Each holiday season, I review different modules, games or supplements as a thank you to the wider tabletop roleplaying game community. All of the work I review during Critique Navidad is either given to me by fans of the work or the authors themselves. This holiday season, I hope I can bring attention to a broader range of tabletop roleplaying game work than I usually would be able to, and find things that are new and exciting!

Late Stage Death Cultism is a 28 page module for Troika! by Diogo Barros, who also made the fantastic Isle of Hex. In it, you pursue a giant corporate-sponsored ape along a coast-to-coast road on a postapocalyptic continent.

Unlike most Troika! modules, the focus of Late Stage Death Cultism is not in the backgrounds. We only have 6 backgrounds here, as well as a few short additions: A few reasons to chase the ape, and a few choices in what you’re riding as you chose it. Honestly, my gut feeling is that it would’ve made a little more sense to fold those additions into the backgrounds, as they’re not entirely consistent; that said, I like these backgrounds, as they are bright with Barros’ humour, and interestingly enough, come across as playbooks of a sort, each being more of a character trope in kaiju cinema than a class or background per se.

The map here is linear, because you’re following a road, chasing the giant ape. I like this, a lot, because firstly it is such a contrast to the “make up the world” ethos that a lot of Troika displays, and secondly because it allows you, once again, to explore the tropes of the apocalyptic road trip movie. These are all neat, they feature very clear and fun to play characters, but it is, absolutely, on rails. I’m not opposed to a one-shot that’s largely on rails, you just might need to flag this with your table beforehand, else you’ll be completely unsupported when they go off-script. This reminds me a lot of the pleasure to be had described in the Monomyth Thread of yore, and I think there’s a place for it, but it’s not something you’d expect in a Troika! module.

The characters you encounter all have very specific responses to the ape that has stampeded through their homes, and this is where the title comes into play: Barros here asks how do various personalities respond to the absurdity and danger of this apocalypse? But it’s buried very solidly in a very gonzo, very absurdist sense of humour throughout.

The layout here is simple, with Barros drawing all the art in digital ink, and hand-writing a lot of the headings etc. The asides and the aesthetic fit the humour, if perhaps not the themes, and work far better than any of the house Troika! layouts, which insist on challenging formatting in their current iteration.

I’ve always been fascinated a little in Troika! as a model, but I’ve found many of the people who develop it fall a little short of it’s potential: This is perhaps the most interesting gesture towards that potential, effectively being a capsule game, for a very specific story and series of events. This is rendered possible because so much emphasis is placed on the backgrounds in Troika! that it effectively can be used to explore very specific situations, without a lot of mechanical overhead. I like this as a conceptual space a lot, and I’d really like more designers to take advantage of this underutilised space to explore a wider set of environments and situations. Based on this, I could see someone using Troika! as a little Fiasco or Desperation simulator, as weird as that seems; Late Stage Death Cultism gestures in that direction with its’ choices, but still lives in the traditional Troika! extremity. What happens to Troika! when you place it in a historical or mythological context though?

Overall, Late Stage Death Cultism is a really interesting module, full of humour and interesting characters. It’s essentially a series of linear scenes, though: This would make for a fun one- or two-shot, I feel, if you got the table on board in advance. More importantly, though, Late Stage Death Cultism is a pretty interesting model for exploring smaller and more specific narrative spaces, in a way that not many people are doing, and with low mechanical overhead. I’d check it out, either way: It’s a fun night with your friends, or else it might inspire you to write something yourself.

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