Journey Over the Troll Bridge and Keep Magick City from Falling into the Lava Below

March 21, 2022

Creator Spotlight/ Previews/ Roleplaying Games

Hot on the heels of an amazing new tabletop roleplaying game one of the most creative people we know came up with another super fun RPG and it’s available right now. Creature Curation’s Brian Colin put together a brand new game called Over the Troll Bridge, a minimalist OSR (Old School Renaissance) inspired RPG for 1-7 players. Brian developed the game with his kids Wyatt and Ruby, with art by Carey Drake.

Play trolls, cross bridges, find treasure

Over the Troll Bridge’s itchio page explains how the game is based on Down We Go and licensed for their use under CC BY 4.0 International. One of my absolute favorite things about this game is the succinct description of what players do during gameplay. This is the very first thing I look for in any RPG and providing a clear statement up front means a great deal.

“Everyone else will create and play a troll. The group of trolls the players are in is known as a troupe. Your troupe of trolls works together to bring back as much loot as possible from your quests into unknown lands.”

And if that’s not clear enough there’s a sidebar with even more explicit description of the game explaining how the goal of the game is to keep Magick City floating in the air by bringing loot from quests to be melted down in the forge. I love this! Completely open ended RPGs certainly have their place in the hobby but I’m equally excited about games with a very clear premise. To me these represent a cool creative space somewhere between a board game and a traditional RPG. They’re super easy to pick up and run as a self-contained activity but flexible enough to play an ongoing campaign.

The work-in-progress version of Over the Troll Bridge shared with us by Brian is a tight 24 pages featuring a very colorful, energetic graphic design style, which does a terrific job visually evoking the atmosphere of the game. Players choose from one of four types of trolls — Metal, Rope, Stone or Wood — and each type has it’s own single page character sheet with everything you need to play. All the features include their effects so there’s no need to look back at the rulebook constantly during play.

Over the Troll Bridge uses a d20 and d6 for mechanics, with players adding the level of any relevant ability to their d20 roll against a difficulty determined by the Referee. The d6 comes in for Encounter or Chance rolls, with each potential roll of this die tied to a specific outcome and possibly further adjusted by the Ref based on player input, circumstances and creativity.

The game delivers narratively too and I am a big fan of how it presents lots of evocative ideas without getting bogged down in too many details. Over the Troll Bridge’s Magick City location is a wondrous place connected to many lands through the titular bridges players’ troll characters quest to maintain. This connection to distant lands makes the hub location diverse in terms of not only the inhabitants but the sorts of gear, items and treasure available. There’s even a section to help bring the city to life as a collaborative effort between the Ref and other players including a fun worksheet to track these details.

In fact there’s a lot of worksheets, trackers and amazing roll charts for tremendous game support. Along with these resources Over the Troll Bridge includes a variety of sidebars and helpful sections with tips and guidance directly for the Ref in easy to understand language.

Technically the game is in the funding phase at the time of this writing but at this point in development it’s already a completely ready to play game including everything needed to go on quests, collect loot and keep Magick City afloat. Additional funding translates primarily into more art, which is something all of Brian’s projects knock out of the park. Supporting the game at this stage is incredibly affordable but there’s also Community Copies of Over the Troll Bridge available for download at the bottom of the game’s itchio page right here.

*Featured image — Keep Magick City floating in the air by bringing loot from quests to be melted down in the forge in Over the Troll Bridge from Creature Curation. [Illustration by Carey Drake]