Active Time Battle!!! Postmortem

Active Time Battle!!! was originally intended to be a d66 of science fantasy backgrounds with a central theme of time travel coupled with a loose adventure/setting guide. Over its development, I decided to release the first d6 of these backgrounds for free as a sort of demo/free trial to get some eyes on my work with the intention of doing a crowdfunding campaign to support the full release. Through playtesting, and writing to rewriting to rerewriting this project, I have finally settled on a pipeline of three releases. Active Time Battle!!! is the first small tasty morsel of all the manic research I’ve done on the concept of time travel in TTRPGs. Next will come the full release of the originally intended d66 of Troika backgrounds (though with a much lighter emphasis on time travel). After that, the intro module to the setting will go out with full OSR compatibility rules. Finally, sometime far into 2024, I hope to begin the process of releasing the original idea, but as a full blown hack of Troika!’s ruleset. This is going to be interesting for me, because these four works are forever linked together as sibling projects. Thus, there will be four post mortem articles along this journey, this being the first. 

And due to all of the changes in the trajectory of Active Time Battle!!!’s development, this post mortem comes much earlier than I anticipated. To be perfectly honest, I haven’t really fully comprehended this past year yet. So much has happened in my personal and professional lives, that it feels like I’ve been on some Mad Max nightmare hell roller coaster. The goals in front of me are like a mountain peak dancing in the mists. The distance to my goal on that mountain ever elusive to me, taunting me with false promises of success and understanding. 

In an attempt to speak plain what has already been so overmeditated and overexamined: I feel a bit better about my art, but my evaluation of my own works may be cucked forever because of my lifelong self-deprecation. The jury is still out on whether it can be something I completely take control of, or if there will always be a lil’ nugget of hatred for my past works. Just raw ass depressive mental quagmire shit. You know: babyback bullshit. 

I have reached a state for the first time in my life in which I can say I earnestly like my own work. My hands have begun to catch up to my eyes so to say. It is a strange and blissful era of creation, because I have found an art that I can make with complete disregard for the notion of being a “Professional Artist.” I now make stuff, because I like the stuff I make. Learning to speak an artistic language in a new medium– THE work I think I was always dreaming of in my soul as a child on through year 30, has enlightened me. I feel like a player character in Kult, I have peeled back a layer of reality and am peeking directly into the Blind Eternities. I see and speak truth in my game language and in my aesthetic language. This is what I’ve always been seeking. 

I am Satoru Gojo, and I have just encountered Toji Fushiguro for the second time. 

“I’m sorry, Amanai. I’m not angry because of you right now, and I don’t hate anyone. Right now it’s just that this world feels so good.”

I’m definitely still not used to it. This new Awakened Six Eyes State could be caused by a range of things. I don’t know if this is getting medicated, actually releasing games and selling some, or finally coming to like the art I make, being driven to create with further and further tempered diligence. I want this state to never stop for the rest of my life. It’ll be fine to wax and wane in accordance with the tides of my social and professional lives. I’m learning to really love the act of creation for all its warty glory.

Active Time Battle!!! is an early sign of tectonic motion in my artistry. Something rumbled deep in my soul and I was able to really unscrew the lid of my head and pour my dank queer science fantasy nonsense onto the table for you to gobble up. (EDITOR’S NOTE: This was written very baked on a Saturday afternoon right after thanksgiving. That metaphor was terrible, but I’m keeping it in for posterity’s sake.) 

I just generally feel good about it despite the flaws I see in it whenever I look at the first six pages of the next release, Active Time Event!!! Active Time Battle!!!, having always been intended to be a sort of free demo of the full work before it had a major schism and mutated into four bespoke products. Well three bespoke products and a demo. 

