Horvath’s Hoard

Monsters, Aliens, and Holes In the Ground was penned by enthusiastic RPG collector Stu Horvath as an outgrowth of his other work documenting vintage RPGs, which began with a humble Instagram account and now takes in a weekly podcast. It’s a handsomely-presented coffee table book, offering a sort of tabletop RPG equivalent of A History of the World In 100 Objects in which Horvath goes over his extensive personal collection and picks out RPG books to discuss – core rules primarily, but supplements, adventures, campaign settings, and less easily categorised items also feature.

Rather than simply offering a run-down of Horvath’s favourites, Horvath attempts to select items which help illustrate something about the tabletop gaming zeitgeist. If a game is historically significant or extremely influential, that counts for a lot, but Horvath also allows himself to include a few items which represent noteworthy oddities, intriguing creative dead ends, or outright screwups, because as in other creative fields infamous failures can be just as illustrative as celebrated successes. In addition, Horvath sticks to items from his own collection – he won’t include something he hasn’t heard of, or has not at least at some point owned and been able to make his own assessment of.

In this respect the biggest gap, as he acknowledges in the introduction, are RPGs in languages other than English; I don’t know whether or not Stu is multilingual, but presumably if he was multilingual enough to read and appreciate RPGs written in other languages, he’d have included some here, so this is really a tour through the Anglophone segment of the hobby; we get only second-hand glimpses, via translations, into areas like the Swedish scene, and nothing on Germany or Japan, all territories where games other than D&D rule the roost.

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Fortunately, Stu is a sufficiently seasoned collector that he is still able to cover a very wide expanse of games. In fact, let’s list them – the items given significant attention here are as follows:

