Trophy Dark: Storygame's Old-School Renaissance

What could have been, were it not for the desire to write More Systems

I have written eight Trophy Dark incursions, one published to The Gauntlet’s Codex and one included in the Trophy Dark book; I have also written for Gabriel Robinson’s Token and Candlelight.

It is late 2018 and I am trapped in Draft Purgatory. Newly minted into the online indie role-playing game “scene” (twitter), armed with an itch.io account for my ashcans, a copy of Torchbearer, Swords Without Masters, and a poorly-translated edition of Trudvang, confident in Dogs in the Vinyard being the pinnacle of game design, drafting directly into my layout document like an absolute maniac. I am publishing under the short-lived self-publishing imprint SAGA and writing what would be my first taste of a fantasy heartbreaker - Bramble & Briar, intended to be a deconstruction of heroic dungeon-crawling adventure games, where would-be treasure-hunters enter a haunted wilderness in search of plunder and never return. It is 50 pages long in the rules sections and I am still working on the lengthy and heavily editorialized GM sections. It is late. I am tired. My attention drifts, and I start browsing DTRPG and see that Codex, Gauntlet’s monthly RPG zine, has a new edition out. I start reading Dark 2. I read Jesse Ross’ Trophy. I close my draft of Bramble & Briar.

Despite killing in the womb what was to be my first big TTRPG project, Trophy Dark would become somewhat of my “welcome to the industry” party for the indie TTRPG scene and, before I became branded a contrarian crank, possible Trilateralist, probable Illuminati, writing Trophy Dark modules was likely what people were introduced to me through. Writing ‘Court of the Radiant King’ for Codex was my first work published to a games anthology (and my first publishing paycheque). The Trophy community at this time had, in my eyes, some of the best writers in role-playing games at the time and since: Jesse Ross, Lin Codega, Madeline Ember, Natalie Ash, Gabriel Robinson, Michael Van Vleet, Jim Crocker, Ludovico Alves; a real crew of throat-slitters, fire-starters and snake-handlers. Each new monthly edition of Codex had at least one new bit of Trophy content. Each new addition to the liminal Trophyverse brought the feverish anticipation of a kid in a comic store, waiting for the newest trade to arrive.

What made Trophy Dark special was how writing-focused it was. The actual rules to Trophy was a scant handful of pages; significantly longer was the accompanying onboarding suggestions for writing your own Incursions (Trophy’s adventure module format). The only two pieces of mechanical information you really needed, going in, was how Ruin Rolls work and how to negotiate (and provoke) a Devil’s Bargain: the former lifted neatly from Cthulhu Dark Green and the latter out of place in Blades in the Dark, now finally in a better home in Trophy. With such a stripped-away mechanical framework and the barest of suggestion as to the formatting of each of the five Rings - the five stages of an Incursion whereby the treasure-seekers circle the drain of physical, mental and emotional health and eventually plummet to the bottom - writing a Trophy Dark incursion required that most valuable and rarest of games writing ability to breathe life into a scenario: the ability to write well. And in full sentences, no less!

Game mechanisms, I have long held, are mostly a prop used to conceal one’s inability to write good prose by masking it with a wall of (alleged) technical writing. That is fairly uncharitable to a good chunk of the Games Industry; that doesn’t make it any less true. Game Designers will often say this but in a manner that attempts to absolve themselves of responsibility: “Game Design,” they say, “is the skill of writing Mechanics. Prose writing is for Fluff, Lore, and these other things I have determined to be inferior and of lesser importance by virtue of not being particularly good at them. I am not a Writer; I am a Narrative Designer, a Taste Maker, a Mechanical Designer.” They are correct in the assumption that they are not writers.

What was beautiful about Trophy Dark was that for one shining second, Storygame-brained Game Designers were forced to actually write - not write ‘mechanics’, a term I loathe because ‘game mechanics’ are mechanisms, ‘mechanics’ work on cars, a much more noble pursuit - and what’s more, they were loving it. The rings of a Trophy incursion have thematic guidelines, not mechanical ones; there are no monster statblocks to fill space with because you cannot fight the monsters, there are no DCs to assign because the dice do not work like that, there are no magic items to stat out, there are no areas to map, there are no “if the players X, then Y.” There is nothing to hide behind. There is the writers’ ability to write compelling prose, to present wonder and horror in a manner that tempts the players’ doomed treasure-seekers further into the web, to provoke them to make compromises with theirs’ and others’ lives, and nothing else. The very design of the incursion format demands good writing; the only way to write good is to write. A veritable content mill of Trophy Dark incursions followed; most passable, some excellent. But people were writing, really writing.

Looking back now, it is very likely that Trophy Dark’s adventure-first mindset is what really set me upon the path towards the OSR. It’s a nearly identical design ethos: largely forget about the mechanisms, foster a DIY play culture, focus on table rulings, encourage the writing and sharing of lots of adventures. For all the ‘system matters’ nonsense of the Storygames scene, what they’d gone and done was re-create the OSR in miniature. And they loved it! It was a genuinely beautiful scene in the making. I attribute a lot of the development of my own writing to writing Trophy Dark incursions and reading those of others, particularly those named above. Flocculent Cathedral is a near-flawless dungeon crawl. Mother, Southern Holler, A Warm and Pleasant Hum, Tomb of 10,000 Dreams, To Make My Bread, Gift of the Sea - you could run these with anything, and I defy you to assemble a better handful of adventure modules from any other subcommunity.

