The Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in The Ground: A Guide to Tabletop Roleplaying Games From D&D to Mothership is as massive as the length of the title suggests. It is also a wet dream of every RPG history buff. With its chronologically ordered list of short chapters, each dedicated to a game or extension or whatnot, it resembles an encyclopedia. But instead of a dry enumeration, Horvath accomplished writing the definitive story of roleplaying games, where the entries are just milestones in the flowing narrative of the evolution and development of systems, worlds, gaming styles, themes, and mechanics; the trends and cycles of concepts, their mutual inference with pop culture and zeitgeist, and the frequent recurrence of old ideas buried in forgotten systems and salvaged decades later.
The diversity and the sheer number of existing RPGs resist the effort to discern clear patterns and trends, although they are there, therefore instead of giving a coherent overview of the book, I simply follow Horvath's example and cherry-pick elements from his own semi-arbitrary collection. I try to choose games that for one reason or another, by inventing new game mechanics, starting a new trend, or introducing a novel idea, made a lasting impact on RPG evolution. The entries in the book are divided into 5 big sections, one for each decade starting from the 70s and ending in the 2010s. I will follow this structure as well.
The 70s - the decade when it started. Foundations, wild ideas, enthusiastic amateurs, legal jungle
It all started in 1974, of course, with the grand-daddy of all roleplaying games, Dungeons&Dragons. But even D&D did not pop out of thin air. The Prussian army introduced Kriegspiels (wargames) in the nineteenth century as tools of military education to teach the potential generals of the future strategy on simulated battlefields. By the middle of the twentieth century, Kriegspiels were a niche hobby for geek men with access to a huge table, a passion for little figures, and plenty of free time. The way from controlling armies of the past to impersonating characters in fantasy words was paved by many, but it was Gary Gygax who is remembered as the inventor of modern RPGs.
Not undeservedly. Even though the first edition of D&D was a messy product of confusing rules and amateurish design, Gygax managed to get a couple of things so unexpectedly right that the product might deserve to be called brilliant. The concept of classes (with the basic archetypes fighter, wizard, cleric, rogue, etc) and the limited theme of dungeon-crawling made the barrier of entry low, for GMs and players alike. They served as crutches to make the first steps in a new world easy. The reward of XPs and levels hooked the players and made them come back for more. The use of ordinary dice (and then less-ordinary ones for fun and feeling special) to simulate the role of chance was simple and elegant. Attributes and skills to describe characters felt very well mapped to real life. Five decades later, the first building blocks are still part of the mainstream, sometimes replaced in a piecemeal fashion, but never made obsolete. As D&D was not only a trove of great ideas, but also a commercial success, modern RPGs were born.
Simple dungeon crawling of course doesn't appeal to everyone, not for a very a long time, at least. 1977, the sci-fi-themed Traveller was published as the first in the line of narrative-focused games. Instead of using classes, it introduced the concept of "lifepaths", which will reappear a decade later in the much more famous Warhammer Fantasy RPG.
RuneQuest (1978) chose another way to dissolve the concept of classes by making skills available to every character.
There is a finite number of editions a company can publish from a core book, but TSR, the publisher of D&D, quickly recognized a new revenue source: publishing extensions and campaigns. The defining campaign style of the era was the mega-dungeons and fun-houses, where the writers and players took pleasure in exploring ever larger and deadlier real-estates: catacombs, mansions, castles, and strange, illogical environments apparently only built to test the players' ingenuity, rather than the PC's skills.
The newborn RPG industry created a legal no-mans-land where D&D epigons sprouted in high numbers. Some specifically aimed for trimmed-down simplicity, like Tunnels&Trolls, some ventured into quirkier pastures, like Burrows&Bunnies, and some were just another D&D-esque dungeon-crawl game.
