[Review] Terror of the Stratosfiend #1

Terror of the Stratosfiend #1 has both a DCC and Troika! versions, written by Sean Richer of Orbitial Intelligence, LLC.

Once again for whatever it's worth, these were gifted to me by Sean, who is a wonderful person who writes really weird shit.

They are all B&W soft-cover POD for whatever that's worth. Some of the art feels very RIFTS.

#1
The Troika! compatible edition is 30 pages. The DCC edition is 60 pages, because DCC spells take up a lot of real estate.  I'm going to focus on the Troika! edition because I'm unlikely to ever ref DCC.

The backgrounds are tightly written. Four of the six backgrounds are ports of character classes, which is good, as both these backgrounds and the classes are strongly flavored.

It has a worshiper of sentient satellites, human sat-caster, that can ran judgement, but only if outside.

A like half-cthulumonster shadowrunner kind of person, half-stratosfiend street whisperer.

Two different kinds of weird extradimensional cycloptic tentacle aliens, one a wanderer in search of knowledge and the other a living seige weapon. A cool thing common among the stratosfiends is they have a tentacle weapon but it takes up one or more RANDOM inventory slots. I think it's wild and very interesting. Very strongly flavors the alieness of them.

The other two backgrounds are derived from the two Patrons in the DCC edition, a flaming death from above alien intelligence embodied in killsats, Sky-lasher the Everlasting, Trident of the Sun, and a cthonic tentacled hungry mother, Terror-eater, the Earth Mother, so yeah, those are actually god-like entities. It feels and reads kind of weird, but at the same time I like them. Disregarding that they are still well within the mechanical bounds of the core 36 backgrounds, the playing god-things is really pushing the edges flavor-wise, which is good. Personally, I take these two backgrounds as being independent sub-beings of their respective god-thing, rather than the true god-thing.

It has weapons, armor, some nifty gizmos, which all of which I'm cool with because the descriptions are great. But the coolest, most interesting thing in the equipment chapter is the upgrade system, even if I'm not super sold on all these upgrades. It's the IDEA of it. There is a small results table, like a weapon damage table, to determine a number of upgrades, from zero to three, but it uses a d6 table rather than just straight rolling a d3 or d6 so it can weight the results. That is really cool bit to me.

There's armor that gets better as the wearer takes damage until if springs to life in a fury of blood and anger, and there is another armor that has to be taking the piss on bikini armor because its beachwear that makes the wearer take more damage.

It's got spells, I think one of them might be undercosted as far as stamina goes, but it's probabably fine, this is Troika! afterall.

The bestiary is good. Having NPCs and creatures premade is one of the biggest things I look for now in games and supplements. GM facing material is so important in a vacuum. And here these creatures I want to use so badly. The mien tables are great, one of them has Juggling as an entry.

A good mix of whimsy and "horror."
I'm using this, and bit of NEIM, as the basis for a sphere I've labled "para-Earth" that is basically RIFTS Earth but Troika!

I recommend this for Troika! And if you're really ambitious you could drop in the DCC spells from the DCC version into your Troika! game just to see what happens.

I'm not sure how I'll approach #1.5 since it's totally DCC. I may wait until #2 drops, BTW that's coming to Kickstarter for Zinequest soon. But it has an elevator god-thing and elevator magic that does some weird ass shit.