• Dungeons & Dragons obviously takes up a fair chunk of space. You get entries on its OD&D, Holmes Basic, B/X, BECMI, 1E, 2E, 3E, and 5E incarnations, plus landmark supplements such as Deities & Demigods, the Fiend Folio, Oriental Adventures, the Dungeoneer’s Survival Guide, and Drow of the Underdark, plus significant campaign settings like Greyhawk, Ravenloft, Dragonlance, Lankhmar, the Forgotten Realms, Spelljammer, Dark Sun, and Planescape, plus adventures such as the Against the Giants saga (Steading of the Hill Giant Chief to Queen of the Demonweb Pits), Tomb of Horrors, Keep On the Borderlands, Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, The Isle of Dread, and Conan Unchained, plus the groundbreaking organised play scheme Ravens Bluff (whose section also includes a discussion of its 3E-era successor, Living Greyhawk), plus notable third party products like Palace of the Vampire Queen, City State of the Invincible Overlord, Tegel Manor, Wilderlands of High Fantasy, Arduin, Dark Tower, and Caverns of Thracia, plus retroclones such as OSRIC, Pathfinder, and Old-School Essentials, plus games which are not clones but are clearly derived from D&D such as Metamorphosis Alpha, Gamma World, Castles & Crusades, the True20-powered version of Blue Rose, Stars Without Number, Dungeon Crawl Classics, The Black Hack, and Mörk Borg. Oh, and who could forget The Official Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Coloring Album?
• Tunnels & Trolls.
• Bunnies & Burrows.
• Traveller, with a close look at The Journal of the Travellers’ Aid Society.
• The Fantasy Trip (plus a close look at In the Labyrinth, the release which made it a viable standalone RPG), and of course its successor, GURPS.
• Chivalry & Sorcery.
• The Basic Roleplaying family, including progenitor RuneQuest (with particular attention given to landmark supplements such as Cults of Prax, Snakepipe Hollow, Griffin Mountain, and Borderlands, and a tip of the hat to the third party adventure Duck Tower), the original Basic Roleplaying standalone booklet, Call of Cthulhu (and major releases such as Masks of Nyarlathotep, the Lovecraft Country supplement line which was recently revived with the new edition of Arkham, and Harlem Unbound), Stormbringer (with a nod to Hawkmoon), Pendragon, and Delta Green (the original supplements and the standalone RPG covered under the same heading).
• Bushido.
• Dallas: The Television Roleplaying Game.
• Champions.
• Thieves’ World, which also creates an opportunity for Horvath to talk about the output of Midkemia Press (and allude to the Ray Feist connection).
• Star Frontiers.
• Fighting Fantasy – both the gamebooks and the RPG, and the clone Troika.
• The FASA Star Trek RPG.
• James Bond 007.
• Hârn and HârnMaster – Horvath making a good case that the former product (a system-neutral setting) is more significant in the grand scheme of things than the latter (a subsequently-published game system for Hârn).
• DragonRaid, which offers Horvath a chance to talk about the Satanic Panic.
• Marvel Super Heroes.
• Toon.
• Skyrealms of Jorune.
• Middle-Earth Role Playing – notably, this is the only bit where Rolemaster gets much attention.
• Dragonroar.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Rifts, representing the Palladium range.
• World Action and Adventure – a self-published oddity I have never heard of and sounds absolutely bizarre in its dedication to the utterly mundane.
• Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, with of course a good look at The Enemy Within.
• Phoenix Command.
• Ghostbusters and its mega-hit offspring, the D6 System version of Star Wars, with due attention given to the importance of the Star Wars Sourcebook and its followups in shaping the Expanded Universe and fuelling the revival of the franchise.
• Ars Magica.
• Talislanta.
• Cyberpunk, where I think Horvath overlooks the significant anime influence on Mike Pondsmith’s aesthetic decisions.
• The Bullwinkle and Rocky Roleplaying Party Game.
• HeroQuest (the boardgame).
• Prince Valiant.
• Shadowrun and its cousin Earthdawn.
• Torg.
• Nightlife.
• The World of Darkness is dealt with entirely under a single heading, with significant spotlight on Vampire: the Masquerade, Werewolf: the Apocalypse, Mage: the Ascension, and Wraith: the Oblivion, but the rest is skimmed through and Horvath seems to be one of those who never made the jump to Chronicles of Darkness – that, or he doesn’t believe the line has done much of wider significance to the field outside of the niche already defined by the early World of Darkness efforts.
• Amber.
• Kult.
• Over the Edge.
• Freeform Universal Donated Gaming Engine, Freeform Universal Donated Gaming Engine Adventures In Tabletop Entertainment, and Ehdrigohr (which is powered by Freeform Universal Donated Gaming Engine Adventures In Tabletop Entertainment).
• Underground.
• Once Upon a Time (the card game).
• Aria: Canticle of the Monomyth.
• Castle Falkenstein.
• Everway.
• Deadlands and its grandchild, Savage Worlds.
• Fading Suns.
• In Nomine (doot-doot, doo doo doo).
• Unknown Armies.
• The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen.
• Nobilis.
• Violence.
• Hero Wars, AKA HeroQuest (the RPG), AKA QuestWorlds.
• De Profundis.
• Sorcerer.
• Universalis.
• InSpectres.
• Dogs In the Vineyard.
• Dread.
• Trail of Cthulhu (overlooking, alas, the significant philosophical shortcomings of the Gumshoe system).
• Fiasco.
• Apocalypse World, Monsterhearts, and Bluebeard’s Bride, representing the Powered By the Apocalypse stable.
• Microscope and its sibling Kingdom.
• The Quiet Year.
• Mutant: Year Zero and its Year Zero System offspring, Tales From the Loop.
• Ten Candles.
• Blades In the Dark.
• Hot Springs Island.
• A Thousand Thousand Islands.
• Honey Heist.
• Dialect.
• Mothership.
• Spire.
• Fungi of the Far Realms.
• Thousand Year Old Vampire.
• Disciples of Bone and Shadow.
• The Ultraviolet Grasslands.
• Electric Bastionland.
• Necronautilus.
• Finally, a section on “zines of note” – the Goblinville Gazette, Lowcountry Crawl, Inferno Road, the output of Nate Treme, The Insectiary, and A Visitor’s Guide To the Rainy City.

That last segment allows Horvath to press home his argument that the zine format is the natural home of RPG innovation. After all, what are the OD&D or classic Traveller booklets if not three zines in a box? Wasn’t Tunnels & Trolls a zine-sized response to D&D? Isn’t it the case that the true home of cutting-edge RPG design discussion in the hobby’s early years was not the comparatively slick Dragon magazine, but the distinctly zine-like Alarums & Excursions? Of course, this might be an inevitability – the production values demanded of higher-end RPGs these days mean that it’s punishingly difficult to produce a chunky full-colour core rulebook for a game where the system (and, quite likely, the setting itself) lack name recognition and the sort of pre-existing fanbase who can be tapped for a crowdfunding effort, but making a nice lo-fi zine is much more viable, and can be made appealing in its own way – at least to sections of the audience who won’t turn their nose up at anything remotely DIY, and given that almost all RPG play outside of the top tier of streamed/recorded actual play shows is DIY that’s a good angle to take in this field.