The first opposing trends started to take form in system design, theme, and mechanics. One school of design went for simplification, like the minimalist D&D-clone, Tunnels&Trolls, and the other for ever-more complex rulesets. Some systems embraced randomness not only in player generation but in every aspect of the game, from map generation to character motivations, events, or demographics. Others went in the opposite direction replacing dice-based character generation with point-buy mechanisms. The original, competitive "collect artifact and boost character" ethos of D&D was still going strong, but new games appeared that focused on narrative, emphasizing social structure and context, like the 1977 Chivalry&Sorcery.
The realm of D&D itself expanded and diversified to the point that in 1977 Gygax decided that the game needs some uniformity. Standard way to write modules, interpret rules, etc. Between 1977 and 1979, he published the second edition of D&D, named Advanced D&D. At basically the same time, TSR also published the D&D Basic Set, an updated subset of the original game targetting beginners. The D&D world bifurcated.
The end of the 70s brought another idea: publish a stand-alone core book that sketches up the world and provides the basic rules to start the game with, and then gradually fill up the gaps and expand the core concepts with a continuous flow of extensions, called "slapbooks". The model was used extensively twenty years later by White Wolf to flesh out the World of Darkness universe.
On the narrative front, the new idea was the metaplot. A real-time evolving narrative of grand events in the world shared by players all across the globe. The most famous of them still to day is probably the 1985 Dragonlance Chronicles, which tells a story of an epic battle between the forces of light and darkness in the world of Krynn.
The 70s RPGs carried the zaniness of the decade, they were characterized by amateurism, experimenting, ingenuity, and the Wild West of ideas.
The 80s - the decade when enthusiastic amateurism (partly) gives way to corporate professionalism. Sketchy fan art to graphic designers. Yet the creative explosion is just starting in earnest and occasionally bounces against intellectual property rights as the freshly born major players of the industry learn to flex their legal muscles. Lightweight rules systems and intricate worlds sprout up.
In 1980, S. Jackson's Fantasy Trip does away with the frustrating arbitrariness of random roll character generation. What if you want to play a paladin, but the gods of dice give your character Strength and Charisma 6 and 8 (out of 18)? Here comes the point-buy system.
In 1981, players in the US finally got the chance to jump into the skin of America's favorite anti-hero of the era, J. J. Ewing. Dallas: The Roleplaying Game turned out to be an epic failure that tanked its publishing company, but it proved that RPG can go beyond mere physical adventures.
The same year saw the birth of the first generic or universal system, Basic Role-Playing, purported to be usable for adventures of every kind from fantasy to sci-fi. It wasn't completely universal, as characters created for one world cannot be directly transferred to another, and it wasn't even a playable system without some bespoke tailoring, but every Chaosium game onward uses BRP as a foundation.
In 1981, Call of Cthulhu arrived on the shelves. The first mainstream horror RPG represents a milestone in the history of roleplaying games. CoC was a revolutionary game for multiple reasons, in a class of its own. In almost all RPGs before and after it, the characters are manifestations of the players' power fantasies. Fearless warriors, mighty magicians, cunning rogues, shrewd agents. In CoC, they are ordinary people who inadvertently confront the mind-crushing terrors of the cold and indifferent universe. The only possible fate waiting for them is either the horrific end or the endless horrors. The other major invention came with the rule system. With the introduction of Sanity-mechanism that represented the characters' inevitable mental degradation in the face of the Mythos, the mechanics were designed to support the theme, like in no other game before.
We are still in 1981 when the RPG world stretches into another pop-culture territory, comic books. In Champion, players can be superheroes. Its main contribution to the RPG evolution was the introduction of advantages/disadvantages (e.g. choosing your "kryptonite" gives you 5 extra points you can spend on powers).
In the early eighties, the RPG world was still predominantly US-based. In the UK, the industry hasn't started yet, and importing American games was expensive. Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone filled this market niche with a clever invention. With a pencil, two dice, and a book where navigating between numbered chapters was determined by the reader's decision, anyone could immerse herself (although much more frequently himself) in a world of sword and sorcery. Although it was a very limited experience compared to roleplaying, the 1982 The Warlock of Firetop Mountain and its followers conquered the world. Jackson and Livingstone have become household names, and their first work a cherished childhood memory of generations.
