Bathtub Reviews are an excuse for me to read modules a little more closely. I’m doing them to critique a wide range of modules from the perspective of my own table and to learn for my own module design. They’re stream of consciousness and unedited critiques. I’m writing them on my phone in the bath.

Arkos is an 83 page setting module for Troika! written and laid out by John Kordosh, with art by a large list of contributors. I was provided a complementary copy by Exalted Funeral. In it, you are introduced to the city of Arkos, a vibrant sphere floating through space, where recently one of the five ruling gods has staged a coup, resulting in a pressure cooker of a location with no escape. Arkos has far more content than an 83-page book should feel entitled to, to be frank. It packs a city setting and a pretty action-packed adventure together in its’ pages, as well as a lot of refereeing advice. It’s as dense as a much longer book, and hence, it’ll be hard to overview. Bear with me.

I’m going to break out of tradition here, and start with appearances: The layout in Arkos is an intense, dense, zine-like affair. There are no margins, the text comes in either bold or bolder, white space is at a minimum (except in select places — namely in the backgrounds), and block background colour is applied haphazardly. It feels like a layout inspired by cheap magazine advertising, in a positive way. To balance out the bold choices, it uses familiar fonts, and a limited palette of canary yellow and teal to hold everything together. The art by all six contributors is in this limited palette, and that really helps pull the disparate art styles together (although admittedly, it is less disparate than you’d expect from the number of artists involved — the art direction here is excellent). You might not like the density on the page, but it’s intentional and it’s not as hard to read as you’d expect, except in long sittings. There are a few unforced errors here, though: The narrow gutter results in a lot of text lost to the binding, usually the first letter of each sentence on the right hand side page, which is a major issue, and will affect the longevity of the book. The navigability at a glance of the pages is challenging, as headings aren’t consistent in either form or placement. This makes for problems mainly when you’re looking for a specific — I went searching for the soundtrack names, for example, and it took me a while — but when you’re running the game, most things you’ll need are either co-located or have relevant page references in the text, which minimises the issue. From this description you’ll get the sense that Arkos is super-dense, and yes, yes it is, which is why I opened with this.

The writing in Arkos is at its’ worst, workmanlike, but even then it usually has something interesting to say: “There’s a 2-in-6 chance a Peacekeeper captain is with them. The Captain challenges whoever has the best Fighting Skill to a duel.” That’s not florid, but it tells you something about the Peacekeepers. My favourite writing, when Arkos is at its’ best, however, is evocative and borders on genius. There must be 70 “crowd types” in this book, and not a single one is either boring or explained — it’s up to the referee’s imagination what a Dwindling Ghost, Fire-eyed Lizard or Loose-wired Droid is. The names are absolutely iconic — Tourniquet Morphine, Zyre-Zye, and Pallo High Sun sell the setting so well. The art style and layout reflect the revolutionary themes, and centering the districts around the music scenes in each of them is really effective at placing emphasis on the relationship between music and activism, not to mention the fact that you’re supplied soundtracks for specific beats in the story as well as for specific locations — and these soundtracks slap, and bring a very positive atmosphere which matches the art style. I absolutely vibed listening to the soundtracks while I read the book. It’s worth noting I had issues finding the soundtracks, though, mainly due to Spotify’s search function being abysmal — I let the author know, though, and it should be sorted by the time this goes live. The main complaint of the writing is that there’s too much of it: Arkos is a Gygaxian wall of text, and if you have trouble approaching walls of text, you’ll have trouble here. For me, the striking layout overcame the initial challenge, but it is not something I was able to read in one sitting.

Luckily, I don’t think Arkos expects you to read it in one sitting: It opens with two tables of contents, one with what to read if you’re a player, and the other for the referee, featuring up front, a Prep section. After the prep section, there is a section on each of the 6 areas in the city, as well as one on “The Trigger”, the thing that can occur if the players pull on the right strings, which will unlock the sixth district and make significant geographical and political changes to the city. This same table of contents also pulls out the six sections which are buried within those cities, that you might want to access separately — shopping and such, mainly, as well as some subsystems that exist specifically for the city of Arkos.

I love that Arkos isn’t a setting for Troika! that relies exclusively on backgrounds to build its’ setting, but it does have a short list of backgrounds — while they feel like a bit of an afterthought in terms of how much they don’t fit into the layout, they all place you squarely in Arkos. I just wish more of them placed you in relationship with the world. This is achieved in other ways, namely what Arkos adds to the Troika! character sheet: Stakes and Sparks. These are things you stand to lose, and things that connect you to the city, and give the players a little more information about what they might choose to do. These are just dynamite for a game that will so much revolve around intrigue and faction play, as well as social encounters in nightclubs and the like. In addition, there’s a party set of stakes and sparks, which gives the party a reason to get into the action as a team. Clever stuff, all that brings everything else in the book so much more to bear in the player character’s lives. These party sparks are a little less compelling than the individual ones, but it’s still an excellent idea.

