Folie à Trois: Trophy Gold

Below is a shared review of Trophy Gold (2022), a fantasy adventure game designed by Jesse Ross and published by The Gauntlet. Although it is informed by old-school D&D aesthetically, being about your typical knavish grave robbers, its play style takes after story games instead. It allows players to participate in creating and narrating the game-world, not just being passive explorers of the referee’s setting.

Ramanan ran the incursion entitled “The Temple of the Peerless Star” for a group with Alex, who later ran “The Smouldering Moor” for a group with Marcia. All three offer their own perspectives on the game.

Initial & Overall Impressions

Alex: I’m smitten. I’m trophypilled now. I’m still kind of riding the high of getting trophypilled and it’s hard for me to be objective about it. I’m saying that as a disclaimer.

I want to hit on a couple high-level takes that I think get at the heart of what has me so hyped about this game: the prep and GM experience are really really liberating; the player experience retains a lot of the grot of OSR play while leaving a lot more room for free imagination; the alchemy of its different elements gives way to a kind of emergence that’s distinct from the usual OSR sort but absolutely slaps.

I also want to sort of call out that I think, prior to this past week, we all felt kind of baffled by the way Trophy explains itself and fits together. The text is decently written, and the Gauntlet has done an excellent job of putting out lots of APs people can watch for reference, but I do think it’s distinct enough from standard OSR assumptions about game structure and flow that it can be hard for those coming out of that and adjacent gaming culture to wrap their head around it without actually playing it. So if you’re reading this and you’re like “I read the rules and???”, I think that’s maybe normal? Hopefully we can help you feel out if it’s worth exploring further.

Marcia: HEHEHEHEHE oh my God, yeah, I have to reiterate Alex’s disclaimer for myself because having walked into the session basically blind (breezing through the SRD a couple hours before playing and not really ‘getting’ it at first), I’m now completely like struck by how good the game is. I’m kind of an unfussy player who mostly plays stuff to hang out with friends, so it’s not like the treasure-hunting premise has ever really appealed to me specifically. Whenever I play, it’s usually just to come along for the ride.

But Trophy Gold is absolutely fantastic. The play structure feels so freeing and creative, in ways not really explored by fantasy adventure games which have lately been preoccupied with inventing new dice formulas and character attributes. The way it empowers player agency while keeping everything simple, including on the referee’s side, should be lessons we apply to playing and running adventure games in general. This game absolves Gygax’s daughters, whom he got mad at for making up treasure they found as they played. They had it right.

Ram: When I first read Trophy Gold I found the whole ruleset very meta: it sounded like a game designed to simulate the act of playing an OSR game. Its original incarnation had instructions for deconstructing your favourite modules into higher level sets that your players could explore. What are the key beats of Deep Carbon Observatory? Let’s just go on a tour of those. As written, players generally have a lot more knowledge about what’s going on in an adventure than you would find in your typical OSR game, often being told upfront what the end goal of a particular area might be, or contributing directly to the overall narrative and fiction of the world they are exploring.

But it was also quite simple! Trophy Gold didn’t seem that far away from the sorts of games I enjoy playing. I have been looking to play the game since I first read the rules. I can say that in practice the game was in fact similar enough to the sort of games I’d run with D&D or Into the Odd or whatever else. We explored unknown spaces in search of treasure. Things developed in unexpected ways. There is risk and danger and all the good stuff. If I described the beats of the game we played to someone it would probably sound like any other game I run. But how we got those beats was sometimes quite different.

Trophy Gold is great: I enjoyed playing it very much.

What Makes It Different?

Marcia: Trophy Gold has kind of changed the way I think about the fantasy adventure game genre. I’ve already said on Twitter that we’ve already known that the player side of classic D&D is a mess and has been outdone by later rulebooks, as far as accessibility and intuitiveness goes (shout-out to Mausritter for being top-tier in this regard). Trophy Gold goes a step further and makes even the most basic play procedures of classic D&D feel obsolete. Whereas classic D&D asks the player to explore a dungeon of the referee’s imagination, Trophy Gold enables the player to participate in creating and narrating the setting collaboratively. Often the player declares that they have found treasure, or that they have solved a riddle of the locale, or some facts about the world which may come back to bite them in the future. Meanwhile, the mystery of the place remains guarded, and players still have to be smart with managing risk and resources as they delve deeper.

So now I’m also trophypilled. Every adventure game that is not Trophy Gold will have to explain to me why it is not Trophy Gold because I’ve been spoiled by the simplicity and creative freedom it offers. Like, even if I don’t play or run Trophy Gold as such in the future, it will affect how I do those things from now on. It is worth playing just to get a taste of what all is possible.

Alex: To echo Ram’s comments above, in other contexts I’ve framed my pre-play impressions of Trophy as “adventure tourism.” You can explore an OSR adventure but just get the highlights: the emergent chaos, the cool toys, the doomed characters, the weird vibes and the grind. And you get to embrace all of that, and shortcut a lot of the time spent dealing with, like, marching orders, round structure, turn by turn exploration, the minutiae of the contents and layout of the room. I can’t tell you how sick I am of trying to parcel out X amount of treasure over Y number of rooms or scale things to PC level (I know “we don’t do that” in the OSR, but also: we do). I have less time and less energy than I used to, and this game is giving me something I’ve been looking for for a while.