In 1983, two RPGs were released based on cinematic pop culture, Star Trek: The Role Playing Game and James Bond 007: Role-Playing In Her Majesty's Secret Service. They introduced a novel concept of "luck points" into game mechanics. Players now had the chance the tap into the resources that enabled Captain Kirk and Bond, despite being humans, to pull off incredible feats every now and then. Parachuting from a falling airplane? Cut the wires of the detonator in the very last second? If you still have points to spend from your pool, you too can don the plot armor for a scene to look magnificent.
One of D&D's most famous antagonists, Strahd von Zarovich, makes his debut in 1983 in the adventure module Ravenloft. The same year sees another great one, the Call of Cthulhu's monumental adventure campaign, Masks of Nyarlathotep. Beyond being recognized to be one of the best roleplaying adventures of all time, MoN set a new, and still unsurpassed, standard in providing extremely authentic-looking handouts, maps, and props, to guide players through a series of adventures across the globe to fight eldrich evils.
Not everything in the 80s was great, though, as the 1984 MERP demonstrated. The RPG in Middle Earth was generally considered a mess. From personal experience, I concur.
As mentioned before, Dragonlance novels were published in 1984. The synergy of novels and modules provided the metaplot to D&D fans playing in the world of Krynn.
In 1985, Chaosium published the ultimate Arthurian roleplaying game, Pendragon. It won several industry awards and has become a cult game since. A stark break from dungeon-crawling D&D-type fantasies, Pendragon is an extremely character-focused game. Like another award-winning Chaosium product, Call of Cthulhu, Pendragon shines in marrying theme and rule system. Passions and personality traits are infused brilliantly in the game mechanics. Apart from the technical innovations, the game got the Arthur myth so right that no other RPG has dared to venture there since.
The same year, Ghostbusters RPG hit the shelves, based on the iconic movie just a year before. The goofy game was a surprise for multiple reasons. It was geared towards a more mature audience than the average players (sex is a frequent theme in the core book). It was also a commercial success. And finally, despite being largely forgotten, it was the RPG that introduced a game mechanism that came to dominate the next two decades: the dice pool.
In 1986, the UK's RPG industry produced one of its most popular games, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. The grim and gritty fantasy game replaced classes with a career system akin to lifepaths pioneered by the 1977 Traveller.
Although the 1981 Basic Role-Playing (BRP) was advertised as such, players had to wait for a real generic game system until 1986, when Generic Universal Role Playing System was published. GURPS is a story and genre-agnostic, universal system. Character generation is point-based, the players spend points on advantages/disadvantages, abilities, skills, etc. Actions are resolved by trying to roll below a certain number with 3d6. It's a blank slate that can be fit to every theme.
Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game rolled out in 1987 and saved the dying Star Wars franchise. At least, according to Horvath. I don't know enough about this to confirm or refute Horvath's version, but in his telling (and he cites sources), as opposed to the generally shared recollection of Star Wars being this unstoppable media juggernaut right from 1977, four years after the Return of The Jedi (1983), Star Wars as a money-making media adventure was practically over. The flow of novels, comics, and video games, that ultimately led to the revival of the movie series, only started after the roleplaying game sparked a renewed interest in the Star Wars universe.
One of the most original RPGs ever, Ars Magica came out in 1987. Set in medieval Europe, where the might of the Church coexists with magic and the creatures of legends, the players impersonate a covenant of magicians. Beyond the fantastic background and implementing the best magic system ever devised in RPGs, Ars Magica introduced the troupe-style playing, where each player had a handful of characters to control.
In 1989 a board game was published that wasn't an RPG itself, but probably the best gateway drug to it to this day. HeroQuest represented D&D at its basics. A dungeon crawl with monsters and treasure. Players could choose between four characters of different skill sets, the barbarian, the dwarf, the elf, and the magician, to fight against the monsters controlled by the GM. They had rudimentary character sheets, and like RPG characters, they could grow in power as they collected weapons, artifacts, and magic scrolls during their missions. Magic worked in the classic cast-and-forget way, the rules of fighting were simple but elegant. Excellent the game it is, its enduring success owes much to its physical aspects. Even without playing the game, the elaborate plastic figurines of heroes and monsters, the pieces of furniture and building blocks of the labyrinths, the cards of artifacts and magic spells are just a joy to look at. As a personal note, I bought an old edition on a fleamarket, then waited for years for the kids to grow up enough to play it. It was worth the patience.