And just like the OSR scene of the mid aughts that the Trophy community had replicated in miniature, things splintered nearly as fast as they came together.

On the heels of Trophy Dark, developed alongside plans for a deluxe Kickstarter campaign, came Trophy Gold: “its like Trophy Dark, but if you could actually fight the monsters and win!” In other words, very little at all like Trophy Dark, save name and setting. Accompanying that would be Trophy Loom, the Gauntlet Forums’ questionably ethical crowdsourced setting guide for the world of Trophy. Hinted at on Twitter (but as of now, very likely quietly scrapped forever) would be Trophy Colossus, a duet game take on the Trophy format where a single treasure-hunter would play Shadows of the Colossus instead scale a singularly giant adversary in the manner of an incursion or a dungeon.

Trophy Loom seems a novel enough idea, if probably unnecessary. I am willing to concede it might simply not be for me; in the grand scheme of things, the world of Kalduhr et al. is just not that interesting or important. I can understand its use perhaps in the development of ideas for writing incursions, but the self-contained nature of those incursions doesn’t particularly call for, require or I’d argue benefit from references to any sort of ‘canon’ shared world. The actual ethics of crowdsourcing worldbuilding inspiration on your publication’s forum and then scraping them for a published book aside (seems kind of crass to me); its the sort of thing that perhaps is best served as an online resource and not a glossy hardcover with a slipcase and thousands of dollars of bespoke art.

Trophy Gold is, in my mind, actively bad. Not only because it rejects the fundamental framework of Dark and abandons one of the key in-universe rules of the format - that the monsters cannot be fought - but because it does so so overwhelmingly poorly. Trophy Gold is a dungeon crawler written by someone who seems to not only hate dungeon crawlers but is bound and determined to misunderstand them. In a game allegedly designed for the players to hunt and kill monsters, the actual hunting and killing is entirely elided through a series of impersonal and overly complicated die rolls, leaving… what, exactly?

The DNA of Blades in the Dark is undeniable in the Trophy series, but where Dark took only that which is good - the Devil’s Bargain - Gold seems hell-bent on replicating specifically what is bad about Blades. Namely, that the most fun part of whatever it is you are doing is handled through die rolls and mechanized bookkeeping. I have ranted at length about what an abject failure of a heist game Blades in the Dark is on other mediums, but in brief: why would I want a heist game where instead of planning and executing a heist I make a series of 2d6 rolls and someone narrates the outcome? Why would I play a dungeon crawler where exploring the dungeon is handled the same way? ‘Rules elide’ is supposed to elide the bookkeeping to get to the fun part of the game, not elide the fun to get to the bookkeeping. This school of game design is so preoccupied with efficiency of play that it forgets that play is the object of game design. There is a joke about golf that the objective of golf is to play the least amount of golf. Blades (and Trophy Gold) seems written with that in mind.

But even more unforgivably, Trophy Gold is designed to cut out the focus on thematic and effective prose in incursion writing to instead prepare a series of bullet points and tables with stilted, unimaginative text accompanying. Modules look like a series of spreadsheets destined for a projector; they look like they would slot in nicely with a company’s annual reports. Trophy Gold is a game written by accountants for accountants. I simply cannot say a single positive thing about this book, and that’s before I blame it (at least in part) on the overall demise of Trophy as a whole.

The Trophy kickstarter launched in late January of 2020. Now, I can’t and won’t harp on how long it took to fulfill that Kickstarter. For starters, my own took even longer to ultimately fulfill (and I didn’t have to fulfill a quarter of a million dollars of product). There was, if you don’t remember, quite a lot Happening in the year of our lord two thousand twenty. Did the delay on Trophy fulfillment contribute to the killed momentum of the Trophy scene? Yes. Was it anybody’s fault? No.

Is Trophy Gold to blame? Not entirely. I can’t say it didn’t contribute - when it was first published in Codex: Gold I more or less entirely ignored it, but it quickly became clear to me that Gold incursions would take precedence over Dark in future Codex publications, and everyone that took part and contributed Dark incursions on the Kickstarter was encouraged to write Gold versions, even when such versions didn’t and wouldn’t make sense. I was asked, I politely declined. I kept writing Dark incursions. I certainly don’t fault those who wrote for Gold grabbing a double payout. I do, however, fault the managerial decision to pivot from Dark - which had to this point been the driving force behind the Trophy hype machine, the main source of content for the game and the main source of marketing and buildup for the Kickstarter - towards Gold. I feel very strongly that this pivot effectively torpedoed momentum not just for Trophy Dark but the entire project.

And then, with the money raised and the books trapped in (and I stress, entirely justifiable) limbo, The Gauntlet just sort of forgot about Trophy.