Though it is published by MIT Press, this is not a serious academic study in the same way as other “game studies” releases from them are – this doesn’t compete with Jon Peterson’s The Elusive Shift or Game Wizards (or, for that matter, Playing At the World, due to be rereleased by MIT Press in a new two-volume edition) on that front. This makes it fun, approachable, and conversational in tome, but perhaps more significantly it means that Horvath can exercise one more layer of discretion when it comes to deciding on what to include and what not to include.

Specifically, if this were an academic treatise trying to provide a rigorous history of the English-language RPG industry, it would be near-unthinkable not to include Empire of the Petal Throne; as the most extensive interweaving of RPG setting and rules set anyone had attempted in 1975, and the most lavish product TSR had attempted up to that point, and as an early RPG written by someone who moved in the same Twin Cities circles as Dave Arneson, it would be utter foolishness to deny its historical significance, and borderline malpractice for a serious academic history of the field to ignore it.

However, Empire of the Petal Throne is the creation of M.A.R. Barker, who in recent years has been posthumously unmasked as the author of a viciously antisemitic neo-Nazi novel published by a hardline white supremacist organisation, as well as spending over a decade as a member of the Editorial Advisory Committee of the Journal of Historical Review, a pseudoacademic journal dedicated to Holocaust denial. To my knowledge, Dave Arneson had no such connections, and people who’d been gaming with Barker for literal decades were surprised by these revelations – but by my recollection they didn’t disbelieve the revelations either, noting that Barker was the sort of chap who lived a rather compartmentalised life.

Someone writing an academic history of the subject would at this point need to hold their nose and cover Empire of the Petal Throne anyway to note the brief but notable impact it had on the industry, perhaps also throw in footnotes about the whole Nazi thing (and perhaps even look at how the revelation of Barker’s neo-Nazi connections was received by Tekumel fans and the wider RPG audience, if that is within the scope of the work in question). Academic literature reviews can discuss texts without endorsing them.

Precisely because of his less formal approach, though, Stu can avoid that awkwardness altogether; as he explains in the introduction to this book, now that he knows about the Nazi stuff he has no interest in keeping Empire of the Petal Throne material in his collection, and equally no desire to include it in this book, so it’s not here, and nor are works by other hands that Horvath has decided for one reason or another he would not feel good about giving some spotlight to here. He’s not given an exhaustive list of those – that would defeat the purpose – but let’s just say that if you were hoping for a writeup of Myfarog by Varg Vikernes in here, you’re going to be disappointed.

That isn’t to say that Stu 100% endorses all the content of the games he does opt to cover – in fact, he’s more than willing to criticise products where necessary. The entry on Drow of the Underdark, for instance, seems to have been chosen less because the product itself made much of a splash (I’ve never heard of it and it doesn’t seem to be especially widely-celebrated) and more because it is a notable opportunity to discuss the way cultures of evil creatures in D&D create crude racial allegories which the designers appear to have either overlooked or not cared about, and he doesn’t let Gary Gygax off the hook for some of the attitudes he expressed on the subject. Likewise, the entry on Harlem Unbound offers an opportunity to discuss how Black writers and others have tackled the issue of Lovecraft’s racism. Colonialism, feminism, and queer representation all come under Horvath’s microscope at one point or another, which is a testimony to the capacity of RPGs to engage with difficult content (to varying degrees of success) and Horvath’s skill at using this format to tease out ongoing conversations and long-standing differences of opinion within the hobby.

(That said, I was surprised to see Horvath let Deadlands game off the hook for the extent to which it tried to make Confederate-leaning characters an option back in the 1990s. He doesn’t outright defend the decision, but he doesn’t dig into it either, and given that this is something that the game’s own creators have admitted was a mistake, why not examine it, and their decision to amend the setting, given that this lines up with a lot of the other points Horvath has opted to discuss?)