Cyberpunk, based on a sci-fi subgenre best represented by the novels of William Gibson, came out in 1988. It's set in the near future, where today's negative trends continue and expand beyond control. Ordinary people live under the tyranny of megacorporations. Humanity's cancerous spread on the globe marches on, but the laws of nature returned to the concrete jungle. It is the survival of the fittest. And the fittest are the most connected, most cybernetically enhanced, and most natural denizens of the virtual reality.
Cyberpunk was barely a year old when its wayward cousin, the 1989 Shadowrun opened the new era of multigenre games. Shadowrun itself married two genres that seemed diametrically opposite: the cynical, grimy, tech sci-fi cyberpunk and classical high fantasy of trolls, elves, dragons, and magic. And with it, the 90s started.
The 90s - the decade of cross-genre games, mature themes, and strange new game mechanics ideas
If Shadowrun opened the door for cross-genre games, the 1991 Rifts tore it off the hinges as it burst out to the wide open fields of a post-apocalyptic Earth teeming with magic, mutants, psychics, sci-fi technology, demons, and all kinds of supernatural creatures. Rifts truly left out very little. But surprisingly, the quantity was not to the detriment of quality.
Continuing the good tradition of high-quality supplements, Chaosium started publishing the Lovecraft Country series in 1990 with Arkham Unveiled. The rich, atmospheric book and its followers explore the dark underbellies of iconic Lovecraftian locations, like Arkham, Kingsport, Dunwich, or Innsmouth.
1991 was the year when the only RPG ever to threaten the supremacy of D&D appeared. Vampire: The Masquerade was a gothic-punk game of personal horror and politics under the looming end of the millennium intended for a mature audience. Its originality, quality, significance, and influence on wider pop culture are neigh impossible to overstate. Placed in the modern era and focusing on personal interaction as opposed to swordfights, it was also ideally suited to live-action role-playing (LARP).
1991 was also the year when the probably most famous D&D hero appeared on the scene. Drizzt Do'Urden, also known as Drizzt Daermon N'a'shezbaernon from the ninth house of Menzoberranzan. Drizzt featured in dozens of novels.
By the nineties, D&D started to show its age but simultaneously also the potential to adapt to the changing times. The campaign setting Dark Sun released in 1991 is a kind of cross-genre Mad Max-style post-apocalyptic fantasy.
The 90s also started explorations outside the conventional boundaries of game mechanics. In 1991, Amber completely discarded the dice and random elements of storytelling. The 1992 Over The Edge threw out another fundamental piece of game mechanics and replaced skills and abilities in favor of keywords. Players described their characters with loosely defined "keywords", e.g. "pitfighter". If certain keywords apply to the given situation, they add extra dice to the action rolls. The indie role-playing game movement started to gain steam.
In 1992, Fudge made the first attempt to be a meta-system. It was part a treatise on game design theory, part a toolkit to create RPG systems.
In 1993, FASA published Earthdown, a setting-focused fantasy game as a prequel to Shadowrun. The same year Magic: The Gathering appeared.
RPG so far had been about players impersonating imaginary characters. That changed in 1994 with Aria: Canticle of the Monomyth, where players create and control nations, and their interaction produces history - the game campaign. It's a highly philosophical game with radically novel ideas, that, according to Horvath, perhaps is much more interesting to read than to play.
Experimenting with novel game mechanics continued in the 1994 Castle Falkenstein. The magic-infused steampunk game replaced dice with cards. The 1996 Deadlands used a combination of cards, poker chips, and dice.
