A street-by-street, door-by-door gazetteer of the Troikan borough of Ripplegate with spider banks, fire cults, population adjusters, and hundreds of other small businesses all mapped and packed with stats, spells, and secrets for your Troika games.
The Visitor's Good-Time Guide to Ripplegate, being a Door-By-Door Gazetteer of its Good Citizens, their Homes, Businesses and Distractions therein; Together with Sundry Warnings for the Unwary, a Word on Local Custom, and Notes towards their Safe Return; Compiled with Great Diligence and No Small Peril.
Look! Book!
A Gazetteer
A gazetteer should be huge. You should feel like you know the place, its people, its ways, but in your bones, not in your head. Understanding a place (even a fictional one) is not achieved with facts and numbers, it's from living in it.
From Melsonian Arts Council and Daniel Sell, publishers and writer of Troika!, comes a brand new setting for running urban adventures, fleshing out a party home area, and pillaging for weird NPCs and locations.
Built for Play
Built from years of active campaign play, A Bit O' Troika gives you everything you need to bring your city to life. A book which exhaustively populates a city map in the same way one might populate a dungeon; every street and building has things going on, people living or working there, and the possibility of the players interacting with them.
Inside the book are just shy of 500 keyed locations, as many NPCs, along with street encounters, an arson whodunnit, one neglected standing army, and a minor corridor of the Goblin Labyrinth.
Local Flavour
The borough of Ripplegate is a typical¹ slice of Troika, with busy streets, crowded buildings, opinionated citizens, and more shopkeepers than you can shake a stick at. All of which have been exhaustively captured in this shockingly robust resource for those curious about the City of Troika and it's citizens. Locations are concisely statted for the mechanics of Troika covering Skill, Stamina, Luck and Armour along with teachable skills, and a descriptive vignette, all slight enough for off-the-cuff use with wandering players and meaty enough for the GM to weave into a whole adventure at their leisure if anything sticks.
Some typical locations:
Putti's Buns Myste Road #1 Residents: Fridolin Salvius, apocalypse priest (Read Entrails) 9/14/3/0 A venerable baker's famous for its devotional currant buns. Each is toasted with the Putti, a bisected circular branding iron of contested provenance, and spread inside with butter and thick black jam. Pilgrims used to buy armfuls of them on their way to the Tower of Sabaoth to be hurled at the walls, jam side out, as high and as permanently as possible. Some pilgrims, unaware of the state of the Tower, still brave the daily queue which regularly reaches all the way to the Box Market during lunch hours. In stark contrast to the jolly baking staff, Fridolin, keeper of the Putti, is an eternally singed, dour man who takes his duties seriously while quietly hoping to be the last to uphold them.
Named after a quote from the famous war hero and martyr St Sir Ormon, this lance makers yard serves as a gathering space for rowdy jousters and monarchists. Yohan, master lance maker and aspiring revolutionary, lords over the place like a Duke (he would never presume kingship), handing down proclamations on jousting fashion and commentary on the results of the latest tournaments. He wears full tournament armour at all times, both to intimidate customers and to hide his cacogenic form.
Ugly Granny Medicine Ripple Road #1 Residents: Gertrude Tenenan, early morning drysalter (Spell: Exchange Shape) 5/17/2/1(clothes stuffed with newspapers) - Weird Ina, late night herbalist (Spell: Tongue Twister) 3/15/2/1(clothes stuffed with newspapers) - Adam Chapel, nervous chemist (Spell: Presence) 8/9/1/0
Jars of powders, unguents, pickles and balms fill high, tight corridors of shelves that never lead to a counter at which to buy them. Adam Chapel, the chemist, though clearly heard rattling glass and shuffling papers one aisle over, remains unseen and always one step ahead of you as though afraid of being caught. Consulting him about an ailment can be done by talking as though to oneself, wondering aloud at the unfairness of your condition and how you would be able to go home and rest if only someone could ease your immediate and clearly listed symptoms. Shortly the correct medicine along with a receipt will appear in a paper bag poking out of a shelf around the next corner. Anyone leaving without paying will receive a visit from a couple of unusually large alcades soon after.
Anti-Canon
So you've run Troika for a decade and are worried we'll overwrite your campaign canon? Worry not! Troika is infinite, all versions of itself absolutely exist somewhere within its borders. A Bit O' Troika is huge, dense, specific and peculiar, meaning your game will be enriched rather than contradicted.
Everyone who backs A Bit O' Troika will immediately get a full and permanent digital copy of the Troika! rules via DriveThruRPG.
Other good reasons to support this project includes:
The book and bundles are cheaper here than they will be at general release.