Horvath also shows an inclination to punch up – realising that it would be easy but ugly to razz self-publishers putting out homespun products on a budget, but that he’s speaking truth to power when he’s turning his attention to TSR/Wizards of the Coast (and that fundamentally, a tiny small press game is going to exert a much more limited cultural influence than the decisions made by the publishers of the world’s greatest roleplaying game). Even the section on World Action and Adventure – which seems on the whole to have been a bit of a disaster – takes a tone of gentle good-natured ribbing rather than an outright roast of its hapless author, Gregory L. Kinney, and the discussion of the 1990s folly Aria: Canticle of the Monomyth makes sure to praise the genuinely interesting ideas the game was trying to play with before concluding sadly that the designers clearly didn’t have the chops to pull off what they were trying to achieve, and it took later designers taking a fundamentally different approach and with the benefit of intervening decades of RPG design innovations to pull something like the idea off. When big publishers put out products which are slickly made but include aspects that Horvath is troubled by, however, he doesn’t shy away from this.

For the most part, Horvath makes an effort to rise above edition warring – a sensible enough approach, though in practice a stance which it’s hard to consistently hold – he makes it clear, for instance, that he thinks that the first edition of WFRP has a certain je ne sais quoi that other editions lack. Notably, whilst Pathfinder gets a section of its own, D&D 4E does not – it’s mentioned mostly to provide context for the Pathfinder entry, so despite Horvath’s sensible distaste for overt edition warring he’s kind of told on himself in terms of where his allegiances lay during that era. After all, surely he’d have included a section for 4E if he had any books for it?

That said, it’s pretty evident that Horvath has mixed feelings about Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro’s stewardship of D&D in general. Like, me, he came to RPGs during the 2E era, and there’s an extent to which his tastes seem to have been shaped by that; the last first-party D&D supplement he chooses to feature is Planescape, apparently taking the view that after that the only truly significant thing that Wizards did was put out new editions of the game and that even Eberron didn’t really measure up next to the classic TSR-era settings when it came to doing something bold and original; it’s the third-party space where he finds interesting new stuff in the D&D ecosystem these days.

That said, it’s not the crunch or fluff Horvath primarily objects to – though he does take the view, which I have some sympathy for, that 5E is a bit too tame and not weird enough. His main problem is, quite reasonably, the outsize impact that D&D has on the rest of the field – frequently a negative one. 3E’s OGL boom homogenised the field and stultified innovation, and then left the industry dealing with the wake of the bust once people got sick to the back teeth of D20 system shovelware. 4E was accompanied by an attempt to walk away from the OGL in favour of the “Game System Licence”, which had a corrosive effect on publisher trust. 5E has fostered a sizable number of folk who believe that they are well-versed in RPGs but can’t see outside the walled garden; he uses the analogy of someone who considers themselves knowledgeable about film only ever watches MCU superhero films and has no idea that horror movies are even an option. (I would say an example more grounded in reality would be the swathes of kids who, we were breathlessly told back in the 2000s, had become avid readers thanks to Harry Potter… only for them to simply stop reading once the Potter series ended, because the fad didn’t translate into broader exploration.)

I’m not sure about that assessment, though. I think there’s always been a chunk of people who, having found D&D, are essentially disinclined to explore further afield. Horvath appears to be under the impression that the pipeline which would have otherwise led to these people exploring other games has been broken, but I’m not sure that it has – I just think that a sizable proportion of the fanbase that 5E has accrued to itself through pop culture phenomena like Stranger Things or Critical Role were simply never going to follow the pipeline in any event. They’re not here to explore the wider medium to begin with, they just want to engage with this one game which popped up in this other pop cultural thing they liked and that’s it.

Moreover, Horvath’s writeup of 5E clearly came before Hasbro/Wizards own goals like the great OGL debacle began encouraging the diaspora of players from the D&D walled garden into other games. The 5E entry comes from a world where Critical Role and 5E are synonymous; now the Critical Role gang are putting out an entirely original system of their own. Various publishers have reported a significant uptick in sales of starter products in the wake of the OGL controversy. It’s wholly possible that the constant stream of clumsy Hasbro blunders – the recent AI art fiascos being merely the latest in the conga line – has finally reactivated the pipeline.

That said, it’s not Horvath’s fault that the 5E entry has become dated quite rapidly – I suspect that’s something which will be true of a good cross-section of the writeups of very recent material. After all, we’ve had ample time to assess the long-term legacy of Bunnies & Burrows; it’s much, much harder to say whether Necronautilus will be remembered as an indie game landmark or a flash-in-the-pan oddity fifty years after its publication – or, for that matter, five years, given the rapid churn of the indie field.

