The Other OSR: The Hand of God

Troika! is both a setting and a roleplaying game. As the latter, it provides simple, clear mechanics inspired by the Fighting Fantasy series of solo adventure books, but combined with a wonderfully weird cast of character types, all ready to play the constantly odd introductory adventure, ‘The Blancmange and Thistle’. As the former, it takes the Player Characters on adventures through the multiverse, from one strange sphere to another, to visit twin towers which in their dying are spreading a blight that are turning a world to dust, investigate murder on the Nantucket Sleigh Ride on an ice planet, and investigate hard boiled murder and economic malfeasance following the collapse of the Scarf-Worm investment bubble. At the heart of Troika! stands the city itself, large, undefined, existing somewhere in the cosmos with easy access from one dimension after another, visited by tourists from across the universe and next door, and in game terms, possessing room aplenty for further additions, details, and locations. One such location is The Hand of God.

The Hand of God is the second entry in a new series of scenarios for Troika! from the Melsonian Arts Council begun with Whalgravaak’s Warehouse. This is the ‘1:5 Troika Adventures’ series, which places an emphasis on shorter, location-based adventures, typically hexcrawls or dungeoncrawls, set within the city of Troika, but which do not provide new Backgrounds for Player Characters or ‘Hack’ how Troika! is played. The Hand of God lives up to these tenets, in that it is a dungeoncrawl that takes place in the upturned hand atop the tallest statue to a god in the temple district of the city of Troika. The Player Characters are plucked from their dreams and the scenario opens with them waking to find themselves atop the extended index finger, in the giant nest of THOG, the demon bird. It is a strikingly silly and utterly appropriate cold opening for the Player Characters and the scenario, and it makes the scenario incredibly easy to slot into a campaign. The Players Characters fall asleep one night and when they wake up, there they are. What the Player Characters can see below them is the fingers of the hand, a gondola spanning the distance between the index finger and the thumb, bridges between the other fingers, a tower on the middle finger whilst water rushes out of the tip of the finger to fall to a lake below, a ramshackle wooden town on the little finger, and far below on the palm, forests and mountains surrounding the lake, and even perhaps a way down. It is a wondrous vista, a sight unlike that in any other roleplaying game and The Hand of God never lets the Game Master or her players forget it. There are constant reminders of what the Player Characters can see throughout the adventure.

The Hand of God is a pointcrawl, consisting of locations linked by specific routes and connections, making deciding where to go from one location to the next easy to decide. It is literally laid out in front of them, like the palm of well, a god’s hand. As the Player Characters descend, they will encounter the denizens of the hand, like the Goblins at the Gondola Station led by Frenki, the elderly radical mazematician ostracised for his experimental maze design, and Skink, the priest from Jibberwind Temple, currently riding the gondola back and forth in silent contemplation, who could be provoked enough to start a fight—and would quite like it if you did. In a cave down the thumb, the sleazy, flat cap-wearing Crenupt the Undead, who has been thrown out of Jgigji, the tumbledown town of living dead on the little finger, who might have goods to sell that he very likely stole and if that fails, the means to take revenge by stealing everything from the town if the Player Characters will help him. All he wants is a lot of wine. A lot of wine. The index finger is scored and scarred by Sofia the Giant Serpent as she endlessly circumnavigates the finger, her iron scales cutting deep into the stone of the finger, whilst just above in the crags, three Harpy sisters all want food, but one also wants to hear fine music, another to see beautiful paintings, and a third to read beautiful words, and they all hate each other!

The hand has several major locations. They include Jibberwind Temple, which is home to the cult of the Perfect Fingers, dedicated to Thog, its looping corridors acting more as wind tunnels and its treasure vault the target of many an inhabitant of the hand, whilst Thark Village is being put to the torch by Automonous Arrests and Adjudication Inquisitorial sect of The Indelible Order of Allotted Idols as the villagers huddle in the crypts below and attempt a ritual which might save them. Elsewhere, there is Jgigji, the town of drunken undead, a wizard’s tower/folly where the wizard’s work is likely the actual folly, and a community of Parchment Witches—one of the signature character types in Troika!—who set snares and net traps for beast and intruders, using the skins of the former to create some of the best parchment across the spheres whilst squabbling about anything and everything. All of these locations and their various factions are interlinked and many of the people that they meet will share information or ask for help in return for it, pushing the Player Characters onwards in their exploration of the statue. The descriptions of the scenario’s many NPCs do vary in detail, but all are going to be fun for the Game Master to portray, some of the less detailed ones really leaving room for the Game Master to develop how she wants to portray them and make them memorable.

Escape is the ultimate aim for the Player Characters in The Hand of God. But there are also plenty of mini-locations and dungeons to explore, treasures to find or steal, and of course, there is the view to look at. Other options are suggested as to why the Player Characters might want to go to The Hand of God, whether that is find one of the treasures in the statue, locate a curse-eater, or discover their future from Vow, the Spider-God who can read the threads of fate. Many of these reasons might also explain why the Player Characters might want to return to The Hand of God in the future.

Physically, it all helps that the content of The Hand of God is presented in very accessible fashion. The maps are great and the adventure is decently illustrated. The scenario needs a slight edit in places.

The Hand of God manages to feel big, but is delightfully self-contained, more or less in the palm of a god’s hand, a pointcrawl as memorable for its location as its content, such that it is more of a ‘handcrawl’ than a pointcrawl. The Hand of God is fun, easy to drop into a campaign, and like any good Troika! scenario is weird and wondrous.