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.

Finally In Full Bloom

Green Ronin’s Blue Rose struck me, back in its original run, as one of those games which is more talked-about than actually read or played. Promoted as an RPG based around “romantic fantasy”, it feels like it wanted to position itself as a potential entry point to RPGs for an audience that the market hadn’t previously catered to, though I suspect that by being sold as a big RPG rulebook and distributed and marketed through standard RPG channels meant that most romantic fantasy fans never realised it existed. Still, despite that, it undeniably targeted a fantasy subgenre which had been poorly served (or flat-out not served at all), which turned heads even if it put off people who either actively dislike romantic fantasy or who unthinkingly write it off because it’s got the word “romantic” in it.

Dig deeper, though, and there was more to talk about than just its chosen genre. For one thing, Blue Rose saw the debut of the True20 system, which provided a welcome lighter take on D20 than mainline D&D and most of its derivatives were offering at the time along with some novel system tweaks of its own. For another, it offered a laudably broad-minded take on what sort of romantic relationships could be front and centre in a campaign, in keeping with the best of the romantic fantasy subgenre: the setting it presented was overtly supportive of LGBT characters and themes, and also made a major effort to be inclusive and diverse in the characters depicted in its artwork.

In its time, though, the system and setting also had its detractors, as any game will. As you might expect, if you looked about you could find grumpy conservative sorts who found the inclusion of gay, bi/pan, trans, nonbinary and polyamorous characters in the setting on equal terms offensive (or, if they were being a bit more subtle about their objections, talked about it as being “too political”, as though assuming that a completely invented fantasy world would have no such people or have the same demographics and prejudices as Earth weren’t just as political).

Referee’s Bookshelf – True20 Adventure Roleplaying and True20 Companion

True20 is one of the many unexpected uses Green Ronin have put the OGL to. Having already made out like bandits with Mutants and Masterminds, their adaptation of the D20 rules to superhero games, Green Ronin originally developed True20 as the system for Blue Rose, an attempt to market tabletop RPGs to the romantic fantasy crowd – a portion of the fantasy market typically poorly-served in a gaming context. I don’t know whether Blue Rose made any headway in that section of the audience, but it did get a reaction in the tabletop RPG hobby – who soon began lobbying for a standalone version of the system without all that yucky kissing attached. The end result is the True20 core rulebook. In its first incarnation, this included a collection of sometimes interesting but generally not awe-inspiring campaign settings at the back, but in recent printings it has ditched these and instead includes the material which formerly made up the True20 Companion. Therefore, I’m going to review both here (skipping over the campaign settings, which I don’t personally have much interest in) since between them they cover the material which Green Ronin are presenting as being key, core material for the game.

So far as I can tell from the explanatory notes and from the general approach behind the design, the intent behind True20 was to provide a system which was somewhat more intuitive than 3.X Dungeons & Dragons but wasn’t so radically stripped on that you’d describe it as a “rules-light” game – I think the idea was that the audience they were going for with Blue Rose weren’t dyed-in-the-wool gamers, so they would benefit from a system which was intuitively easy to learn, but at the same time they also tended to be grown-ups and so didn’t necessarily need to have their hands held. I’ve not read Blue Rose, so I don’t know how the rules concepts were explained there, but I wouldn’t give someone the True20 core book as their first RPG myself; it’s a little too dense to be beginner-friendly, and I think designer Steve Kenson unconsciously assumes the reader has a little more familiarity with RPG conventions – and particularly the conventions of the OGL – than a complete beginner would necessarily have. (In particular, the explanation of how damage works feels confusingly brief and I’m fairly sure the accompanying roll summary and gameplay example are actually incorrect.)