Ram: I’m not sure what games I’d consider similar to Trophy Gold? It feels quite unique, a real marriage of the OSR with Story Gaming. I won’t define either of those terms, so don’t ask. You can play Trophy Gold in a way that feels pretty close to how you might play a game of The Black Hack: trying to discover treasure and solve mysteries in a very diegetic way. You can also play the game leaning quite heavily into its Story Game roots, spending the games meta-currency to discover treasure or bypass a puzzle. It really did feel like the game could move between these poles of play quite comfortably. I can picture running the game in a much more writer’s room way, and I suspect if I was more comfortable with that sort of play I’d have been able to do so more effectively. But I think you can also run the game in a way that leans more traditional and it will chug along just fine. You don’t need to play the game the way Jason Cordova does in his actual plays: you are your own boss.

Preparing & Exploring Sets

Locations work differently in Trophy Gold that they do in other games. They are made up of simple, sometimes linearly connected, nodes called “sets” which contain interactive props, dangerous traps, and of course treasure to loot.

Alex: For me, this game’s most radical ideas are about prep. I could probably write a whole, very long, mostly incoherent post about it. Instead I’m going to focus on set goals, which are a deeply challenging concept that gets at the core of Trophy’s ethos. Every set has a “goal” that the GM must announce when PCs enter the set. This often creates a hard split between player and character knowledge. It’s also where the GM, as a fellow player, tells you what this chunk of prep has to offer.

Not all set goals are mandatory, and they can be approached both fictionally and through other mechanics we’ll discuss later on. A good example in our game the other night was the abandoned town set where the goal was “find out what the townsfolk were planning”. I feel like the traditional version of this would have been me trying to convey through various fictional cues that the townsfolk had been planning something, hoping you picked up on it, and/or worrying you’d miss out on something good. You could bypass the whole set and head straight to the dungeon, something else I made sure to clarify. Instead, you were like “oh that sounds neat, let’s explore the village.” Your adventures in the village ended up bringing some of their plans to light, but also through interactions of the various props and mechanics, precipitating the climax of the adventure!

Giving out meta information outright like that will feel really uncomfortable to seasoned OSR/trad GMs, but it’s worth remarking how generative it was. It allowed you to make a quick, informed decision about how to spend your time and resources, both in terms of expected returns and fictional interest, and it did not by any means “spoil” the surprises that ensued, both those embedded in the prep and the emergent ones. I think set goals are one of the most exciting and artful ideas in this game, and they are amazingly robust in the ways they can support prep and play.

Marcia: Something that blew my mind after our four-hour play session was that, all in all, we had explored only two sets in the whole incursion—which itself only had four sets in a line! If you had asked me, I would have thought we navigated through at least five or six distinct areas: we searched someone’s old house, we combed through the attic and basement of an abandoned tavern, and even checked out the altar at a temple.

What this tells me is that although we often benefit from highly detailed “jewelbox dungeons” as far as interactivity and interest goes, it is just as engaging to develop locations on a high level of abstraction where we have enough context to flesh out the place as we go (from our own experience or connecting the dots of the setting). I’m thinking about conceptual density here. Every step along the way was full of decisions made by our characters or ourselves as players, wherever we peeked or walked into or poked at. On the other hand, the things written on the page were the elements that actually mattered, things that would stick out to characters or stuff that they could miss if they didn’t look closely enough.

Maybe the overall structure of the incursion is linear in the same way that a cake is layered (though also, many incursions are simply not linear!), but both narratively and functionally it never felt like we were being pushed around on a railroad. It was more like if you had a couple different dungeon floors, each with their own theme and all being stacked on top of each other, but the contents of individual floors are abstract and flexible—emphasizing points of interest and the risk of exploring them, rather than the minutia of navigating between them. I bet you could combine these with Nick’s new version of flux space to good effect.

Ram: Alex touches on what I both enjoyed and found most challenging about running my sessions of Trophy Gold. The format for the adventures are quite loose and open ended, the expectation being the details will be filled in through play. At first blush this feels really at odds with what I expect from the games I play. Courtney has written many essays on the dangers of the Quantum Ogre, and I have taken his advice to heart. What do meaningful choices look like in a game where the treasure is in this room because you decided it was in this room? Well, for starters, players are aware of what’s smoke and what’s mirrors.

Incursions are written in a way that I have to assume is to discourage thinking of them as fixed spaces. “Temple of the Peerless Star” is described in a way that I could picture it and describe it to the players, but there are no concrete maps, and it’s purposefully fuzzy at times when it comes to how spaces might connect together. My sense is how they connect is immaterial in this game unless you and the players decide it needs to be material through the course of your play. It’s a very different mindset and one I was really struggling to get in my head while running the game. But this structure is also what let me pick this game and run it with next to no prep on my part: the dream. I read the module, read the rules for the game again, and that was that.

The game isn’t rudderless. A well written incursion has enough structure to give you and your players something to hang your ideas onto, while making space for your table to take things in unexpected directions.

On The Hunt

The basic loop of Trophy Gold is the hunt roll, where the active player rolls one or two dice (based on if they apply one of their character’s skills) as they explore or investigate an area. The outcome may be encountering something terrible, acquiring a hunt token which can be redeemed to ‘find’ treasure or ‘solve’ mysteries, or both.

Ram: Trophy’s hunt roll is interesting. When I run games I use a hazard die, as described by Brendan at Necropraxis, having people roll whenever their character performs some meaningful dungeon exploration action. Trophy’s hunt roll is the obvious analog to this procedure. It’s also a bit of an inversion of the roll. You are rolling to see how your circumstances change while exploring a space. You can gain (or if you’re unlucky lose) hunt tokens in the process. You will most likely encounter something terrible. Notably you never “fail” at exploration. The hunt roll is the engine that pushes the game forward, the most common roll in the game.

