By James L. Smith
Images by: Art by Jesse Ross,
© 2020 Hedgemaze Press LLC.
James L. Smith reviews Trophy Dark, an indie storytelling game with an ecoGothic twist. Following a group of doomed treasure-hunters entering a hostile and antagonistic environment, Trophy Dark will appeal to both new and experienced Gothic gamers alike. For those who have never played a tabletop roleplaying game, here is a strange and grimly beautiful introduction with elegant rules and a skillfully evoked affective environment.
When winding vine chokes chiseled stone,
These woods will claim a trophy of their own.
When graven gods are overgrown,
These woods will claim a trophy of their own.
When thorn bursts forth from living bone,
These woods will claim a trophy of their own.
When vengeful seeds are finally sown,
These woods will claim a trophy of their own.
–The introductory poem to the Trophy Dark rules
Gothic horrors and creeping plant-life lurk in the brooding forests of Old Kalduhr. In Trophy Dark, a collaborative storytelling game of tragic fantasy, a group of treasure-hunters embark on a doomed expedition into a forest that doesn’t want them there. This tabletop roleplaying game depicts a dark environment that seeps into everything: sentient, twisting and changing. The body, and mind, in the game is a permeable membrane through which the world sinks in its tendrils. It is a game of nature, red of tooth and claw and thick with layers of magic and memory, of base desires and paranoia, and of ancient pacts and sacrifices. It exists outside of cities and outside of safety. Each player controls one doomed soul, convinced of their ability to overcome the challenges of their hunt for treasure and face their motivations, be they altruistic, avaricious or desperate. The player knows this from the beginning, and this tragic truth is the heart of the game. Playing to lose is both cathartic and liberating in an age of ecophobia.
Trophy Dark makes use of a base mechanic of ruin—physical and psychological corruption—to explore a slow descent into paranoia, greed and the hostile realm of ecohorror and the ecoGothic. It is a descendant of H.P. Lovecraft, both mechanically and thematically—ruin is based on madness in a Cthulhu mythos-based game. It is a place of superabundant, intrusive, decentring, sinister non-human influences working at the borders of human agency. It demonstrates many of the tropes covered by Elizabeth Parker in her work on the forest and ecoGothic. Like the sinister agential plant-life of Algernon Blackwood’s The Man Whom the Trees Loved (1912), the roots of the non-human writhe and worm in so slowly that they go unnoticed.The game describes itself aptly:
[Trophy Dark] requires one game master (gm) to moderate the game and portray the dangers of the world, and one or more players to portray the treasure-hunters. A game of Trophy takes about 3–4 hours. The game tells the story of the physical and mental descent of the treasure hunters as they move deeper and deeper into the dangerous forest. Their journey will ultimately bring them to ancient ruins that hold the treasure they seek, and the monstrous entities which now dwell there. This is not, however, a hopeful story of brave and daring adventurers slaying dragons and dragging bags of gold with them back to town. This is a horror story of entitled pillagers meeting tragic ends. It is very likely that all the treasure-hunters will die or— at best—be permanently scarred and haunted by their expedition
The genesis of the rules derives from a variety of sources, but owes the most to Cthulhu Dark by Graham Walmsley, a rules light Lovecraftian game penetrating the mysteries of the mythos at the cost of one’s sanity, and Blades in the Dark by One Seven Design and developed and authored by John Harper, a game about a group of scoundrels making a violent living in the haunted streets of an industrial fantasy city. A thematic precursor is Symbaroum by Modiphius Entertainment, a tabletop roleplaying game set in the dark forests of Davokar. Like many indie games, Trophy Dark springs its dark seed from a pile of rich loam made from the best and darkest ideas of many previous creations. The context from which it has grown, centred around the Gauntlet gaming community, makes liberal use of the Creative Commons licenses and System Reference Documents (SRDs) that encourage openly created games to be hacked, modified, remade, reborn and recreated. The Trophy SRD offers ‘Rooted in Trophy’, a licensing method of using the openly available mechanics of the game to create new dark offspring. It rejects the conventions of mass-market games like Dungeons and Dragons and their problematic and essentialist depictions of sword and sorcery, also eschewing the lingering xenophobia and racism of Lovecraftian themes for something diverse and challenging.
Trophy Dark is a creation of Jesse Ross, a designer who has already demonstrated a sensitivity to dark tropes of uncanny and unfamiliar exploration. In his previous game, entitled Girl Underground, Ross introduced “a tabletop roleplaying game … about a curious girl in a wondrous world, inspired by Alice in Wonderland, Labyrinth, The Wizard of Oz, Spirited Away and similar tales”. Trophy Dark was first published in Dark 2, the December 2018 edition of the popular Codex indie tabletop roleplaying zine. It contains and plays upon a large variety of tropes that will be both familiar and new to the aficionado of the Gothic. Ross has expanded a sensitivity to danger, dark fantasy and immersion in a Gothic environment into a game that is simple to set up and play but endlessly wondrous, chilling and terrifying in equal measure. This reviewer has both run and played this game and its adaptations—of which there are now many—ten times and counting, and each experience is a unique and potent experience of crawling dread and creeping danger couched in moments of often dazzling beauty, powerful sensory experiences and affecting strangeness. It is a game of moods and resonances and excels in capturing them.