You see, my master plan was to release Active Time Battle!!! for free to get those juicy, delicious email addresses. All of the sage TTRPG creator advice out there stresses that one of the most important facets of the industry is to have a robust, ever growing subscriber list. I’ve seen it be claimed to be more important than all other social media in general for TTRPGs. A strange and novel concept for someone who grew up in the DIY Punk and Metal scenes of Georgia, and Florida the past 30 years. All my experience was that video based social media was most effective for art. That was a misunderstanding. Video based social media is best for all the art I had been making: illustration and music. I toiled around in 100% obscurity for the first year of publishing TTRPG work and putting it out there into the spicy interwebs. It’s really only in the past six months that any of my solo work has had any interest at all, and I really hope it's because of the some small adjustments that I’ve made.

My sense is that this has to do with my now Awakened Six Eye Jujutsu Prowess. But I’m still unsure how. On to Active Time Battle!!!, but like forreal this time.

It’s basically science fantasy time travel gumbo. Extra heavy on the Smoked Chrono Trigger. Maybe it has a spicy side dish of Adventure Time? Idk. Anecdote: I waffled hella hard on a title for this product and her future triplet sisters. At one point in pure desperation, I thought to myself, “What would the most distilled and direct title for this product be? I decided it was simply Time Adventure which was a quite hilarious ouroboros moment (or Ourovorous if you’re peeking into this article from the future– Hail, fair time traveler! I hope Trump didn’t cause the fucking Rumbling in 2024!)

Again: basically Chrono Trigger. I hope it reads right but isn’t too obvious. I had a playtest just last night at a small convention in which a player had a massive and hearty “Aha!” when I told him the playtest was my attempt at telling a story with the ontological shape of Chrono Trigger in a tabletop game. So I’m not worried or anything, but I am genuinely curious how many people get the myriad references in this sibling set of game books. I’ve been mulling over a concept in a video by The Cinema Cartography in which the argument “To elevate your work, you must elevate your reference” is made. I think I wholeheartedly agree, and maybe if you read this post mortem and the next three postmortems, you might find that you also agree. 

I’m thinking of doing a new illustration for the following product, Active Time Event!!!, and using the tagline “A d66 Clusterfuck of Science Fantasy Nonsense.” That’s kind of the intent, full stop. I want to just make stuff that I would genuinely think is fun to GM for and for Players to play with. I guess right now that just means Chrono Trigger by way of Fiona and Cake era Adventure Time canon– wild and at times maybe even a bit too elicit. Someone recently told me that they found Kessler Syndrome to be “the angriest game” he’s ever read. Maybe this one will be the sexiest game he’s ever read. And maybe hardcore after that?

Writing and illustrating these Troika backgrounds has felt like a damn fever dream. It’s my own cozy nerd hell. Working myself to death after my day job to illustrate Cheetara wearing Luke Skywalker’s space tunic. It seems people like that, I guess? As long as I can keep putting blatantly queer characters on the covers of my books and no one wants to fight me about that, and maybe even if that’s not explicitly the case, I’ll keep doing it. I’ll keep doing it, because the tiny Zachary in my brain in charge of the feel good juice lets me have a little sippy when I make a thing. 

  I wanted to tackle a Troika product because of the stretchy nature of the game’s design. I want my digital illustration to have the malleability of cartooning, but taken as seriously as contemporary marvels like that of Scavenger's Reign, Disco Elysium, and Ultraviolet Grasslands. Phantasmagoric and whimsical, playful yet dark and refined. I know this is a hella lofty goal, but this is ostensibly what I went to school for. Whatever the hell this is. Games writing? Media writing? What did my degree say again? Professional Smart Person? No, wait, that's my lanyard from my day job. I haven't checked it in a while, but it probably says traditionally educated cynic. Whatever– I made a video game and studied Soothsaying at University in the Deep South. I got Dark Power and I want my work to reflect that Drab Majesty. Fiction and reality blurs, and everything has a sharp philosophic undertone. If I’m going to spend every waking second not spent directly on some immediate task frantically thinking of the connection of the harsh realities of the human condition driving us to seek bleaker fantasy, I might as well make some goddamned money while philosophically giving myself a sad handjob. 