That you can choose to fast forward through an adventure using hunt tokens you collect via Hunt Rolls is going to be the thing that I suspect most OSR players will find most contentious in this game. This is what jumped out to me when I first read the rules, and was what I was most keen to excise from the game before playing. It felt like you could have a more “OSR” game by dropping this rule. After having played, my concerns seem unwarranted. Hunt tokens can be turned into gold, which your characters will need to meet their burdens and survive to play again. Sacrificing them to meet some goal is an interesting and sometimes difficult choice for the players. It’s not easy to simply zip through an adventure. You’ll likely lose if you try and speed run an incursion. With the various resources a player needs to manage, the game is really pushing you to explore spaces via hunt rolls, where they will encounter dangerous situations.

Marcia: Where to start! On a high level, I love how this procedure encourages players to put themselves out there. Usually exploration focuses on the party as a unit, sometimes going as far as to say that the party gets one action per turn, and individual characters may or may not be part of that. Trophy Gold goes the opposite direction by putting each act of exploration into the hands of a single character. Besides personalizing the action to that character, it also incentivizes players to take turns exploring because over half the time you’re going to get a token for it. I think this would work well with a sort of “always-on initiative” like we’ve just seen from Shadowdark, where everyone must act before anyone can act again.

The tokens themselves I absolutely love. Again, more likely than not, you’re going to get a token for putting your character out there (and at risk). It’s like the reward juice they give to lab monkeys! Even better is how you spend the tokens. I don’t think we ended up spending three tokens to solve a set’s goal (which can be spent collaboratively, by the way), but I did spend one of my tokens to declare that there was a fancy, aged bottle of wine left underneath the barkeep’s counter. It didn’t occur to me that converting tokens to treasure could be a way of “speed-running” the game, as much as I thought it was a nice way to consistently enable players to contribute to the setting while rewarding them for it. Keep in mind that getting the reward has two steps, basically: first put your character at risk, and then declare a treasure in the world (with any amount of time in between those steps). That is such a tight play procedure that encapsulates the risk-reward loop of the game in general, while not foreclosing the sources of risk and reward that you would usually find in the world as you explore it. It’s very much an “as above, so below” kind of thing: the game loop is a microcosm of the larger adventure you’re participating in.

Alex: Less about hunt rolls but more about procedures generally, many of them reward players with extra dice for employing relevant skills or equipment. This sounds like pretty standard OSR, but a relevant departure is that many unresolved environmental details can be suggested by players, rather than specified by the GM. This means claiming that extra die can be as much a matter of expanding the fiction and offering material for the GM and others to build upon, as of exploiting the fiction as dictated by the GM. As an example, I watched an AP where a player justified their use of a “mending” skill by describing the dilapidation of their surroundings. These may feel a bit gimmes, but the mechanics are punitive enough without the bonus dice that I suspect this is play as intended.

Stumbling Blocks

Marcia: Ram referenced the hazard die earlier, and I think it’s a good point of comparison for how it encapsulates aspects of classic D&D that have become pretty standard: wandering monsters, light sources, and party fatigue. Only the wandering monster really survives in Trophy Gold in some form, and it has been generalized into encountering “something terrible”—such as a monster, a trap, or simply something traumatic. Light sources and fatigue do not make it, but I don’t think this is really a bad thing. I’ve at least expressed my own dislike of tracking light sources (not really sure what I’m doing here in general), and even others have expressed their own dislike of forced rest turns. Trophy Gold, as it were, sticks to just managing “hit points” in the form of Ruin, which can be gained not just from combat but also from falling victim to risky behavior in general. I have really no complaints about this, especially having suggested a similar approach a few months ago; I like that it keeps it simple. I do wish there was an overarching structure surrounding character actions if only because I like characters acting concurrently and as a group—Alex handled it well, though, by treating our actions as if they were concurrent anyway.

More generally, I’ve seen concern about how Trophy Gold relies too much on game mechanics (as opposed to player intuition or fictional positioning), that it is scene-based rather than location-based, and that it generally betrays the play style of classic D&D. This was not at all my experience with the game. My group played it very diegetically, exploring the world through our characters’ senses. Although the spatial relationships between different points of interest were abstracted, they still definitely existed—we just weren’t moving our party from square to square anymore. The dice we rolled felt no more arbitrary or gamey than when we would roll encounter or hazard dice in classic games, and they feel better integrated into the game loop by being rolled when a player acts. Rather than Trophy Gold watering down of classic D&D for a story game play style, it feels like it takes seriously the idea that D&D is an exploration game rather than a skirmish war game. It even embraces taking place in the theater of the mind rather than being ported from the tabletop.

Ram: I would have loved to see more detailed advice on running Trophy Gold. The GM section in the book is quite small. There is tons of information in Podcasts and Actual Play videos, but that’s not my preferred way to learn how to play a game. I ended up asking a lot of questions in Trophy Discord, which is fantastic, to get a sense of what the game play loop should look like concretely, what the game should feel like in play, etc. (That there is so much information on Discord, and not in a more public / searchable space like a blog is a shame. If you’re going to make an OSR game, you should be required to foster the blogging culture to go with it!) How many Hunt Rolls is too many? What are some examples of fleeing from combat, or trying to avoid it in the first place? How much extra Endurance should you give a group of monsters? There are no real examples of play in the book, and though they are often quite goofy, a well written one can really clarify how the rules of the game all fit together.