In 1997, Chaosium published the most influential Call Of Cthulhu upgrade to date. In Delta Green, which may most succinctly be described as a love child of X-Files and the Cthulhu Mythos, the players play agents in a secret organization that is dedicated to fighting otherwordly horrors and recruits its members from existing law-enforcement or investigative agencies. The characters' usual background ties them to the CIA, FBI, or any other organization that allows access to resources normally kept from ordinary citizens. This setup solved two major issues of traditional CoC games. One is the discrepancy between the Cthulhu Mythos knowledge of the player and that of her character, the other is how ordinary people have the time and resources to fight evil, and how exactly they are supposed to avoid the electric chair after burning down a barn full of cultists. Delta Green also introduced some changes in game mechanics, my personal favorite of them being the "bonds". At character generation, the players can define "bonds" that anchor the character's sanity to the real world. It could be family, profession, hobby, whatever. The strength of the bonds is expressed numerically. In a situation when the character is in danger of losing her mind, she can decide to sacrifice some points from a bond to avoid losing her sanity. Losing points means losing importance for the character. It's a powerful and effective representation of how the character can draw strength from personal bonds in times of crisis, but also how the constant pressure will eventually fray these ties. Thinking of your children can give you strength when needed, but in the long run, you will become a cold and estranged parent.
The millennium angst and its occult undertones leave their marks on the era's games, like the aforementioned Delta Green or Vampire: The Masquerade and its siblings. In the heavily Christian-themed In Nomine, players take the roles and angels and demons. In the 1998 Unknown Armies, the PCs are occultists, playing with powers that will eventually break them. Its madness meter is considered one of the best game mechanics for handling the deterioration of sanity.
Not every innovation was on the dark side, though. The 1998 Munchausen started a new branch in the evolution of RPGs (or perhaps continued what Aria tried and failed to start): the story-telling games. In Munchausen, the players don't control characters, or anything tangible at all. They are taking turns telling tall tales trying to outdo each other inside a minimal framework.
Aria was perhaps the first attempt to expand the conventional boundaries of RPGs to the realms of philosophy. If controlling nations seemed far-fetched, it was nothing compared to the vistas Nobilis opened in 1999. Players could now impersonate ideas and abstract concepts. Like railway networks, detective novels, or Time itself. If D&D's target audience was teenage boys and STEM students, as we know from Big Bang Theory, Nobilis seemed to aim for philosophy and English majors.
The 1999 Violence's novelty stemmed not from new ideas or breaking conventions but from self-reflection. Encouraging excessively violent and amoral behavior, it was the satire of the monster-killing and treasure-hunting version of D&D. It was a fitting end to the 90s.
2000s - the decade of nostalgia and the attempt to unify game systems, which almost destroyed the industry
As the whole industry in 1974, the new millennium as well was kicked off by D&D. In 2000, the 3rd edition restored the original unsanitized version of Dungeons&Dragons after the purges of the 80's satanic panic. Demons, assassins, and half-orcs were back. The new edition also came with a new system, the d20. The 3rd edition and d20 on its own was a massive success. Many established games, like CoC or WoD were rewritten on d20-rules and an avalanche of new ones were published using it. The craze lasted three years, but in 2003, due to various reasons, from the flood of low-quality products trying to ride the wave to bad marketing and licensing decisions the d20 bubble burst, almost burying the industry. D&D 3.5 came out in 2003.
Prior to the third edition, TSR's successor Wizards of the Coast released two licenses. The first one, the Open Gaming Licence (OLG) gave permission to any publishing company to use the D&D 3 rule system. The second to use the d20 trademark. They had lasting consequences. Even before OLG, the rules of a game were outside of American copyright laws. You could not copy full sections of D&D books, but nothing stopped you from reusing the rules. Nothing, except for the legal department of TSR, which wasn't for nothing earned the moniker T$R or They Sue Regularly. OLG was a marketing ploy to pretend to be the bigger man (while merely restating what was already in law) but it was a signal to the industry that WoTC won't bully fledging companies out of business. The other beneficiary of it was WotC's own business, as letting other publishers use their system increased the demand for their own core rulebooks.
