Status
⚠ Partial Outage Dan Alive Work In progress Busyness Elevated Project cancellations 0 incidents in 3650 days Patience Major outages reported Work time spent performing admin tasks a chimp could do 85%
Daniel Sell
This is my current active game blog. I made Troika, I'm a publisher at the Melsonian Arts Council, I'm running a megadungeon, I don't use social media except...
Latest posts
Across the Sky
ADJUSTMENTS to my preferences about running a game. Laptops are annoying. I think the school exam style of bringing only pencil and paper to the adventure is right. I've been using Obsidian recently and it's nice, and too powerful. I was using IAWriter but it gets slow on VAST documents; Get It At Sutlers and Bits O' Troika became stop-motion after a piddly 80k words or so, which is weird 'cos…
Troikanary
There was a joke I heard some trad publishers make when I was in university about how every year another radical author cooperative appears to disrupt the publishing world. Then they decide one of them should do the admin. And another should deal with the printing. And another will do the marketing. And then they've become another publisher. I am that joke. Melsonia's great strength and weakness…
Crowdfunding Season
CROWDFUNDING SEASON IS STARTING! I'm joking, it never ended. I've come to peace with it, I think, since I've been so available to chat to strangers in this real-life shop space. There is a sense it should be possible to have some integrity, to just make a game and have it played and eat food under a roof, but that's just a reality that needs to be accepted. And real life is marvelously inverted…
Dan Went Outside
An interaction over the weekend with a 14 year old comic artist while working a faire made me think, again. Comics seem more indie from the outside, but there is objectively more money in them, and is easier to get started and sell stuff. You can be truely indie, a little bit punk, in comics because there is so much more money there. You can be sub-optimal as per the rules of living in a society…
The Eternal Summer of Troika Tuesday
Every Troika Tuesday (or "Tuesday" for uncool people) I am in the London Library working on whatever I damn well please . Explicitly anything, not something. No plan. Here, every week, one day becomes like those endless childhood summer days where the world stops flowing through you for a bit. There is some kayfabe around it, so I hesitate to say it, but this day is my most productive day by a…
Jaime Memorial Map
In fond memory of Jaime Worried (see The Ox Gang ) mercenary, henchman, professional, guest, and, dare we say it, friend , we, the Blancmnage & Thistle upper-middle management, present this map commissioned from one Barhadbesciabas Gorman . We sincerely hope that those who use it keep Jaime and his short but well used life in mind while exploring the Undercity , and, above all, never forget that…
Swarms and Banking Initiative
Huge numbers of enemies is always tough in a regular i-go-you-go initiative system. So for Troika the original solution was to cap the initiative to twice as many as the players. The benefit in numbers is that they maintain that level through casualties, and they have an ambiguous amount of additional flexibility in where they are and what they're doing. My current dungeon has a lot of gremlins.…
Spider Banking
See this post for more on spider bankers. Open an account to hold currency Initial account fee: 100p Receive a unique lace tally of bewildering complexity that marks you as the account holder and is updated by the spiders on use. The pattern, scent, tension and gauge all convey meaning and make it almost unforgeable and unreadable my anyone other than a spider banker. The account is unreachable…
Bullet POINT
Something I have strong feelings about is ideas. Mainly about how they are both cheap and do not exist until I can poke it with a stick. As an easily accessible publisher you would not believe how many times people have literally come in off the street and said "I have an idea for a game, how can we work together". And I mean idea. Full stop. Think of a building. A cathedral made of lapis lazuli…