Backing this book makes it more likely we'll make more books in the future.
You get a front row seat to the publishing process, which is notoriously fun.
More backers makes us feel good. We all love to feel loved right?
You're cool enough to have seen this project. Seriously, we don't have a massive YouTube channel feeding eyeballs into the cash register over here, if you're reading this you probably care about art² continuing to get made. It's like how when I spot a second hand bookshop I always buy something, no matter what, as a tiny vote for their eventual return.
All pledges come with a PDF of the core Troika! rules for free, provided immediately on pledging.
All O' Troika Bundle
A Bit O' Troika - Troika! - Whalgravaak's Warehouse - The Hand of God - Eye of the Aeons - Season of the Snail - Get It At Sutler's - all in print & digital
Along with A Bit O' Troika and the Troika! core rules, also get every book we have ever made that is specifically set in the city of Troika itself (all in print & digital). That is at least 15-20 sessions of pre-made adventures. Frame them all inside Bits O' Troika, add the almost bottomless pile of downtime activity and adventure seeds in Get It At Sutlers, andit'll be a while before you have to write your own adventures. By then you'll be more than qualified to take the reigns.
Day Tripper Bundle
A Bit O' Troika - Troika! - both in print & digital
This bundle includes everything you need to explore the neighbourhood, meet the locals, sample the cuisine, avoid the population adjusters, and get a campaign running for a good long while.
A Bit O' Troika
A Bit O' Troika (print) - Troika! (digital)
Get the most magnificent city gazetteer ever published (probably) in both print and digital format, along with a free digital copy of the Troika! core rules.
A Bit O' Troika - digital
A Bit O' Troika - Troika! - digital
Get A Bit O' Troika and a free copy of the Troika! core rules in convenient digital format via DriveThruRPG..
Rejoice! Print the book. The campaign is a success.
£25,000
Celebrate! Every backer will receive the complete Melsonian Arts Council collection of PDFs on DriveThruRPG and Itch.io. Every book so far.
£250,000
Become the most funded³ tabletop RPG book that isn't based on an IP or attached to a YouTube channel! Start a world tour doing motivational speaking on how publishing isn't dead yet. Also secure the rights to Columbo: The Tabletop Roleplaying Game while on the US leg of the tour. And free bookmarks for all backers!
The books will be fulfilled from within the USA and the UK, and we will charge and dispatch them according to whichever is most available and cost-efficient for you. All post will be arranged duties-paid where possible.
How much?
Assuming nothing changes, postage estimates are a follows:
UK Single book £4.50 Bundles £5.50
EU Single book £10-17 (location dependant) Bundles £13-20 (location dependant)
Everywhere else Single book - £18 Bundles - £20
All prices are based on our working knowledge of shipping orders as of August 2026. World events may see them go up, similarly our efforts to simplify and economise fulfilment may see them go down.
Fulfilment
We've been running and successfully fulfilling crowdfunding campaigns for a decade now. UK backers will be fulfilled by us from our own warehouse; the rest of the world will be fulfilled either by regional partners or by us directly.
The expected fulfilment target of June 2027 is a conservative deadline, built around worst-case scenarios rather than likely ones. Crowdfunding is ostensibly meant to speculatively fund creative, risky projects, but in practice both creators and backers treat it like a pre-order. While this isn't one (the book can't be made without this funding), it would be unfair to provide a release date that is anything short of overwhelmingly likely. So, June next year, with good odds (and absolutely no promises) we all get pleasantly surprised when it arrives much earlier.
No AI has been within a nautical mile of a word or an image in this book. It'll be chopped up, consumed, recycled and illegally used in a CEO's company Christmas card very soon though, so enjoy that just human smell while you can!
It's not easy keeping up with cool, real things in this AI riddled, influencer driven attention economy so maybe join our famously cool and real newsletter. It's inexplicably popular!
Tony Hough Veteran freelance fantasy illustrator, best known amongst our sort for late era Fighting Fantasy, Melsonia's own Get it at Sutler's and some classic Warhammer Fantasy/40k pieces . Andrew Walter Melsonia house artist, along with Old School Essentials, a constellation of zines, and his own comics.
Shuyi Zhang Melsonia house artist, comic artist, book designer
Published by:
Melsonian Arts Council Adventure game publishers of repute, established and running into the wind since 2015.
A local youth group
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ¹ If anything can be said of being typical of an infinite city; A question for the mathmologists ² Art is used here to describe something made by a human in pursuit of a line of curiosity, and is in no way a value judgement. Bad art is still art. ³ Guesstimated comparative study of all TTRPG crowdfunders
