Journey Over the Troll Bridge to Keep Magick City Aloft

Our great friend and amazing creator Brian Colin just launched a crowdfunding campaign for his latest brainchild. Over the Troll Bridge is a narrative roleplaying game of high adventure based on the Down We Go system. The rules light game focuses on collaborative storytelling and Brian recently ran a one shot for our Tuesday night Nerdarchy crew. We had an absolute blast! I love tightly focused RPGs like this so let’s get into it.

Cross bridge, find loot, save your city

While big name RPGs aim at providing a system for players to run any kind of game they can imagine there is limitless design space to explore creating games with much clearer objectives and I’m a big fan of this paradigm. Whereas an RPG like D&D is built on an assumption of every group playing their own distinct style of the game, which is terrific, I very much appreciate games like Over the Troll Bridge because of the refreshing departure from that approach.

Stylish, thematic RPGs feel much more accessible to me. I can imagine having some friends over, deciding to play Over the Troll Bridge on a whim and doing so within just a few minutes. There’s no lengthy character creation process or complex rules to follow. Instead Over the Troll Bridge presents the kind of game I always think of as an RPG and board game hybrid. A bit of customization, a dash of dice rolling randomness, creative space for storytelling and a strong central premise to tie it all together.

The succinct rule book is only 24 vivid pages, which includes terrific Referee resources along with the easy to learn rules and a starter quest too. This all adds up to the perfect kind of boutique RPG I grow more fond of all the time.

Players choose one of the four trolls (rope, wood, stone or metal) with each including a few customization choices, all shown on the character sheets specialized for each troll. A few dice rolls determine the scope of a new adventure, which all focus on the thematic premise. The system relies on very simple d20 and d6 mechanics, which makes it especially accessible for new players and children. If I’m not mistaken one of the motivating reasons to create Over the Troll Bridge was for an RPG the whole family can play.

“The shifting metropolis known as Magick City is a place of wonder. Its bridges take trolls to countless exciting lands, and their influences make its districts and neighborhoods dynamic and diverse. Unique cultural inspirations cause them to constantly change, but they also physically move and shift as power is diverted to keep the city afloat.”

Like a lot of Brian Colin’s work this game is inspired by his family and you’ll find them listed as game designers along with illustrator Carey Drake and editor Walton Wood. When I first met Brian years ago at Origins it was his story about creating the World of Revilo with his son that I thought was super cool and it’s just as neat to see more of the Colin family creating this fun project together.

Traveling across a magical bridge to a mysterious new realm, gathering whatever treasures you find during the allotted time and then returning to the trolls’ home of Magick City in time sums up what players do during a game. However this manifests is anyone’s guess. Since the titular bridges connect Magick City to basically anywhere an adventure’s only limit is the group’s imagination.

Over at Nerdarchy the YouTube channel we played a one shot run by lead designer Brian. Before we got started he asked all the players if anything came to mind we might like to see in the adventure and since I went all the way in playing a Rope Troll I threw out the idea of a Wild West component where my lasso and cowboy accent would fit. Lo and behold our bridge let to a desert where a gigantic cactus had been hollowed out to make a casino for rat people. And it was run by robots, naturally.

You can check out the campaign to find out more about Over the Troll Bridge and get your own copy right here.

New videos all the time at Nerdarchy the YouTube channel