And I craved that freedom. Say whatever the fuck I wanna say. Draw every stupid and hilarious thing I can think of and synthesize game mechanics along with those frantic digital scramblings. I wanna be a dang Sleazy Moogle Alchemist working on grinding out the Ultima Weapon. Emphasis on the grinding, baby! I can’t escape my childhood enamour for Final Fantasy, and it finally clawed its way to the surface. What is the opposite of Magical Realism? Reality Fantasy? Horreurs Fantastiques Banales? Okay, this writing tone has gotten too ridiculous. Let’s recap.

Active Time Battle!!! is a d6 of Science Fantasy JRPG Backgrounds for Troika! by Melsonian Arts Council. The original idea spawned from the desire to make an adventure that uses the Troika! system to play a Chrono Trigger-like adventure. I spent pretty much the entirety of the past year developing the 36 bespoke backgrounds as well as fleshing out a barebones setting called Tempus. I spent the first large chunk of time designing this concept just reading science fiction about the concept of time travel. The 6 backgrounds in ATB!!! are my attempt to iterate on the 6 archetypes of characters that make up the base party.

Front Right to Left:

1. The Non Euclidean Himbo - Crono
2. Partners in Time - Marle
3. B3. M0R3 - Robo
   
4. Manic Mechanic - Lucca
5. Wild THANG of a Bygone Era - Aayla
   
6. Beastman-At-Arms - Frog

My goal was to take these six character archetypes and roll my favorite examples of them together. For example I see these examples elsewhere in RPGs: The Non-Euclidean Himbo’s design was heavily inspired by Tidus of Final Fantasy X. The Manic Mechanic’s design is vaguely reminiscent of an NPC from one of my home games who is heavily inspired by Lucca Ashtear. Overall, I think I more or less succeeded in this. The folks who have seen and played these backgrounds have expressed nothing but positive feedback. 

Currently, Active Time Battle!!! has about 60ish downloads between DTRPG and Itch.io. At time of writing, a couple copies are downloaded every few days. Putting the price point of the work at the low, low price of free was a strategy to collect those juicy email addresses. We’ll see how that pans out for Active Time Event!!!’s planned release for early next year. For the moment, let’s go over the various feedback I’ve gotten on this project. 

Number one: My First Proper Review. While lurking in the murky inner depths of the publishing tools of DrivethruRPG, I found an alert that one of my projects had been given a written review. It was five of five stars. I blinked my eyes a few times in a little bit of shock. No one had written any reviews of my solo work up to this point, and the most recent numerical review at that point was a two of five stars someone gave HEAVY METAL HAND CLASH, which was hilarious to me. Why waste your time by giving a free one page RPG from a one month game jam a rating that low? Goofy. So with a little bit of trepidation, I clicked over to the review: 

For the past few days, I have soloed my way through the fun adventure that is included in Troika! Numinous Edition (120 pages, on sale at DriveThruRPG). I used the six characters in Active Time Battle!!! (8 pages). The adventure starts at the front desk of The Blancmange & Thistle. They are told that they can have the last room that is available. It is on the eighth floor which is also the location of a big party. After the PCs pay, they are invited to that party. In the lift they try to converse with the lift attendant, but that is a one-way conversation. On the second floor, The Old Lady enters the lift. She asks lots of questions. The PCs answer her questions and get awarded with a bonbon apiece.

On the second floor, The Gas Form enters the lift. The PCs can’t breathe, so they get out on that floor. They take the stairs up (no more elevator trips for them). They find the merchant on the third floor and they sell their bonbons for coins. On the fourth floor the PCs encounter a woman and her tigers. The PCs do not bother the tigers. On the fifth floor, they notice that their group has increased to seven. He is the Mysterious Friend. Further down the hall they are attacked by Spiteful Owls. The PC mechanic has a drone which does take damage. The PCs kill three of the owls and the others fly out the broken windows. For loot, the PCs collect owl feathers. On the sixth floor stairs, they encounter puddles of Demon Seawater. Two of the PCs can’t get past the puddles and the PC Android attacks the PC named Kunai. The wounded Kunai follows the advice of his ancestral totem. This enables him to bring back the Android to his senses. Kunai makes sure everyone gets past the puddles and he drags them if he has to.