The Prep section is what you need to know to run Arkos — it more or less summarises the lore of the city, the events leading up to it, and the big secrets. It provides tips for challenging sections of the module, or things that might get missed — stuff that I feel must have just recurred in playtesting as issues. It describes what play will probably look like before and after the trigger occurs between Act 1 and Act 2. The idea of an Act 1 and Act 2 may make many people look askance — get your story game out of my emergent play — but really it’s just a way to describe how the players impacts are likely to result in a significant change occurring to the city of Arkos. It’s kind of like skipping straight to the big explosion at the end of the advancements in Magical Industrial Revolution. Honestly, it’s a really clever mechanic, which means that you can retreat the same territory with vastly different experiences, increasing the potential of the city two-fold, but without the expectation of years of play that comes in more graduated versions of it. It also breaks down how to read the ward descriptions, the factions in them, and how you should approach them, as well as the main antagonists and how best to utilise them.

The first five wards follow a similar structure (although, importantly not the same: they’re all unique, and so one doesn’t have crowds, or one has magical cats that cause you to change your mood, etc.). They’re each 7-10 pages, and each have a series of very brief locations, characters, as well as highlights (which really helps — what do you want to make sure we hit in this location if you’re not sure what’s next?). The breadth here is astounding — from immigrant communities to fan communes to of course stores. Each has a micro-dungeon tied to its’ factions’ primary quest, and each has a nightclub which serves as the primary social location for each. The main concern with these wards is that they’re so intense to absorb, and in each of them there’s at least one random table that would benefit more from having a decision made about its contents: An example is the Altimus Wrench quest in the Ward of Glyphs, where his disappearance and nature as well as location is left up to chance. In a city this complex, with so many moving parts, I think it would relieve the referee a little to save the randomisation for things that benefit from it — the unexpected goings on of the city, specifically — and not for the goals of quests or the nature of leaders (which is another example that occurs in Ward Zero). The sixth ward, Omnus Ward, is far more complex, has multiple districts within it that you can visit, each with its’ own encounters and its own dangers. And it’s dangerous: It’s honestly more of a dungon than a ward. But it still follows a similar structure to the others, as best it can.

The dungeons in Arkos are probably its’ weakest link; but this is Troika!, and the truth is the style of dungeon in Troika! is more one of engaging scene to engaging scene than exploration and puzzle-solving. I’m not sure that the dungeons not being as spatially complex or puzzling as many of the others I review is a valid complaint, although it may impact your enjoyment of Arkos if you enjoy dungeons as more than a set of scenes to proceed through. The main dungeon, The Mind Fortress, however, is a much better proposition. There is a collection puzzle to move from the first to the second floor, there is clever colour coding to differentiate rooms, and the themes are pretty compelling. It feels more like a set-piece, where the smaller dungeons feel like distractions from the real fun of engaging in the city. That said, one strength of all of these dungeons are the excellent maps by Geremia Gayaud — they’re full of personality and information, and deserve a lot of praise.

As well as the maps, all the art in Arkos is well selected, as I mentioned earlier, but I didn’t talk about how well the art and writing work together — better than I’ve seen before, to be honest, in a product with so many collaborators. The art really complements the writing in a way that seems very, very intentional: For example, the character of Zyre-Zye, a musician and revolutionary leader from a brutal war-torn planet, uses they/them pronouns (just in text, there’s no indication otherwise, which I also like). In a sci-fantasy setting, this doesn’t mean a lot, but in combination with the art featuring top-surgery scars and a beard, far more about the character is communicated through the juxtaposition of art and text than the text itself ever spoke of. In a book where the writing is so dense, its’ meaningful that they manage to cram even more communication about the world into the art than most products do.

Arkos is a sparkling but messy, city supplement. The messiness feels intentional, adds to its appeal, and fits the themes, although it can detract from usability at times. At the time of writing, this is in my opinion the definitive Troika! module and setting rolled into one. I have trouble finding a pitch to get a Troika! table together: This is my pitch, now. As a referee, this is everything I need to run a Troika! campaign, it fits perfectly with the core setting, and it is so much better than any of the official content I’ve read, and it smartly allows for play to continue based out of the city of Arkos, meaning I can drop all of my other Troika! modules right in here.

If you’re a referee who runs Troika!, or want to run Troika!, Arkos is the both the best module and city available right now. It’s vibrant, evocative, and clear enough in its’ execution that it’s easy to run with a minimum of prep — and, it walks you right through that prep! But it’s a city, and a module combined, which means it’s very very high density. This density means it’s too dense to run in digital format, and for me it’s completely unnavigable on a screen. And the choice of binding in print fails the book, because it can’t lay flat, and sometimes you’re doing damage to the spine in order to get read the first few letters of a sentence. If you can look past those flaws and you never could figure how to actually run Troika!, Arkos is for you.

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