Closing Remarks

Marcia: Trophy Gold is just really good. It’s maybe the most unique take on the dungeon crawl I’ve played as far as rules go, and its new ideas are just really fun. My only complaint is that the book’s "universe of discourse" is so restricted to the dungeon crawl that it feels like a closed system. However, I have no qualms about incorporating its mechanics into my mental toolbox since as such they are not as restrictive. Hunt tokens are simply fun and cool, and so are sets. Minigame gang, rise up!

Alex: I’m writing these several months after the above and while I’m no longer in the afterglow of hype I still feel very warmly about Trophy Gold. I ended up running two of my own adventures and feeling really good about them! That’s a huge deal for me, as I tend to struggle with adventure creation and fall back on modules. I maintain that the set structure is a very powerful tool. I especially recommend it to GMs who struggle with OSR prep, at least as an experiment.

Ram: As I said at the start of this post, Trophy Gold is great. The game is mechanically interesting and novel, while remaining quite simple. What I love about the game is that it’s a little bit messy when it comes to what it’s about. It’s not trying to a Story Game or an OSR game. Trophy Gold is very much its own thing, and all the better for it.

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Note by Marcia: Since we started writing this review circa March 2023 (you know how it is), I had played even more Trophy with my friend Nova as the referee. I actually wrote about that experience on my blog, which might be of interest if you were wanting to modify Trophy to be more “open-world”.

Cryptic Signals - A Book of Beasts, Monsters & Treasure, Volume 2: Monsters &

A Book of Beasts

Review by WFS

This bestiary is a supplement for a supplement. In 2015, Jason Lutes wrote “The Perilous Wilds”, a supplement for overland exploration for the Dungeon World RPG, which is regularly cited as an essential product for that system and a source of inspiration even for those who lack any interest in Dungeon World. “A Book of Beasts” was a stretch goal for the Kickstarter for The Perilous Wilds. 

The premise for A Book of Beasts is that The Perilous Wilds provides a series of random tables for generating creatures, and that all 56 of the monsters included would be rolled up using those random tables. Just knowing that each monster was born of random prompts has a certain magic akin to learning that classic D&D monsters like the Owlbear or the Rust Monster were inspired by deformed children’s toys. To add to this creative flourish, Jason assigned each creature “to a different artist, giving them very little direction in interpreting [his] written descriptions.” I think the reason that this approach tickles me so much is twofold: Firstly, I love improv and watching someone take a few random prompts and create something cool and cohesive, and, secondly, it is reminiscent of medieval bestiaries, where you had monks describing and drawing strange monsters such as “elephants” or “lions” via an ancient game of telephone, to often hilarious results.

But the wacky process means nothing if the actual monsters are no good. A Book of Beasts, however, fully delivers on being a fun and gameable bestiary. I always like the more obvious creatures that are just two animals combined (such as the White Cat of One Hundred Paws, which is a snow leopard-centipede hybrid, or the Owlbat, which is an owl-bat), but the real mark of a bestiary’s quality is if the really bizarre monsters seem like something you could bring to your table. A Book of Beasts offers plenty of weird monsters that still feel like they have some reason to exist in a fantasy world from the small (e.g., the Prayer Sparrow, a small bird that pecks the eyes out of unrepentant petitioners at religious functions) to the humanoid (e.g., the Wastewalkers, reptilian nomads who can survive without water for weeks on end) to the larger than life (e.g., the Architect Lichen, an intelligent fungus that grows to look like ancient ruins and always expanding). 

But this bestiary is far from perfect, as some entries run toward the generic. For example, the Fenkin is a toad-like humanoid that lives a tribal and territorial existence in the swamp, which is a bit too similar to…basically every swamp-dwelling humanoid proffered by D&D, honestly! Sometimes even a small twist goes a long way. Such as the Hulking Brute, which might have been yet another ogre-alike if not for their fascination with cheese, which causes them to press cheesemakers into servitude to produce poor quality, moldy cheese (their favorite).

I award bonus points to bestiaries that hint at how the creatures interact with each other. It is all well and good to present a list of cool monsters for the player characters to fight (or run from), but adding details about how the monsters interact amongst themselves makes them feel more real and also provide useful guidance on how to place them in the game naturalistically. While A Book of Beasts largely presents stand-alone monstrosities, it shines when there is interaction. For instance, The Snow Creepers are basically D&D Ankhegs for frozen climates, but they are made way more interesting by the inclusion of the Flurry Worm, which are larval creepers that appear like a flurry of snow when a female Snow Creeper’s egg sac bursts open. This clever climatological camouflage is the setup for a horrific payoff–they Flurry Worms burrow into the flesh of their unlucky hosts where they gestate for a month before “[e]merg[ing] in some horrific fashion.” That is terrifying; I love it.

The organization also makes these monsters easy to bring to the table. The bestiary is organized not alphabetically by name, but first by climate (frigid, temperate, torrid) and then within each climate by terrain type (lowland, wetland, woodland, highland, underland). Each climate-terrain combination includes four creatures on a single spread. The result of this organization is that the referee can open to the appropriate climate-terrain combination for where their players are (or the location they are prepping) and pick one of the monsters on that spread. While it includes the obvious index of listing the creatures alphabetically in the back of the book, organizing the monsters based on where they can be found makes this bestiary a handy tome to have with you while running the game and minimizes flipping between pages during play.

