A historical guide to tabletop roleplaying games, subtitled "A Guide to Tabletop Roleplaying Games from D&D to Mothership." It was written by Stu Horvath and published by The MIT Press in 2023.
So if I asked you what roleplaying games you were familiar with, the vast majority of y'all would say Dungeons & Dragons -- and that's pretty much it. Gaming hobbyists would know a lot more, but for most people, it's D&D, the first roleplaying game, the one owned by the biggest company, the one with the most Satanic Panic infamy, the one from "Stranger Things," the one from that one episode of "Community," the one from "Critical Role" and "Dimension 20." But there have been more, a lot more, spread out across five decades -- and this book includes a lot of the best and most interesting ones.
Stu Horvath founded a cultural criticism website called Unwinnable, he cohosts the Vintage RPG Podcast, and he runs the wonderful VintageRPG Instagram account. He's been collecting roleplaying games for decades, from the common ones to the really, really uncommon ones, and he's done plenty of research and analysis on games, along with interviews with game designers from the early days of RPGs up to the present day. So what we get in this book isn't just a dry listing of games, publishers, page counts, and sales numbers. This is over 400 pages of essays focusing on the best, most influential, most innovative roleplaying games, starting with the first edition of Dungeons & Dragons in 1974 and finishing with -- well, they don't actually finish with "Mothership," a sci-fi horror game from 2018 -- there are another nine games that come after "Mothership," plus a handful of gaming zines.
What the book covers is roleplaying games -- not board games, not card games, not computer games. Sometimes, this feels strange -- no entries of the many computer games based on D&D? No entry on Magic: The Gathering, the trading card game so successful, it transformed Wizards of the Coast into the most important company in the games industry overnight? No entries on TV shows or movies based on games? Well, all of these things do get mentioned -- but usually in the context of how they affected other roleplaying games. This is a book with a singular focus on tabletop roleplaying games, and it rarely breaks that focus unless discussing other important elements of pop culture.
If you've been playing games for a long time, you'll see a whole lot of familiar games. The book includes almost every edition of D&D, along with all the important settings and adventure modules, including "The Keep on the Borderlands," "Expedition to the Barrier Peaks," "Tomb of Horrors" and "Ravenloft." There's Tunnels & Trolls, Traveller, Gamma World, RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu, Champions, Star Frontiers, Hârn, Toon, Pendragon, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, GURPS, Ars Magica, Talislanta, Cyberpunk, Shadowrun, Rifts, The World of Darkness, Amber, Earthdawn, Castle Falkenstein, Deadlands, Delta Green, Unknown Armies, Nobilis, InSpectres, Fate, Savage Worlds, Blue Rose, Dread, Fiasco, Pathfinder, Apocalypse World, Monsterhearts, Dungeon Crawl Classics, Tales from the Loop, Blades in the Dark, Thousand Year Old Vampire, Mörk Borg, and many, many more.
There are also plenty of games that you've probably never heard of, due to obscurity or amazing weirdness. There's Bunnies & Burrows, a game inspired by "Watership Down," where the characters are all rabbits. There's the Official Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Coloring Album from 1979, which was a kids' coloring book with a simplified combat ruleset to be played with the dungeon map in the middle of the book -- which is why this counts as a game and not another associated work. There's Dallas: The Television Role-Playing Game from 1980, which let you roleplay as any of the Ewing family of oil barons from the "Dallas" TV series. There's DragonRaid, a Christian RPG released at the height of the Satanic Panic which ended up being hated by fundamentalists who thought all RPGs came from the Devil and hated by gamers who didn't trust its fundamentalist origins. There's De Profundis, a game where players send each other actual letters through the mail about their Lovecraftian experiences. There's Dogs in the Vineyard, a popular and highly acclaimed Western fantasy game involving religious lawmen tracking down sinners and demons; the game is no longer offered for sale because the designer was unhappy with the setting. There's Honey Heist, a one-page RPG where everyone plays hat-wearing bears pulling a daring heist on a casino to steal honey.
Every entry for a game includes worlds of info about it and its creators, analysis of its impact on the gaming world, images of the covers (most taken from Horvath's own gigantic collection of RPGs), and what made it interesting or innovative. You end up learning something new about every game listed, no matter how familiar you think you are with it. It also comes with several appendices including notable fantasy artists, both within gaming and from elsewhere in the art world; thoughts on collecting RPGs; a list of game publishers; analysis on the genesis and development of the RPG-style dungeon, a concept with absolutely no equivalents in the real world; and Horvath's own version of Gary Gygax's Appendix N, a collection of inspirational books, movies, video games, and songs.
This book doesn't include every game ever published -- in the 50 years since the first appearance of Dungeons & Dragons, there have been thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of roleplaying games, so there's no way to include every one of them. But one of the interesting things to think about is the prominent games that did get excluded. Some make perfect sense -- everyone knows about F.A.T.A.L., but the only people who want to play it are psychopaths, and to hell with those guys. And in Horvath's introduction, he says he decided not to include an entry on the long-admired game Empire of the Petal Throne because it was revealed after his death that the author, M.A.R. Barker, was a white supremacist who wrote neo-Nazi novels, and Horvath decided he didn't want the fucker in his book. (This is also a sign that Stu Horvath is good people, and I'm glad he's the guy who wrote this book.) Other omissions are more unexpected, including the fourth edition of Dungeons & Dragons (which remains deeply disliked by many players, but every other edition got an entry here, so it still looks weird), Paranoia, Feng Shui, Chill, The Whispering Vault, HoL, Blue Planet, Hong Kong Action Theatre!, Puppetland, Scion, and Mutants & Masterminds.
This is really a fantastic book. It's extremely readable and extremely re-readable, which is an amazing combination. It's something you'll want to keep in an easy place to reach in your bookcase, because you're going to want to look stuff up in here all the time. The only downsides are that it's oversized, very heavy, and it has a $50 price tag -- and if you're not an RPG fan, collector, or player, there may not be a lot in here to entertain you. But for game lovers and people who love fantasy and the stranger corners of pop culture, this is going to be a must-buy. Roll the dice and pick this one up.