The 2001 Lovecraftian De Profundis created yet another kind of roleplaying game. In an epistolary RPG, the players cooperatively create the story through mail correspondence. It starts with one player writing a letter describing some strange occurrences that happened to him. The other player responds, continuing to weave the story. No GM, dice, or character sheet required. To me it seems somewhat similar to Munchausen and raises the same question: is this RPG at all?
In 2002, Universalis continued in the same direction, at least broadly speaking. The players are writing a story together while simultaneously competing for influence over the flow of events using the game's underlying resource system. The indie games started to gain steam in the early 2000s and Universalis became a major inspiration for many of them.
The De Profundis and Universalis are examples of a new trend in RPGs, where the line between GMs and players blurs, sometimes dissolving completely.
The most successful indie game, the Dogs in the Vineyard came out in 2004. It's a keyword-based, western-themed game where players take the roles of Mormonesque religious fanatics. The whole game is geared toward pushing the characters to morally ambiguous situations of ever higher stakes. Unfortunately, it is out of print, as its creator had an "awakening" and declared that until Westerns (including his own game) "decolonize" completely, he wants nothing to do with them. And others should not either, apparently.
But the general push for new mechanics, themes, and concepts unsurprisingly created an opposing trend as well. The 2004 Castles&Crusades was a prominent representative of the Old School Revival (sometimes referred to as Old School Renaissance), the line of games that aimed to evoke the feel and simplicity of the original D&D. After many such games, eventually the question arose: why play with emulations when we can just have the original? And there came the Retroclones. The OLG enabled publishers to take the whole ruleset of older, no longer supported D&D editions, write new explanations for them, and release them as new books. Their most successful example OSRIC (Old-School Reference and Index Compilation), a remake of the first AD&D edition, was published in 2006, after which the movement slowly petered out. The OSR movement, which was born out of pure nostalgia, with a concept quite vague to start with (as for everyone the One True Edition was the one they personally started with), has stretched itself thin to the the point of meaninglessness.
And for those eager for novelty, progress didn't halt. A simple and revolutionary horror game brought something novel into the RPG world in 2005. Horror RPG sessions, regardless of their quality, almost invariably are interrupted by bouts of laughter from time to time. Perhaps this is how players deal with pressure. I was happy to read this from Horvath because it was my experience as well, and he reassured me that it's a general phenomenon. The 2005 Dread introduced an ingenious solution to really scare players shitless. At the beginning of the session, the players build up a Jenga-tower. During the game, instead of by rolling dice, the outcome of any action is decided by the player pulling out an element of the tower. If the tower falls, the game comes to a catastrophic end. This is a smart gimmick to make the risk palpable and the failure dramatic. According to Horvath, this creates real tension, much more gripping than the normal dice can achieve.
Trail of Cthulhu, a revamp of Call of Cthulhu came out in 2008. It ran on the Gumshoe system developed for investigative RPGs and addressed one flaw of the original CoC. In a CoC scenario, the campaign could come to a grinding halt if the players fail their library rolls and cannot find the book with the crucial information to make the next step. In ToC (and in other Gumshoe systems), this situation cannot happen. The underlying philosophy is to eliminate the role of chance in how players access information. They should be provided all the clues, their job to put the pieces together. As a point of interest in game mechanics, the Gumshoe system revolves around abilities, and contrary to most RPG systems, the concept of attributes is missing altogether.
Another indie game milestone is the 2009 publication of Fiasco. Fiasco is a GM-less game with no preparation where the players collaboratively write and play a heist-gone-bad scenario. The short introduction wasn't enough for me to understand the mechanics but it sounds fun as hell.
As is probably obvious from the above, both indie and traditional games boomed in the 2000s. The D&D 4th Edition came out in 2008. It completely overhauled the system, rendering 8 years of sourcebooks and supplements obsolete. It really pissed off the community, a large part of what decided to stay with the 3rd edition or go with the classic fantasy RPG Pathfinder, a derivative of D&D 3.5, which was published in 2009 to a huge commercial and critical success.