Disclaimer: The cover art for A Book of Beasts is by Keny Widjaja, who is an interior artist on my upcoming Barkeep on the Borderlands adventure. The interior illustrations are by Carl Antonowicz, Billage, Jan Burger, Niels Burger, Jonathan Fine, and Josh Rosen. Keny’s inclusion as an artist in this bestiary did not impact my review.

A Book of Beasts was written by Jason Lutes. It can be obtained in PDF format for $5 on DriveThruRPG.

MONSTERS & TREASURE
Review by Gus L.

The second “Booklet” of the Original 1974 edition of Dungeons & Dragons (OD&D). This thin half sheet zine is the blueprint for all subsequent monster books.  To find something earlier one has to leave the space of Role Playing games entirely and look to ancient bestiaries. Today Monsters & Treasure remains a functional and near complete list of creatures for the game it supports (or I’d argue almost any simple D&D-like game), in addition to being shockingly economical - with 76 monsters (at least 10 of which are simply alternate names or a vague one line description without stats) on only 20 half-pages (treasure tables and magic item descriptions fill more than half of Monsters & Treasure, which sets the form for subsequent role playing guides).  

I should mention the fact that I generally hate bestiaries. There are exceptions where bestiaries can be useful: densely stated tactical games, or ones that are really sets of lair adventures/hooks/scenarios. Otherwise bestiaries seem indulgent, mostly virtually useless fluff - rarely connected to setting, and almost never offer interesting deviation from the standards. Monsters & Treasure set though standards though, and it still manages to raise questions and offers lessons about the use and construction of beastiarys that should be taken more seriously today if one wants a bestiary that’s more then an excuse to draw a bunch of cool monster illustrations -- which is a perfectly fun project - just not an especially useful one for playing most RPGs.

At first it’s a bit odd to hold up Monsters & Treasure as an example of great bestiary design, there is nothing special about the creatures listed within;  without exception it offers the standard creatures of contemporary fantasy with little more than a name and a stat line. For ogres the entire descriptive text consists of “OGRES: These large and fearsome monsters range from 7 to 10 feet in height” followed by two more lines discussing their special abilities to inflict greater damage and throw rocks.  We don’t know what OD&D’s ogres look like or much about their habits or demeanor, only that they either serve chaos or neutrality and carry sacks of gold around - like giants.

Best Illustration in OD&D

This simplicity isn’t because of a lack of imagination, but rather because Monsters & Treasure is the ur-bestiary, and more than that, it’s one of the pillars of Gygaxian vernacular fantasy’s implied worldbuilding. Most creatures in Monsters & Treasure depend on the general and popular understanding of monsters to provide description and character, because even in 1974 most people knew what an ogre might be from reading Puss in Boots as a kid or some similar fairy tale source.  That’s the power of vernacular fantasy, it functions well with even minimal information and early D&D’s reliance on it rather then copious lore not only allows individual referees and players to understand threats with their creativity and general genre knowledge rather then games mastery but also keeps things easy to use and approachable.  These elements in bestiary design  are less necessary today, largely because Monsters & Treasure also changed our understanding of fantasy creatures. Beyond the basic understanding of monsters are foes to be defeated in RPG combat modeled via die roll (rather than through the ruses and abstractions popular in mythology, fairy tale and fantasy writing), Monsters & Treasure does more, it changes and defines many aspects of fantasy creatures in ways that are general today.

Monsters & Treasure (along with OD&D generally) is the source of our cultural understanding of what fantasy worlds look like, and when some other work of fantasy is considered creative, novel, or weird the baseline it’s being compared to today is the implied setting of OD&D.  This power is why I use the term “Gygaxian Vernacular Fantasy” rather than Vanilla Fantasy or another label - because even as it continues to evolve and change, today’s conception of fantasy worlds owes so much to Gygax and Arneson.  Personally I suspect Monsters & Treasure mostly this is Gygax’s work, though as with all early D&D it’s hard to tell*, the expanded and more descriptive Monster Manual is both writers' work, but the world building encounter tables of AD&D are Gygax's and expand Monsters & Treasure directly.

There might appear to be a contradiction between the generic names and laconic descriptions within Monsters & Treasure and this claim of cultural importance, but taking a look at some of the more in depth descriptions it’s clearer. Look at Dungeons & Dragons’ titular beast, the mighty dragon (or at least the very deadly but fairly fragile dragon in OD&D).  It’s the longest entry in Monsters & Treasure, spending a decadent two pages detailing the six Gygaxian chromatic dragons: white, black, green, blue, red, and golden and the mechanics around their varied breath weapons, age categories, and subdual.  This detail, while minimal, was novel in 1974 - the dragon here is conceived naturalistically, as a group of species (we even learn of their “family groupings”) rather than a singular mythic beast. Monsters and Treasure creates the idea of the fantasy dragon that’s today’s default: a species of intelligent fantasy creature whose color determines habitat and breath weapon.  While several legendary dragons breathe things besides fire (notably the Norse World Serpent, Jormungandr, who breathes noxious fumes - but then one asks if a world encircling serpent really a dragon?), fire is the norm, and it is unrelated to scale color. Monsters & Treasure created, codified, and popularized the colorful coded breath weapon trope. It’s also responsible for several other common and almost universally accepted fantasy versions of monsters such as the gnoll and slimes (borrowed from Dunsany and the movie The Blob) that weren’t a major part of the genre prior to D&D.