The rules are simple but engaging. The core mechanic is known as a risk roll. The combination of gaining a single white six-sided dice to roll from competencies and equipment, making devil’s bargains that ask what could possibly go wrong to gain a second and the ruinous effect of the third ever-tempting dark dice, boosting your pool but increasing your risk of gaining ruin, is mesmerizing to watch. The goal is to roll high, taking the highest of your assembled collection of dice, known as a pool. The more dice, the higher the potential score, and the greater the risk that you have delved too far, and you do not want to roll below a four. Unlike other more heroic tabletop games, treasure-hunters cannot fight the monsters that stalk them: they will simply die. As a result, their only options are desperate use of skills and rituals, making use of the tools to hand and, as is often the case, running away in abject terror.
The incursions—as the unique thematic settings for the game as termed—of the game are divided into rings, pushing the hunters deeper and deeper into their psyche and into danger. The first ring is easily solved, a confidence-building exercise to set the scene. The second is environmental, with hazards such as looming cliffs, scratching trees or sucking mud to overcome. The third is suspicion-based, as the travel companions turn on each other. The fourth ring is monster-based, as the forest comes alive and stalks them. Finally, fleeing, the players stumble into the fifth and final ring, where they are confronted with a psychological reckoning: temptations, bargains, sacrifices for blood and gold, corruption, and often murder. For ecoGothic film buffs, it is telling that the go-to explanation for this structure is the (2018) film Annihilation starring Natalie Portman and adapted by Alex Garland from the novel by Jeff VanderMeer.
The engaged and erudite community of players and writers surrounding the game has demonstrated both an intense interest in and enthusiasm for Gothic themes. In The Flocculent Cathedral, a horrifying Gothic admixture written by Jim Crocker for the Codex Zine, the doomed treasure-hunters find themselves deep within a fetid swamp, faced with a horror made from the stuff of ecoGothic nightmare:
Thick, gnarled cypress trees, draped with copious moss of all sorts. It’s easy to get separated, and there are thick networks of roots underfoot. A colossal rutting stag the color of jade, 15 feet high at the shoulder, its rack of razor-sharp antlers overgrown with thick moss and lichen. Its nostrils spew clouds of foul-smelling spores that will poison any who inhale them. It appears suddenly from behind a gigantic tree, and though it approached silently, its hooves shake the ground when it charges.
The incursions explore a variety of themes adjacent to or overlapping with the ecoGothic, making it a perfect exploration of or practice in collaboratively generating the themes of interest to readers of this journal. The game rejects classic tropes of heroic fantasy popularised by mass-market games such as Dungeons of Dragons: the players play to win, their story is heroic and successful, evils are possible to overcome and comprehensible. It embraces the Old School Revival (OSR) principles of rulings agreed between players and their game master (GM) over rules, conversations at the table, consensus and player agency, and yet embraces the new. It descends deeper and deeper into all-encompassing environs that smothers, horrifies, traumatises and intrigues treasure-hunters in equal measure.
Ross, when asked by the reviewer about the influence of the Gothic on his work, cited the superabundance of vegetable nature as a major influence, especially the idea of “personifying and personalizing … the idea of unrelenting creation”. The game and its setting firmly exhibits all six of Dawn Keetley’s six theses of plant horror. Other writers for the game cited the decadent aesthetic of Gothic plant horror and decay as strong influences, as well as video games and novels drawing on themes familiar to scholars of the ecoGothic.
The game, its companion Trophy Gold and Trophy Loom, the system-neutral lore of its world, have recently completed an extremely successful Kickstarter campaign. There is much more on the horizon for this game and its future adaptations. If academic scholars of the ecoGothic and their students are interested in a whole new way of exploring and interrogating their subject matter, then they will gain a great deal from walking this dark path with some fellow enthusiasts.
Biography
Dr James L. Smith is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of English and Digital Humanities at University College Cork, working on the 2019-23 Ports, Past and Present project. His work is at the intersection of the blue, environmental, spatial and digital humanities. His first monograph is Water in Medieval Intellectual Culture: Case-Studies from Twelfth-Century Monasticism (Brepols, 2018). James is the editor of The Passenger: Medieval Texts and Transits (punctum books, 2017), and co-editor of the Open Library of the Humanities collection New Approaches to Medieval Water Studies (2019). His current book project has the working title of Deep Maps of Lough Derg. He is the co-author together with Colin Yeo of ‘EcoGothic, Ecohorror and Apocalyptic Entanglement in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Tales of the Black Freighter’ in the first issue of Gothic Nature.