The indie Apocalypse World came out in 2010. It wasn't the first Mad Max-like RPG, but perhaps the one that most unashamedly embraced the B-movie vibe of the violence and the raw sexual tension of the genre. Its game design framework, called Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) has become the engine of many indie games that followed. One of its major game mechanics inventions was the concept of Moves. Imagine a typical action scenario, let's say when the PC is standing at the baddy's gunpoint. The player wants to make a distraction, lunge for his gun on the table 3 meters away, roll behind it to dodge the bullets, and end up on his feet shooting back. In most RPGs, the action sequence would require several rolls. In PbtA, they are aggregated into a single batch called a Move and their success is determined by a single roll. At least, that's my understanding of it from Horvath's description. There are common Moves available to every player, but characters have their own set of Moves, called the Playbook. True to the Mad Max ethos of valorizing primal instincts, one Move for each player is sex-related.
Microscope (2011) was a collaborative, GM-less, zero-preparation game to explore the history of a fictional society. The players collectively decide the theme, set the start and end points (Horvath takes the example of the rise and fall of a king), and then take turns adding events to the timeline. The only rule is that previously established facts cannot be contradicted. Microscope, and its sibling, Kingdom, set the stage for a new line of RPGs that focus on world-building.
The 2012 Monsterhearts is one of the games that really fascinates me while at the same time, I have no intention of ever playing it. It's a PbtA-powered indie game, where the players take the roles of teenagers with a dark side. Dark meaning being vampires, werewolves, that sort of thing. Anyone who likes Buffy can relate to a game of conflicted relationships, confused emotions, and being trapped inside a hormon-fueled body. Being a monster is almost just a supporting theme. Sexual ambiguity and attraction are at the center, but the game never descends into porn or mere voyeurism. One of the most fun features of Monsterhearts is the use of vices of typically teenage pettiness: emotional blackmailing, manipulation, spreading rumors, petty vengeance, hitting on your friend's beau, etc. The game is clearly for mature audiences, but why anyone would want to relive the most confusing part of their teenage lives is beyond me. Nevertheless, the concept is brilliant, as are the game mechanics that support it.
The 2013 The Quite Year is yet another novelty in RPG evolution broadly in the group of world-building games. It's a collaborative map-making adventure, where the usual ever-present chatter during game sessions is unusually discouraged.
In 2014, the time has come for another edition of D&D, the fifth. It delivered the most streamlined and straightforward D&D ruleset to this day yet, and its approachability paid off extremely well by inviting a huge number of novices into the RPG world. It's interesting that after at least of two decades of experimenting with mature themes and novel, widely diverse ideas, the biggest player in the mainstream RPG scene is still the good old Dungeons&Dragons.
In 2005, the creators of Dread introduced the groundbreaking idea of representing crisis situations and failures in the game with physical objects, in Dread's case, a Jenga Tower. Their solution managed to infuse a palpable sense of danger at the crossroads of the story like no other RPG mechanism before. In 2015, another game borrowed the concept and took it a step further by brilliantly marrying theme and mechanics. In Ten Candles, the players face the end of the world. They delay the inevitable only as long as the minimal-prep, collaborative game session lasts. Then darkness covers all. The preparation consists of creating a couple of index cards for each player, each card representing one player feature, and lighting ten candles. During the game, the players can use their unique features to modify dice rolls, but then the corresponding card has to be literally burned and its remains deposited in the ash bowl. If a player fails a roll, a candle is blown out. When the last candle goes out, either on its own or as the result of a failed attempt, the game ends. Then darkness covers all.
"Hacking" as a term refers to the act of improving the ruleset by tweaking its awkward pieces here and there. In D&D circles, hacking has been around the since first edition, which being a mess, really needed some in-house tweaking to be playable at all. It's also interesting on its own, that after forty years of fixing, replacing, refining, and overhauling the game rules, people still feel that there is room for improvement. The Black Hack (2016) might be a crown achievement of this evolution, at least according to Horvath. It radically takes apart and reassembles the original D&D rules while staying true to its spirit by simultaneously drawing inspiration from both the Old School Revival and the indie games movement. It's lightweight, streamlined and polished to perfection. There are hundreds of RPGs mentioned in the book, but Black Hack is the only one Horvath calls perfect. That's something.
