(Header image is a trophy duck from this website)

I have been dreading this review.

Trophy

The design is just so clean. You play treasure hunters cutting your way through a forest that will smother you. Anything risky is handled by a dice pool with the mixed successes we have come to know and love: Failure on 1-3, complications on 4-5, and success on a 6. The twist comes in how you build the dice pool.

Your dice are divided into Light and Dark. Light dice are added to the pool when your occupation or background apply to the situation, and Dark dice are added whenever something dangerous or deadly is afoot (which will be always). If your highest dice is Dark, your fate is sealed and you move closer towards death and desolation.

The Light though, the Light can save you. If your highest dice is Light, you can twist your fate and reroll your pool, though each time you do, more and more Darkness clouds the future, with a Dark dice¹ added for every reroll.

THAT IS FANTASTIC. Damn, what a clean system Jesse Ross made. It is made for the little gambler in my head that wants to push my luck just a little more every time. And the tiny devil on the little gambler’s shoulder can always convince him to convince me because the odds of success do go up every time, I might as well add one more Dark dice to the pool.

And the balance for the Dark dice is great too. “Ruin” is effectively your health track. If your highest dice is Dark and it is higher than your current ruin, your ruin increases by 1. So you will accumulate ruin quickly then it will take longer and longer for ruin tick up until you hit 6 and are lost to the forest. More clever design!

And maybe my favorite part is the reduction roll, which may allow you to reduce your ruin once you are sufficiently tainted by the forest. You remove ruin by betraying your friends and acting in favor of the forest. Acts cannot be selfish if done for self preservation, right? Surely not. You must twist the knife to stay alive.

This allows the fear and desperation you want to feel in horror games to truly manifest. When you need them most your friends will turn on you, better strike first. Trophy Dark doesn’t seem to be a game about hunting treasure, not really. In play it feels more like the game is designed to take a miserable pack of characters and give them an even more miserable end in the most harrowing ways your table can imagine.

That is something I can get behind.

Dark

I was being honest about everything up to this point. I had been wanting to play a Trophy game since I heard the name² and every scrap of rules I read made me more excited. So you might understand why I was extremely frustrated that I didn’t much enjoy playing Trophy Dark.

This must be a me problem right? Trophy RPG is an award winning game and I constantly see people (including me just above!) gushing about it. So let’s dissect where I might have gone wrong and make sure you get the most of your Trophy experience.

It’s not just that I hate games where every situation gets turned into a writers room. Both Pico and Fabula Ultima have similar mechanics and I gobble those games up. I think the core of my difficulty came from trying to approach a game that is trying to tell the best story, but the past year I have been steeping myself in OSR style games where I am faced with concrete challenges I can only overcome with my wits, and on its face, Trophy Dark looks very much like an OSR game.

The excursions in Trophy set you on a path that guarantees that your character will be beaten, bloodied, maimed and traumatized. Each stage of the excursions outlines new and grim things for the GM to plague the players with. And everything on the road to those horrid things is malleable, any given roll can shift the landscape of the game and send your character tumbling off a cliff.

Though, when everything is malleable, players can no longer “win” by playing smart and safe. The forest is coming for you and it will not be denied. I think that is why I struggled so much with Trophy Dark. To me, Trophy looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, but is not a duck (The duck in the case is a poor analogy to an old school dungeon game).³ If I had just given up trying to out-wit the module and instead focused on making the descent into the forest as terrible as possible for everyone else, I think I would have had a much better time.

And honestly, even with me actively fighting against the system, we still told one of the scariest stories I experienced in the last year. The last ring of the excursion ended in a very unbalanced power struggle with my weak historian having has head crushed in by the last living party member. That scene still lives vividly in my imagination. So in retrospect, I know the game works, I think I just needed the right mindset.

Trophy Gold lives very high on my to-play list so hopefully I can try my hand at this again soon.

Recommendation

This is difficult, because I think it probably will work better under the circumstances I described but I can’t know for sure. That said, the design is so unique that I think it is probably worth having a pdf⁴ just for that. Ross has also provided ton of free resources on the Trophy website. Look, flow-charts!

Acknowledgements

Trophy Dark can be found here.

Thank you to Jesse Ross for making such an interesting game. It has been living rent free in my head for months and I am hoping I can get it back to the table soon and really try to catch the vision. Thank you to Jim Crocker for writing the very gnarly excursion: The Flocculent Cathedral

Thank you to my very generous GM Sparky who gleefully sent us to our deaths, to Kyle who choose to entomb himself in stone rather than lose a fight, and to TundraFundra for crushing in my head.

Special thanks to Gemelli who does all of the background work to keep our calendar, and therefore the Secret Sunday Sampler (our one-shot club) running.

P.S. Okay a few minor grievances that did not help with my play experience. The excursion we used included some “suggested” background and occupations, which I used assuming they would be specifically useful. I rolled up a former librarian/historian who could summon spirits and catch them in bottles. Very cool, but also basically useless? I had to ration my ritual abilities and only use them when I really needed them because my other skills basically never came up. I would be less annoyed by this if the excursion hadn’t suggested it.

P.P.S. I think another branch that may lead to me enjoying the game more would be to use an OSR style module so that there is something solid pinning everything down, then we can go in and knock all the walls down with our complications.

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1. If you are new around here, reject plurality and accept invariant nouns. Become bathed in the light of dice. ↩︎
2. Such a clean, unique naming convention for Trophy Dark, Trophy Gold, and Trophy Loom. ↩︎
3. I have in my notes “Wow this even looks like an OSR character sheet!” from when I was doing character creation. ↩︎
4. There is basically no way to get physical copies right now sadly. ↩︎