From a very cynical marketing perspective I understand the reasons for this. A common axiom among TTRPG publishers is that Books (and by ‘books’ I mean ‘systems’) sell and Adventures do not. This is the dark underbelly to the ‘System Matters’ crowd - the mindset that adventures exist to be written by the consumer and are of little consequence, but Systems are word of God written by the publisher and are necessary for use and thus the bread and butter of the publisher’s bottom line. One might imagine the Gauntlet might have learned something from the OSR about continuing to support and foster a culture of play through adventures (perhaps someone with a podcast where they read adventures) or perhaps from their own quarter million dollar Kickstarter campaign where they sold an entire book of adventures. In any case, outside of the glossy hardback in production, the rules for Trophy existed in the back issues of a monthly zine publication and online, for free, and most of the adventures available were written outside of the Gauntlet publishing umbrella.

The solution: write more adventures for Trophy? No, obviously not. Write an entirely new System.

To be clear: I’ve never read Brindlewood Bay. I’m sure it’s perfectly fine. I’ve very little interest reading new systems, particularly now. But what Brindlewood Bay’s arrival hype train said to me more than anything was how done the Gauntlet was with Trophy and how ready they were to move on to something else entirely.

Trophy Dark was unveiled in December of 2018, and there would be seven more issues of Codex before Trophy Gold was released in Codex: Gold on August of 2019. Ten more editions of Codex would be published between Gold and Codex: Starlight 2 (the very last Codex issue, to my knowledge, which was published March 4th 2021). Between December 2018 and July 2019, the Gauntlet published eight supplements for Trophy Dark. Between August 2019 and March 2021 seven Trophy Gold additions were published to Dark’s four. For reference, Brindlewood Bay (first published in 2020) has its first supplement appearance in Codex: Yellow 2. Seven supplements appeared between Yellow 2 (issue #41) and Starlight 2 (issue #46). The drop-off in Trophy Dark support was sharp. The drop-off in Trophy Gold support post-Codex? Even sharper. As quickly as they pivoted to Gold and off Trophy, executive decisions to prioritize focus on Brindlewood Bay was even swifter.

A few months back I received my Kickstarter copy of the Trophy boxed set. In the intervening time, the Gauntlet has announced not only Brindlewood Bay but BB-successor The Between, The-Between-follow-up Public Access, and as-yet-unreleased Arkham Herald. There are, I am sure, people still playing Trophy. Some people still talk about it on Twitter. A few people are even still writing Trophy Dark material - Gabriel Robinson’s Candlelight and Token are both Trophy Dark spin-offs - but the once-passionate and active Dark scene has largely evanesced and the Gold side of things never fully metastasized. And while yes, certainly, all the factors that contributed to the entirely justifiable delaying of the Kickstarter (the George Floyd movement, the still-ongoing COVID-19 pandemic) certainly contributed to some of the scene’s erosion: why haven’t those factors crumbled similar role-playing game scenes?

When speaking on the health of well-fostered DIY-focused community projects the two examples I most often give are Mausritter and Mothership. Both started off as small, communal and self-published projects that encouraged their fanbases to play their games, write supplements for them, and above all talk about them at every opportunity. Mausritter and Mothership have some of the strongest DIY scenes in indie TTRPGs. Their originators are approachable and seem genuinely delighted to see people enjoying their work and extrapolating from it. Neither Sean McCoy nor Isaac Williams had nearly the resources of the Gauntlet’s monstrous markeing machine when they started their projects. But they focused on tending their little gardens, planting the seeds, encouraging them to flourish, rather than jumping onto the next project, and then the next, and then the next, at each step letting the last one die.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from not just working with the Gauntlet but from the indie TTRPG scene over the last six years, it is that far too many creators envision both the business side and the creative side of RPGs as a literal and metaphorical claw machine arcade game. Rather than focusing on building something from the ground up, the goal is to create the flashiest minimally viable Product, specifically designed to be as mass-marketable as possible, and often cramming in as many BookTok-esque buzzword genre identifiers. They release this glorified ashcan with a twenty thousand dollar art budget into the wild straight to Kickstarter. The project either generates a ton of artificially-inflated hype or fails to, but in either case it rapidly collapses under its own hype. And then the collective attention of not just the creators but the scene itself moves onto the next project. A project doesn’t fail because the creator failed to foster and develop an audience behind it - a project fails because the mythical claw arm of Hype Capitalism did not deign to choose this particular project. The lesson learned? Repeat this process until you become one of the Chosen.

I love Trophy Dark for what it represented - a step towards what games could and should be; vehicles for play created as a result of truly excellent writing. I hate it for what it ended up as - another headstone in the Fantasy Heartbreaker graveyard, slotted neatly in between never-released Welcome to Tikor and instantly-forgotten Quest. I could (and do!) blame Kickstarter, or blame the erosion of small print publications by million-dollar ‘mid-sized’ pubs who have sold themselves on the merits of not being WotC and therefore ‘small business.’ But ultimately the FOMO-fueled hype train and accompanying goldfish-length attention span of the indie TTRPG scene is a product of its own creation, and at the end of the day, much like the doomed treasure-seekers I first broke my teeth upon writing about in 2018, we get the games we deserve.