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.

Referee’s Bookshelf: Everway

Let’s get one thing out of the way first: Everway, whether not it is a good game, is an absolutely gorgeous game. Presented in an inconveniently huge box, with artwork varying from evocatively abstract work to material which was a bit more ordinary for fantasy art but aimed at a much more sober and serious and less pulpy and comic book tone than most RPG art, and coming with not just one but multiple decks of cards, the Everway set is really nicely presented.

But as inviting as that presentation is, and despite having the might of Wizards of the Coast behind it and a name as big as John Tweet’s on the cover, Everway vanished into obscurity. It didn’t help that four months after its publication, Wizards closed their RPG division (this was some two years before they would buy out TSR) and sold off all their RPG properties. It certainly didn’t help that whilst other RPGs from the sold-off portfolio like Ars Magica and Talislanta would find new publishers who would actively support them, Everway‘s subsequent owners don’t seem to have done much with it – so far as I can tell, its current owners are still Gaslight Press, who seem to have fallen into stasis some dozen years ago and done nothing since except regularly pay the fee to keep their website online. But I think the major reason Everway failed is because it’s a curate’s egg. It’s simultaneously extremely traditional and extremely experimental; those looking for an experimental gaming experience will find the traditional aspects of the game hampering, those who look for a more traditional experience will be infuriated by the experimental stuff, and the game’s left and right hemispheres don’t really mesh together sufficiently to create a satisfying and interesting hybrid.