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.

A Microscopic Supplement

Indie RPGs of the arthouse school which actually get supplements published for them are a bit of a rarity. Plenty of indie games simply never get the sort of traction which would create an appetite for a supplement in the first place; in other cases, the core expression of the game represents more or less everything their creators want to say on the matter, at least in the form of an actual product, or the designers end up transferring their enthusiasm to new projects.

One exception is Microscope, whose designer Ben Robbins has turned out Microscope Explorer, both a collection of alternate spins on the core game, tools and aids to help support the standard game, and hints and pointers on best practice in play. I don’t have a whole lot to say about the Explorer that wouldn’t be something of a rehash of my original review of the game, but I want to put a particular spotlight on the way the advice on good Microscope practice is clearly built on experiences in actual play, which is something I wish were true of all RPG products but often isn’t.

Robbins has clearly both played a bunch of Microscope himself and taken into account the experiences of the wider audience that took it up after it got published, and it really shows in the points he chooses to expand on here and the way he explains why he considers particular approaches to be useful. One expects that if a Microscope 2nd Edition ever happened, some of the explanations offered here would likely make their way into the core book, especially since the Explorer seems to reflect Robbins’ evolving thoughts on this interesting new game format he has invented as much as it does a clarification of matters he wishes in retrospect he had expressed a little better in the original book.

Microscope Under the Microscope

One of the things that enraged me about Ron Edwards’ awful brain damage thing is that Ron wheeled out his horrible opinions on how White Wolf games warp developing minds in the process of making a point which was actually fairly reasonable, but which got derailed by the impossibly crass way he expressed it and the terrible ideas he wheeled out in the process of being crass.

That point is one I’ve also wheeled out a lot in discussion of artsy narrative-y indie RPGs: that many such games would benefit from walking away from the conventions of tabletop RPGs altogether. For instance, some games seem to retain ideas like players having a particular identification and control over a particular character, or particular bits of the scenario being under particular people’s authority, when that just doesn’t serve them well.

Such is not the case with Microscope, which marches into novel territory so firmly that I’d almost hesitate to call it a role-playing game. It sort of is, since it’s a game in which role-playing can take place and is explicitly supported as part of the process, but at the same time it’s a game where that is just one aspect of play and an awful lot can happen without any role-identification occurring whatsoever.