On level seven, they encounter The Slug Monarch and his Heralds. The PCs pay the toll with owl feathers. In the hallway they see two Mysterious Strangers, but the PCs do not interfere with what is going on. They climb some more stairs and do not take The Alien Maw option. Instead, they make attempts to jump from step to step to avoid falling down into the Wide Carnivorous Sky. The PC Felicia and the android fail the attempt and fall. On the top step, the rest of the PCs find a sleeping woman and their two friends who had fallen. Next to the woman is a spellbook (missing some pages). The PCs quietly take the spellbook and continue on. This puts them in The Dream World of Madame Belloza, but this is an adventure for another day.

Give this a try!

• Bob V.G.

If it's not clear to you, dear reader, not only is this a review of Active Time Battle!!!, but it’s also a review of Troika! itself. Bob used ATB!!! to run the Blancmange & Thistle one-shot in the back of the Troika! rulebook. It’s beautiful. I was genuinely moved while reading this. This is what we do this for. Up to this point, I’d never gotten any evidence that the people buying my games were even playing them. The Forever DM’s curse, it is! Spend money on games you will never convince your players to try. Shame. It seems that Bob V.G. didn’t care about that. He played Active Time Battle!!! all on his own. I’d never even considered that someone might do that. Truly, transcendentally dope. I thank Bob for giving my character designs life! ATB!!! still has a 5 star rating at the time of writing. Gnarly!

I used ATB!!! along with the intro module I mentioned at the beginning of this article to run a one-shot at a local games convention for my wife and a few other people. As I was setting up and getting the other players ready to roll characters, another GM (sup Wayne) who was running his own game later in the schedule stopped in to talk to me about my design and illustration work. It seems that I finally got the reaction I want, “Wait, you wrote this, laid it out, AND illustrated everything, too?” Why yessir! You are correct, and I do not in fact have a life. He was interested enough to sign up for my one shot as well. I’m to meet him for lunch next week, possibly to talk shop over providing his game Rustwater with some illustrations. 

On to the most recent feedback. In a recent session of my own homebrew mix of Troika and Ultraviolet Grasslands, a player character (Chaos Champion) merged with the soul of his previous character who had ascended to some elevated state of being. The Chaos Champion had been chasing the cold trail of this elevated being to exact revenge over a previous slight. Now face to face with his old character, I offered this player a choice: rip up your sheet, and end Grimjack’s quest, or simply wake back up having made no progress. Grimjack formed a Grimpact with the devious Garth Mulligan and was transformed. With this synthesis of ideology and character we decided it would be best for Grimjack to evolve into The Non-Euclidean Himbo: Grimchad. It went over really well with my group, and Grimchad is now rocketing toward the climax of that campaign with a collection of other colorful fuckups created from a mix of Daniel Sell’s work, Luka Rejec’s work, and my own work. It still all feels so surreal. Most of the time I’m huddled over my tablet at my desk, ripping hippy speedballs and drawing my ass off under a dim desk lamp. After working so damn hard for so long, I stopped looking at the proverbial finish line. I just make stuff now for that elusive feeling of watching a player at my table get excited over some stupid and inane bullshit I wrote or drew. Who knows where the finish line for all this is. Maybe it would be better for me to eventually die having not ever reached that finish line. If I stay hungry for creation itself, I always be creating with fervor and passion. At this point, I’m not sure it matters.

In the future, the next post mortem to be released will be Active Time Event!!! I plan to drop that in the next few months; with any luck it will be during Kickstarter’s Zine Quest in February 2024. I’m going to try to crowdfund a small print run of zines for Active Time Event!!!. That’s currently where my eyes are looking to. What’s behind that for the moment, I have no damn idea. The Mad Max hell rollercoaster is about to crest over its apex, and I think I’m about to go into freefall.

I hope there’s something cool at the bottom.

Love y’all,

Wilderwhim