Acid Death Fantasy (2019) is a setting book for Troika by Luke Gearing and illustrated entirely by the aggravatingly talented David Hoskins.

The Troika rulebook strongly implies its chaotic core setting through its myriad character backgrounds, which nest nicely in the dream/nightmare of Fronds of Benevolence. Together, they demonstrate a specific sort of play. But what if you don’t want to play Troika that way? How do you do the same basic thing, but with a different flavor? Gearing shows you.

ADF consists of a brief introduction that lays out the barest frame for the setting — desert, a plastic sea, a thousand petty sultanates, a fallen high-tech civilization. At the end of the book are three tables for sketching out a sultanate and some adventure seeds. The rest of the book is split between character backgrounds and enemies. Reading through them, a handful of Gearing’s inspirations quickly becomes clear: Dune, Dark Sun, Al-Qadim, Fallout, Gorilla City, Arik Roper’s Dopesmoker cover, a smattering of real-world cultures and historical eras. There’s also plenty of original weird stuff too, though it is a bit more regimented by the setting themes.

By peppering the setting with stuff I recognize, even if those things are subverted or otherwise tinkered with, it provides hand holds I can work with to run a game here, perhaps with greater ease than core Troika (sometimes there is something to be said for having constraints!). Not only that, but seeing the familiar interact with the new and weird also teaches me how to make my own setting, should I desire.