Gnolls, or “A cross between Gnomes and Trolls (. . . perhaps, Lord Sunsany (sic) did not really make it all that clear) with +2 morale.” are even more of a D&Dism then dragons, but their presentation in Monsters & Treasure didn’t define the Gnoll as the signature hyena monster that terrorized a million new World of Warcraft players, Gnolls became Hyena-ful in the 1977 Monster Manual. Monsters & Treasure Gnolls (see that illustration for all the detail you will ever need) aren’t hyena people, and they aren’t much like Dunsany’s Gnoles - forest dwelling fairy creatures who delight in gemstones, ropes, and torture.  In Monsters & Treasure they are one of the few illustrated creatures, but like their description they remain “similar to Hobgoblins”. This lack of definition and distinct character is also an aspect of Monsters & Treasure that makes it interesting. Gnolls are an example of what I think of as Monstrous Hierarchies.

I don’t know if it’s a taxonomic obsession specific to Gygax and sprite based computer games, but the most important monsters in OD&D tend to exist as distinct sub categories, for example undead and humanoids. These orders of foe start with the weakest and rise to the most dangerous - roughly in concert with character level. Humanoids begin as kobolds/goblins with less then one hit die and rise to giants who have exceptionally dangerous special abilities (massive boosts to damage dealing) and twelve plus Hit Dice. Gnolls are in the middle, the nastiest of the humanoids are roughly human sized - monstrous soldiers who still appear in large numbers and have 1.5 Hit Dice. After them come ogres. These hierarchies serve a purpose in that they produce an array of similar challenges that follow the same sorts of behavioral scripts, fill the same niches in the Gygaxian pseudo-ecology and gradually introduce more and better special abilities, but also ramp up challenge steadily with player level. One could simply say that goblins, like humans, have class levels and ½ to 3 Hit Dice, corresponding with fighters of the same level and then note they come in various varieties and by various names.  What Monsters & Treasure does instead is define each tier of monster as something unique - still largely undifferentiated, but with a name and specific statistics that allow them to become a known risk the players can gauge.

These hierarchies would simply be a curiosity if the first edition of D&D were a more complex system, but as it is they offer a sort of matrix of stat lines and special abilities that’s easy to adapt. If one wants dangerous hyena people or opium fantasy murder gnomes, the gnoll statline works equally well. The concept of reskinning a monster implies a fair bit of work in complex modern systems, or relatively minimal changes to description, but with Monsters & Treasure the space for reskinning and reimagining monsters is vast. This may disrupt the method that monster hierarchies teach players about monster risk, but reskinning is also enabled by hierarchies, because the whole can be reskinned multiple times: goblins become conscripts, orcs veterans and gnolls elites in an evil human army with almost no stat changes. Alternatively the same humanoid soldier monster hierarchy might represent the different types of goatmen or otherworldly fungus invaders, but monsters and treasure gives a quick reference for soldier type monsters from weaker than an average man at arms to stronger then veteran troops, and then it offers several types of the same sort of foes as giants. There are even a small number of special abilities offered in Monsters & Treasure, and they are also modular. One can snap the dragon’s breath onto a giant and suddenly you have a huge demon.

Monsters & Treasure succeeds because it’s less a bestiary and more a monster building toolkit. It offers a large enough selection of foes and special abilities, then organizes them in hierarchies that flow intuitively and mirror character level. This lesson is reinforced by the random encounter tables and the OD&D rule that dungeon level and character level are roughly equivalent - though of course OD&D’s random encounter tables allow for asymmetrical encounters as they do not seem to seek a balance where every combat is balanced. This bestiary strikes a balance in very few pages by offering sufficient examples and content to allow a new referee to judge how encounters and monsters are designed while creating a minimal implied setting, but it doesn’t stifle creativity, and offers incomplete examples of monsters that the referee can stat and add  as they desire.

As much as it set the standards for how monsters in RPGs appear, Monsters & Treasure One wishes it had done more to set the standards for bestiary design with a systemic approach to stats that is useful for reskinning while still providing sufficient information to play.  This balance is what makes Monsters & Treasure work, because despite some stumbles in layout and offering fewer special abilities than it might have (both perhaps unavoidable for a book written before the concept of the RPG was fully formed), it is a sufficient, even generous bestiary, that encourages referee adaption and expansion.

Reading through Monsters & Treasure is worthwhile simply because it makes one consider - how many monsters does one need? What really are the mechanical distinctions between an orc and a bandit? One doesn’t need every monster to be a bear, but it’s pretty likely that every monster you will need or can imagine will mostly fit into one of a small number of statlines with a novel special ability or two.

—

*Determining the contributions of Gygax & Arneson in OD&D is an impossible and pointless task. The truth is clouded by years of litigation between and self-aggrandizing myth making by the two. I prefer to think of OD&D as something they wrote happily together, with Gygax codifying and expanding on Blackmoor, and Arneson making tweeks to Chainmail to produce the final product - this of course is also myth making. We can say that Arneson’s Blackmoor supplement also includes monsters, and that the 1980’s settlement to his lawsuit regarding IP rights to AD&D materials included the Monster Manual which was affirmed to some extent in Arneson’s 1985 declaratory judgment regarding royalties on the Monster Manual II- though the issue there is largely settlement interpretation and the conceptual nature of an RPG Bestiary, not specific monster design. 225 U.S.P.Q. (BNA) 1252.

Volume 2: Monsters &

Review by Ramanan

As Gus notes above, the monster manual for OD&D, the first half of the book Monsters & Treasure, is quite modest. OD&D isn’t a complex game, so monsters can be described quite simply, mostly via prose rather than fiddly stat blocks. Gygax rightly assumes you know what a bandit is and doesn’t waste any words explaining the obvious to you. Instead he spends a lot of time explaining the fighting composition of a group of bandits.

