What inspired Trilogy?
From 2016 to 2023 I ran an actual play podcast called Crudely Drawn Swords and that show was an extended campaign largely playing Dungeon World by Sage LaTorra and Adam Koebel. By the last few years of the show we were running into some of the limitations of Dungeon World as a system and following some truly reprehensible behaviour from Adam Koebel for which he showed no sign of contrition it also felt bad to be promoting the game.
Dungeon World imports a lot of ideas from old school RPGs and some of these work very well, but others (notably hit points and 0-20 range ability scores that are only used to calculate modifiers) felt a little clunky compared with the more elegant systems in other Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) games. I thought I could write something that worked well for longer fantasy campaigns and and used some of the more traditional PbtA mechanics for representing injury and stress to characters. I also wanted a system that gave equal weight to non-violent problem solving. The consequence is Trilogy.
One thing that we really enjoyed over the Crudely Drawn Swords campaign was building the world together as we played and I wanted to see whether I could take that even further in this game, so the game begins with the Appendices, wherein you build the world together at the table. There is no setting, there is no lore in the book, that is for you to decide in play.
That created a challenge because it meant that I couldn’t know anything about the world that player characters will inhabit ahead of time. My solution to this was that instead of a traditional RPG character class, your characters have a narrative arc that represents their role in the story. Some of these (such as the Fighter, the Magus and the Healer) look very like traditional character classes, others (the Defeated, the Volunteer, the Mentor) are quite different. You advance along your arc by leaning into your character and hitting pre-defined beats as you go, gaining new moves and new opportunities as you do.
How is Trilogy different from other games?
In addition to the built-in worldbuilding and the approach of narrative arcs, Trilogy has several systems to help structuring play. In particular the Scene system creates a clear boundary between in-character and out-of-character play, this lets you switch between representing your characters directly during a scene and taking more of a writers-room approach to play between scenes. There is also a fun Montage mechanic to give you a relatively quick way to play out the kind of journey or preparation that would be shown as a montage if your game was a film.
Is Trilogy easy to run?
Trilogy does require a GM (Game Master/Game Manager/Godlike Muse) to play the part of the world and the non-player characters, but as a long-time GM myself I designed it to be as simple as possible. The book is packed with examples of play and the second half is entirely dedicated to GM guidance. My hope is that even if you don’t get time to play Trilogy straight away, you can still benefit from the GM advice, which is widely applicable.
It is also designed to require relatively minimal preparation – as GM it is useful to keep notes of what happens during a session, but the game is more interested in story than in strategy, so creating NPCs and opponents is largely a case of answering a set of standard questions and thinking of fun descriptions for them.
How well this suits you will depend somewhat on your approach – for me as a GM who enjoys improvising at the table and does not enjoy homework, it is ideal. If you are the kind of GM who prefers to play through adventures from a sourcebook it may not suit you as well, and that’s alright – there are many more games catering to that kind of play.
Is Trilogy easy to play?
If you are taking part as a player with a character, everything you need will be on your character summary and your playbook, which you can download along with the main game. Aside from that you need two, or ideally three, six sided dice and a pencil. How you play your character is entirely down to you.
Isn’t it restrictive being on a character arc?
When you read about character arcs, it might seem as though they represent a kind of railroading, a constraint on your character’s agency, but that is not how it feels in play. Instead you have a direction of travel, a little like a character in a novel or television show – it creates something both you and your fellow players can lean into, creating opportunities to encourage one another into ever more extravagant adventures. Our experience in playtests has been that it is no more restrictive than any other character class system. In fact, given that the shared moves give characters a lot of power and agency, they are less restrictive than many class systems.
Who is Trilogy for?
Although Trilogy is designed to be enjoyable for lots of different types of player it will particularly appeal to people who like to make their own settings, those of us who preferred making our own toys to playing with other people’s. To stretch the analogy dangerously close to breaking point, Trilogy is like RPG lego rather than a set of action figures. You can make almost anything with it, but you will have to apply your own creativity a little.
Trilogy is also the game I want to play – for years I kept an eye on the community expecting somebody to release a game like this, until eventually I realised that if I wanted it to exist, I’d have to write it.
Why is it called Trilogy?
Epic fantasy as we understand it started from a trilogy of books and the format remains a common one in modern publishing, so it felt genre-appropriate. Also a character in Trilogy can make their way through up to three arcs before retirement, which seemed like a fitting way for the game structure to match the concept.
Also there wasn’t already an RPG called Trilogy, I was as surprised as you are.
Why Powered by the Apocalypse?
There are some great narrative-first game systems around and I considered several of them when I was starting to design the game. The reason that I settled on the PbtA framework was partly that I am very familiar with running it and with designing moves that work with that approach but also because you consistently use two or three dice and a modifier so rolling is quick and easy. Particularly during a scene I wanted to have as little mechanical negotiation as possible, to give everyone more opportunity to focus on what is happening in character rather than worrying about the game.
What kind of worlds can Trilogy create?
Trilogy expects a few classic fantasy elements to be part of your world and the Appendices section walks you through these – fundamentally it expects a world that has some kind of magic to it, and where technology is pre-modern. Beyond that, the game is very flexible – if you want a dark fantasy setting where magic is exceedingly rare or forbidden or a world where everyone inhabits floating crystal towers and commutes between them on magic trains, you can play that in Trilogy. Perhaps you want to play the former in the ruins of the latter after some terrible sorcerors’ war – these are the kind of ideas that Trilogy thrives on.
The game is interested in narrative detail more than strategic detail, so there’s little difference between a magically enhanced crossbow and a black powder pistol as far as the mechanics are concerned.
As long as everybody at the table agrees on the tone and style of the game, you can have a great time in any of these settings.
Can I use Trilogy to run a game in my existing setting?
Absolutely. It is worth going through the worldbuilding questions in the Appendices anyway, to ensure you know everything you need to, but Trilogy will stretch to fit pretty much any fantasy setting.
It really sings when you create the world at the table, however. There is something about the creativity of talking through ideas together that gets very interesting and fun results, and when you have created the world together then everybody playing the game knows everything they need to from the very start.
Where can I play Trilogy online?
I am very close to completing a Virtual Tabletop that will allow you to play it on this site. I will release the source code on Github, which will include all the character arcs and related data, so it should be easy enough to bring over to other platforms, too.
Will there be a print version of Trilogy?
It is very expensive to print things. If enough people want to see it we may look at a crowdfunding campaign for a print edition, but there are no plans in that direction as yet.
Can I stream/release an actual play of Trilogy?
I would love that – if you’re going to do this feel free to let me knowand I will promote it wherever I can.
Given my own background in actual play, I think the game will work well in this context. In fact…
Can you recommend an actual play of Trilogy?
Starting from Thursday 25th April 2024 we will be streaming a campaign over on the Crudely Drawn Swords youtube channel.