an order of philosophers that voluntarily gave on on their higher brain functions, and includes other highlights such as stone dwarves that come in well- and poorly-made versions, several forms of bizarre knightly orders and esoteric magical traditions, and a catch-all “mysterious foreigner” archetype whose dress and customs look odd even to this lot.

There’s not really a setting chapter. The basic “science-fantasy universe filled with portals” description is in the introduction, and most of the rest of the setting information contained here is in the archetypes. I’m guessing the GM is meant to come up with their own setting details as needed, and a worked example of this is in the included adventure, titled “The Blancmange & Thistle”. I don’t think I like it very much, though.

The Blancmange and Thistle is name of a hotel in the city of Troika. The idea is that your PC party has just arrived and is looking for accommodation. There’s only one room left, in the 6th floor, since there’s a festival happening today. It’s pre-established that all the PCs have agreed to share that room, strangers though they may be.

And the goal of the adventure is just for the characters to go up to their room. Only this is written as a linear dungeon crawl sort of thing, where an incredible amount of concentrated bullshit is thrown at the character’s direction. They get to choose whether to take the elevator or the stairs. Either way, at each floor there’s going to be a strange and potentially deadly encounter, you’re just picking which set you want. The party is not expected to solve all these encounters with violence, but many of the “peaceful” ones are still dangerous.

I get it that they’re trying to give us a feel for the type of weirdness you can find in the setting without describing the setting itself, but this is just too much, y’know? The poor PCs are just trying to get to their room in an hotel, and they have to contend with a toxic gaseous life form, a herd of tigers, someone whose dreams of an infinite abyss leak into reality, a gang of owl hooligans, ornery mandrill security guards, and so on. All in rapid succession, with little time to think or recover. There’s no way around any of these things, as all the encounters happen inside the elevator or in a narrow stairwell. You can switch from the lift to the stairs and vice-versa, but there’s going to be a random encounter while you walk through that floor.

You just know that even after the PCs get to their room after the adventure ends, someone is going to die on the way to the toilet. Probably swallowed by a drunk sapient black hole who was staying in the next room over and got into the wrong door by mistake.

I think Troika is a good game on balance. The system is simple, relatively unobstrusive, and allows for a really wide variety of bizarre characters. The feel of the setting is great, but the design of the included adventure makes me feel like the authors were still a bit too attached to the “dungeon crawl” paradigm. If you do GM it, I would recomment spreading the weirdness out a lot more, and using it for picaresque adventures that run at a calmer pace than the frantic “try not die while getting to your hotel room” scenario presented here.