Although Bandits are normal men, they will have leaders who are super-normal fighters, magical types or clerical types. For every 30 bandits there will be one 4th-level Fighting-Man; for every 50 bandits there will be in addition one 5th- or 6th-level fighter ...

I’m not sure that’s much better. (I sincerely love the OD&D monster booklet, though! It is charming.) Into the fruitful void left by Gygax steps the man himself—Luke Gearing. The cheekily named Volume 2: Monsters & is Gearing’s take on an OD&D monster manual. Luke leans even harder into the minimalism of OD&D, giving us a book that is far more flavourful. It’s basically all flavour. His take on the Cockatrice reads like a poem, likely because this is basically a book of poetry:

Featherless Bird 

armoured with iron scale 

and useless wings purloined from bats

stretched wide to embrace the world.

There are stats for each creature, though they are as minimal as those found in OD&D’s book of monsters. A Cockatrice is: HD 5, AC as Plate, damage 1d6, physical contact causes petrifaction. If you need Luke to tell you anything else about a Cockatrice this is probably not the book for you. If you want a picture of a Cockatrice you’ll be doubly disappointed! 

Luke’s bandits are described as follows:

1d6 relatives to grieve,

close enough to know who did it.

But who is in charge! Luke isn’t trying to solve that problem with this bestiary. This is a book about transmitting feeling and mood. 

I believe the best game books fold worldbuilding into everything they do. As terse as this book is, you get a strong sense of the implied world these monsters fit within. The implication throughout the book is that most monsters are men who have twisted themselves in pursuit of power, or have been twisted by men into the monstrous, with some fantastic beasts to round it all out. I like this take on the creatures of OD&D.

If you enjoy this take on the dragon you’ll enjoy this book. If you think this is some total art-house nonsense—and honestly, it kind of is—you will be disappointed: avoid this book, it’ll just piss you off. I for one enjoyed this unusual take. We already have Monsters & Treasure, Monster Manual, The Fiend Folio, etc. No one needs to tell that story again.

That said, Luke should have made a table with all the monster stats, like Monsters and Treasure: that is the best part of that book!

Grave Trespass - Gradient Descent

Is Luke Gearing too powerful? Certainly. Luke’s latest work for Tuesday Knight Games is Gradient Descent, a megadungeon written for the sci-fi horror game Mothership. The braintrust at Mothership HQ asks the question, “can you fit a megadungeon in a small zine?” Yes, apparently you can.

I may have been the first person to run the module who didn’t help play test. It has a compelling premise: a giant space station, an evil AI, Bladerunner nonsense, etc: all the good stuff. I read it and was enthralled. Brendan and Evan played a game I ran online, starting in media res, trying to flee the space station with an artifact they found “off camera”. It was a fun game. Months later I picked the module up again and started a longer campaign, which has been running for several months now. As it winds down I have lots of thoughts about this adventure.

Gradient Descent is a 64 page full colour zine: it’s a very dense 64 pages. Like all good OSR books it opens suggesting how you might use this adventure, from the basis of a campaign to something to simply hoover up ideas from. Luke explains some basic procedures of play and how the module works and then we jump right into things. There is an AI, Monarch, that controls a massive space station called The Deep. This is a huge factory complex, abandoned by its corporate overlords. Next we learn about what orbits the Deep. My Mothership campaign had the players begin in The Bell, a small retrofitted thruster that serves as a safe haven for people exploring the station. There they met a small coterie of NPCs who can help kick things off. As part of a larger campaign I would have had them try and cross a blockade to reach the station, and perhaps make friends with Commander Kilroy, another NPC with goals they might help achieve. Along with some “monsters”, these are the things outlined first. Then we move onto the “dungeon” itself, which makes up the bulk of the adventure. The Deep is huge. There are several floors, many sections, and a web of interconnections. It’s a complex and interesting dungeon. In a twisted way you can almost picture what the factory would have been like in the past. Finally the book concludes with a table of random artifacts, some super science. The back cover of the module is an "I search the body" table.

The art by Nick Tofani is wonderfully moody, often creepy. A perfect fit for this module. I would share it with my players often. Jarret Crader, the man behind all your favorite RPG books, did development editing. With a module such as this, I suspect no easy feat. Finally, Sean McCoy did the layout, and it’s a real chef kiss emoji.

The book continues a long tradition of really strong graphic and information design that feels like the most standout feature of the Mothership line. I see a lot of the design cues from one page dungeons at play here. The adventure is laid out with the two page spreads of the zine in mind. You can likely run each section of the dungeon with minimal page flipping. When I was running the adventure, from a PDF, I would normally only need to jump to the sections about the androids, ghosts in the machine, or monarch. If I had the zine in my hands I’d put some post it notes there and that would be that. (I am weirdly cheap about shipping, so my copy of this zine had been sitting with my brother in NYC for the last year and change. Of course, it arrived in Toronto just as I wrapped up running things.) There is so much information this book is trying to get across, and it does a remarkable job at doing just that.

The descriptions in this dungeon are terse. On the whole I think this is a positive, and is what allowed me to run my games straight out of the book. It takes you seconds to read what’s going on in any room the players have walked into. For example:

The square in the title indicates this is a large industrial scale space: you should imagine a large factory or warehouse. In my head when I read this I pictured something akin to rows of corn. To avoid being licked would take some dexterity or creativity. The scene is both horrific and cold: there heads on stakes, but everything is artificial.