The book is divided up by decade, which reveals some interesting trends. The 1970s section is 63 pages, the 1980s are by far the largest with 137, the 1990s are covered in some 65 pages, the 2000s get a tight 37, and the 2010s (and early 2020s) are wrapped up in 73 (of which 64 and a bit go to the 2010s themselves). Obviously, the quirks of Horvath’s collecting habits are going to account for some of this, but there’s some interesting implications here. Firstly, even though Horvath does consider supplemental material as well as core books for entries, a supplement is always going to be a little bit disadvantaged next to core rules when it comes to widespread impact (everyone who ever played a particular RPG interacted with the core rules, supplements are only ever going to be touched by a subset of that), and it’s notable just how much of a boom decade the 1980s were when it came to groundbreaking RPG design.

More notable, though, is that the 2000s end up with this major shortfall of creativity – falling well short of even the 1970s, where four entire years (1970 to 1973) had no commercial RPG products published. To my mind, this is evidence of two things: the chilling effect the initial OGL boom (and subsequent bust) had on innovation, and the surprising lack of staying power a great many of the Forge games of the era had. That isn’t to say Horvath ignores the Forge entirely – several are cited here, in fact, and many alumni of that particular crowd have gone on to make major contributions to the wider scene (Vincent Baker, in particular, thanks to Apocalypse World).

Nonetheless, there’s numerous Forge and Forge-adjacent games which were very widely discussed back in the Forge’s prime – My Life With Master, Primetime Adventures, The Shadow of Yesterday, and Burning Wheel – which simply don’t get in a look-in here, and whilst Burning Wheel might have fallen afoul of Horvath’s “I’m not going to promote the work of assholes” scruples as a result of recent events, it seems odd that some of those others (and yet more whose names escape me) weren’t included, particularly since given the substantial number of zine-based games Horvath includes in the 2010s/2020s section suggests a healthy appreciation for scrappy DIY games which you would think would translate to him owning a good cross-section of the Forge’s greatest hits.

That said, I can’t actually take issue with Horvath not including any of those games, because after including Sorcerer as the seminal example of the Forge ethos and a few other games such as InSpectres, Dogs In the Vineyard, and Universalis to give an idea of what the first wave of Forge tames were getting up to, I’m not sure what else those other games would have offered in terms of longer-lasting impacts. Some of those games don’t even get mentioned that much when people look back to the Forge’s output – for all the plaudits The Shadow of Yesterday had at the time, that’s a game which has not so much faded from public consciousness as it has spontaneously evaporated – and I strongly suspect that Dogs In the Vineyard might not have made the cut either were it not for Vincent Baker going on to write Apocalypse World, which is a pretty big deal.

My pet theory is that the purposefully tight scope of the 2000s generation of Forge-influenced indie RPGs gave rise to games which didn’t have much in the way of widespread influence on the zeitgeist: precisely because they were designed to provide very, very specific experiences which were tightly and narrowly defined, they deliberately closed themselves off from having a substantially broader influence outside of the specific niche use case they had envisaged for themselves.

That said, there are some interesting gaps in the coverage. Given that Horvath clearly appreciates the output of Free League (as do I – those folk put out really lovely physical products), and given that he takes the extremely sensible position that whatever its merits, MERP is a system completely tonally at odds with what you’d want out of a Middle-Earth game which reinforced the atmosphere and themes Tolkein was going for, I was greatly surprised not to see an entry for The One Ring; he also doesn’t touch on any Modiphius products, which is a surprise to me given the major licenses they’ve landed and his appreciation elsewhere in the book for the role of licensed RPGs.

Of all the omissions, the biggest surprise was this: despite Horvath including warm words for it in his introduction, having apparently enjoyed it in the past, and citing it in other sections, Stu doesn’t see his way to providing a section covering Paranoia, which given its comedic impulses and its innovation in terms of accommodating a purposefully PVP playstyle at the table seems wild to me.

Still, at the size of this tome, any objections about games not included are mere quibbles. Monsters, Aliens, and Holes In the Ground not only taught me a bunch of things I hadn’t been aware of about games I already knew, it also provided fascinating insights into game products I’ve never read for myself – either because I was aware of them but disinterested or because I’d never heard of them. You can click through my archives on this blog to get an idea of whether that’s impressive to you, but personally I consider myself fairly knowledgeable on this subject, and yet Horvath’s book manage to tell me a lot which was new to me, and is presented in a style which would be accessible to anyone. As far as showcases for some fifty years’ worth of tabletop RPGs go – and especially when it comes to giving substantial spotlight to games outside of the D&D ecosystem – we could do with much more of this sort of thing.