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.

Storytelling Patient Zero

Back when I reviewed the 1st Edition of Vampire: the Masquerade, I took note of the various other RPGs cited in Mark Rein-Hagen’s afterword (only included in later printings). One game which was conspicuous by its absence from this list is Prince Valiant, a Chaosium RPG based on the Arthurian newspaper comic strip by Hal Foster. Emerging in 1989, not only does it proudly proclaim itself a “Story-Telling Game” on its front cover, but it also explicitly refers to the referee as a Storyteller, works in the idea of rotating the Storyteller position over the course of a game (which may be influenced by Ars Magica‘s ideas about troupe play), and has what is effectively a disguised die pool system.

To cover that latter point in brief: in principle, rolls in Prince Valiant are actually based on coin tosses – you add together stat and skill, toss an appropriate number of coins, and count heads as successes. This seems to have been a decision made in part to make the game approachable to non-gamers who might not have dice handy, but almost certainly have coins – but whilst tossing a bunch of coins in sequence is burdensome, you can roll much faster and get mathematically equivalent results simply by rolling a bunch of dice and, say, taking odds as successes and evens as failures, or rolls of over 50% of the maximum roll as successes (so 4-6 on a D6, or 3-4 of a D4, or 11-20 on a D20).