Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground: A Guide to Tabletop Roleplaying Games from D&D to Mothership (2023)

By Stu Horvath

456pp, Non fiction

Notes

2024-03-08

I've enjoyed Stu Horvath's Vintage RPG account on Instagram for a years but when "Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground", his book about the history of RPGs told via his collection, came out I balked at the price and decided to hold off till I was feeling less skint. The next day it arrived in the post! Turns out that an earlier, flusher feeling, version of me had pre-ordered it. I'm glad I did.

The book is divided by decade starting in the 1970s and finishing right up in the present. Within this broad structure and with the evidence of his collection Horvath sketches a particular view of RPG history defined by design iteration and experimentation, even the original DnD is shown to be an organic outgrowth of historical wargaming rather than the product of some singular creative moment. This communal process has often been enabled by the fact that game mechanics don't fall under copyright, alongside a willingness to borrow liberally from other media and disciplines which seems baked into RPG culture. Is there any other form of entertainment that so closely meshes maths and improvisational theatre?

After the main body of the book there are, of course, appendices including a couple of short essays, one on collecing on one the idea of the dungeon...

In dungeons, we get, not just a place to explore, but also the very soul of the first roleplaying game: Travel deep, fight monsters, find treasure. As a space, they are constrained, with narrow, claustrophobic rooms, allowing players limited choices for routes in the immediate term. In the long term, though, those choices string together into a vast, non-linear space, constructed, fractal-like, out of an infinity of twisting corridors.

There are no real-world equivalents to this kind of dungeon. It is an irrational, imaginary space, a broken mirror cobbled together out of shards of myth, snippets of fiction and slivers of our own fears. More than the dragons or the power fantasies, this great below captured the collective imagination. The dungeon speaks to something primal about the way human minds work, even if we can't quite understand its shadowy vastness.

I'm not sure anyone needs to drop £50 on this book but I don't regret for a moment that my past self did.