2017, another milestone indie game came out that has been emulated many times since. In Blades in The Dark, players take the roles of scoundrels of a Victorianqesque, dark, ghost-ridden city. Every session is a heist the characters have to pull off, but the game starts close to the end of the story, and the earlier chain of events is developed on the fly through flashbacks. When the need arises the player can simply invent what transpired in the past: "The door is locked? Well, yesterday I bribed the guard to leave the first-floor window open. Lucky that I have a rope with the climbing hook, too". The other way Blades In The Dark makes a unique experience is its emphasis on utilizing failures to lead the story. The game is not about happy endings and the mechanics actively encourage the GM to weave the story in an improvisative way, reacting to the blunders of the characters.
One of the best representatives of hex-crawling RPGs, Hot Springs Island, came out in 2017. In hex-crawling, the stories are driven by players exploring maps.
After all the weird RPGs already mentioned above, I find the 2018 Dialect the strangest. Here the players form a community that has to survive somehow, and the story is tied to collaboratively creating a language. No, I don't understand it either.
Interestingly enough, despite the amazing variety of themes RPGs explored in forty years (and counting), one genre has somehow been curiously underrepresented. The Kickstarter-supported indie game Mothership (2018) is perhaps the first representative of the alienesque, claustrophobic, survival sci-fi horror. Its 40-page core "book" has everything players need to kick off a collaborative nightmare.
40 pages seem rather short for an RPG? Try Honey Heist (2017), a one-page RPG where the players take the roles of honey-craving roguish bears. It's only one of the many one-page games designed, written, and illustrated by Grant Howitt.
Maybe Dialect isn't the strangest game of all. I close the enumeration with Necronautilus (2020) where players control souls bound to sentient poison gas.
And we are more or less at the end of the book. This really is just scratching the surface. I touched maybe every tenth of the games the Horvath describes in depth.
There is only one issue I found with the book, which piqued me enough not to leave it unmentioned. The book is very much the child of its time, and Horvath dedicates a fair amount of time to lambasting RPGs for not living up to diversity, equality, and inclusivity. Races (like orcs, elfs, etc) inevitably represent and reinforce real racial stereotypes. Any attempt to incorporate non-Western culture into the RPG world has been ignorant and offensive at best, and racist at worst. My favorite element of Shadowrun mythology is The Great Ghost Dance led by Daniel Howling Coyote, when the native American tribes execute a powerful ritual to assert their right to their ancestral land. It is monumental. Unfortunately, it is insensitive cultural appropriation as well, Horvath tells us. So are the attempts to expand the D&D world by tapping into oriental history and folklore. Evil characters with high honor, for example, simply play at the white men's racist cultural stereotypes of Easterners. I'm generally sensitive to this topic, so I intentionally tried to give Horvath the benefit of the doubt. I gave that up on page 198 after Horvath declared that the Shadowrun character class "Street Samurai" is in and of itself naked racism. Horvath didn't give up yet. At the mention of Drizzt Do'Urden, the reader is treated with a several-page-long diatribe of how depicting drows as inherently evil, is pure, unmitigated racism that belongs to the dustbin of history. There are frequent lamentations on Lovecraft's racism and colonialism whenever the context allows, and close to the end, we learn that apart from the rampant racism and ignorance, RPGs also failed to reach out to queer communities.
Having said all this, it is really the only fault I can find with the book. Apart from that, if you are interested in the rich history of role-playing games, or simply of creative pop culture, this is a book to kill for - or kill with, being a hardcase 400 A4-sized pages long monster. It leads the reader through 40 years of game evolution through ideas, game designs, meta-game designs, mechanics, themes, and all things RPG. All the pictures in the book are actual photos of the physical books from Horvath's own collection, with wrinkles and all, lending a very authentic and personal feeling to this love letter to roleplaying games. A must-read, and an extremely rewarding one.