What now? Again this is a huge room, but I found it harder to imagine what its deal might be, where the loop of glass was going, and what it might be for. I know you might use sand for cleaning or scouring in a factory, perhaps for making glass, but I couldn’t quite picture what Luke wanted me to take away from this scene. I do like the phrase, "a whisper magnified to a roar," though. In a space where you maybe expect to hear the clanking and crashing of a factory, this suggests a different sort of noisy space.

Most of the time there is enough for you to improvise on top of, especially for you pro-star GMs. I'm not sure i'm quite there, so I found myself describing rooms as “large industrial spaces” a lot, or falling back on analogies of Toyota factories. I should have watched some old films and made some dungeon dressing tables. I think if there was more space that would be a nice addition to the book: examples of what these alien industrial spaces might look like. A small table of ideas might be all it takes to help cement a space in your head. I would not want to see the descriptions of the rooms themselves expanded: improvising poorly is better than discovering well into play you forgot something important buried deep in some multi paragraph description of a space. I suppose the module is really trying to get straight to the point with everything it presents. We don't have pages and pages of backstory about The Deep. If you read the module you'll have a good sense of what's up, with enough space for you to inject what you want. The module is flavourful: it paints a real picture of this strange alien space, certainly at the macro level.

Gradient Descent declares itself a sprawling sci-fi megadungeon. “But Ram, what does that even mean?” I would have shrugged my shoulders, but thankfully many years ago Gus wrote a blog post musing about what makes a megadungeon both mega and good. I regret not re-reading this blog post before running my games because I think it would have informed my GMing and improved the campaign.

The Deep is split up into 11 discrete interconnected sections. This doesn’t feel like a dungeon where the intention is to fight your way through it, so level 6 isn’t more ‘difficult’ than level 1, just different. The levels vary in size, but playing online most of the meatier ones took a few sessions each to explore. I initially tried to runs the game like a traditional dungeon crawl. I was going to think about rations and light and all that nonsense. I drafted up some houserules for overloading encounter rolls to track more aspects of play, but in the end I dropped it all. I found it awkward. I am not sure that you can simply map that D&D style of play straight onto Mothership. Stress seems to be the resource you want to worry about in the game. Occasionally room descriptions in Gradient Descent will suggest players gain stress or make stress saves, but I think something more systematic that encompasses the whole module would have been a good addition. Dungeon exploration rules that tie into the stress mechanics of Mothership would be excellent. This is certainly something I will think much more about the next time I run the game.

The Bell is presented as an obvious home base. When I ran my Carcosa campaign the players generally ended each session back in the safety of a town. This way we could rotate new players in if needed week to week, which is generally what happened. The tone of this Gradient Descent campaign would have felt different if I also required the players end each session retreating back to safety—to the Bell or some particular sections of the Deep. This feels more in line with the ethos of a megadungeon campaign, as Gus outlines. You push into the space as far as you can until you must finally fall back. You are hunting for short cuts, trying to understand the geography, making friends with factions to find new safe havens, etc. With the short online sessions I was running I didn’t think this would work. The lack of a clear resource management side to the game also has some impact here: there isn't a need to return if you don't really need to resupply. The sessions we played ended up primarily being about exploring the weird space. We would pick up where we left off each session. And that’s perfectly fine, to be honest. There is enough there for it to be a fun experience, but you can do that and much more! 

If I could go back I would have certainly prepped more! I am out of practice running games. This module is so well put together it fools you into thinking you can pick it up and just play. (And to be clear, you can, as I have just noted. Ha!) I just think I could have run a more compelling campaign if I had put in a bit more effort. I can picture something stronger! Mind you, no one is or was complaining: the players seemed to enjoy themselves and I certainly did. But maybe there are some lessons for you to do better than me:

• I kept the antagonist AI Monarch in the background for much of the campaign. I figured a creature such as it would see the players as ants, and largely ignore them. Which is all well and good if it was behaving like a god. But I didn’t really do much there, so they didn’t face much conflict from the game’s primary antagonist. I could have made its presence more known, indirectly in keeping with my original vision. Ominous messages, security androids giving the players cut-eye, and all that.

• There is a whole element of “am I a human or am I a robot” that I didn’t lean into. If you are running the game I would have some coterie of regular rival NPCs who are also exploring The Deep, and who may or may not be the mysterious infiltrator androids. I had NPCs I had drafted—and then didn’t really use! But why?

• There is a lot you can layer on top of the dungeon and its contents. NPC parties and factions are a big part of megadungeon play, and to get the most out of this module, I really recommend you think about these things up front, and as the players encounter the various factions of the dungeon. Luke has several factions called out explicitly who are adversarial with one another, like the Android groups on the second floor. There are a few other big groups that aren’t called out as factions, but could be treated as ones. (Off the top of my head the Androids hidden away in the Dis/Assembly floor.)

This sort of advice would have been good to include in the procedures of play that open the book. I think a much longer section on how to use the book most effectively would be great for new DMs, and honestly old ones like me. I’m not sure running a megadungeon is quite the same as running a normal dungeon, and so a few words discussing how you might approach things differently would have been great.

Overall my gripes are far outweighed by the creativity on display. In these Covid-times I had lost my energy when it came to playing RPGs, but reading this adventure really grabbed me and got my excited about gaming again. Most importantly it did what it said on the box: I ran this giant dungeon crawl for several months with the most half-assed of prep. This is the stuff dreams are made of: truly wondrous.