Trophy Dark: Zine Review

 

Okay, so this review is more of a story, even more than usual. I mean, I think good reviews are stories of your time with the product in question. And I think it's a good story, so we're going to go with that. 

I initially tried out Trophy Gold with my players. Before trying Gold, which is an OSR game, I would have said that the divide between OSR and story-gamers was a fake one. Part of that is because labels always seem dumb, but also part of is that I personally can straddle that line pretty well. I prefer more "story-oriented" games, but I still have a blast doing OSR. They're two very different itches for me, but ultimately it's a question of preference.

Boy was that bubble popped. HARD.

To anyone who says there is only an artificial difference between story-gamers and OSR players, I present my group, who were dyed-in-the-wool Burning Wheel players, with some Torchbearer and Bleak Spirit in there too. Blood flowed and they balked. Hard. They wanted to know their characters and get attached, not use them like tissue paper on the way to success! There was a difference in philosophy that was extremely obvious, painfully so. I am still explaining the OSR and how it works and finding that it just. Doesn't. Click. With these folks.

Which, for the record, is okay. I just had to remember that labels do, in fact, exist for a reason. 

They were so badly burned on Trophy Gold that one of my players still twitches if it's even casually mentioned. But I'd tried Trophy Dark with someone else, using one of the pregenned Incursions, and we both loved it, so I wanted to try it with them. For the last few months I've just sorta been biding my time, hoping an opportunity would come up to see if I could convince them to try this game.

Trophy Dark is a one-shot game of tragic horror fantasy. You are playing characters who are not heroes, or even necessarily good people. No, you are playing those people who enter an ancient forest thinking the forest owes them their success. And finding out that's really not the case. The word Trophy does not refer to what you take out of the forest, but what the forest turns you into. Gameplay is light but thematically an embarrassment of riches. If you fight an actual big bad monster you die. Period. If you do anything other than that you roll what's called a Risk Roll, which is a pool of dice, light and dark. If the dark die is higher than your light dice you could accrue something called Ruin. Ruin is the measure by which you are The Forest's trophy, both physically and mentally. Each time it goes up you either invent a new condition or make a previously existing one worse. There's also a roll called the Ruin Roll, which is invoked whenever a terrible thing happens to or is seen by the character. If they roll higher than their current Ruin score (range of 1-6) it goes up by one. When your Ruin hits 6 you either die or snap, becoming a monster that works for The Forest. Once your Ruin hits five you can start doing Reduction rolls, trying to get your Ruin back down. Reduction rolls involve screwing over your fellow players or getting rid of treasure.

I really like this dynamic. And I wanted my players to try it. But... horrific PTSD. So I waited. My players have good taste (That's why they play with me, clearly!!) and I figured if I waited for an opportune moment to strike they'd like the game.

Actual footage of me waiting

Well whaddaya know?? The chance came! The Torchbearer campaign we'd been running had a player miss. I have a 100% show-up policy; if we all aren't available it's cool, that game will not run. So I floated a couple of one shot games to the folks who were still available, one of them being Trophy Dark. I put it last in the list. I didn't expect anyone to pick it. To my great surprise they picked it. I hadn't really picked any Incursion beforehand, since I kinda figured they wouldn't pick the game. Looking at the rules, I decided that I was going to make up an Incursion. Right then and there. How hard can it be, right? Keep in mind I'm currently running three Burning Wheel games; I've gotten pretty proficient at targeting Beliefs and Instincts and kinda figured I'd be able to handle it, right?

Let's break down why I had this thought while looking at the text. See, each character rolls up a Drive at the beginning of the game (or can choose their own) which tells you why they're doing the incredibly stupid thing of invading the forest in the first place. Most of the advice I've read about the pre-written Incursions centers around taking the Incursion and adapting it to your players' Drives. You are supposed to affirm and also punish the player character as they get deeper and deeper, until their Drive is the source of their insanity. So I kinda figured I could just do this on the fly.

The good news is that I was right. The other news is that I was woefully unprepared for the five-act structure of the system, which has you hitting players with a series of five pairs of carrot-stick challenges. Players kept slipping back and forth between acts and I was trying to figure out how to gently nudge toward Ring Five, the end. It was terrifying. It was exhilarating. God it was fun. Thanks to the emphasis on Theme I was able to identify a central core to throw at the players (which I told them about, explicitly: Worthiness) I was able to bob and weave my way through an Incursion. And it worked. Holy shit it worked! I'm sure there were a few hiccups I didn't catch but I was able to run a full Incursion, on the fly, with just the Drives of the characters and the Theme, plugged into the five rings.

The players loved it. They were told, explicitly, that their characters would either die or lose their souls, and that the goal of the game was to make their characters' fall into darkness tragic, meaningful, and fun. One of the players was in a bit of a sadistic mood and wanted to try and break the game. He wound up playing a hilariously dark and tragic arc of a man whose flaws got him killed, violently. The other player was a bit easier on the concept: she wound up dying as she was unworthy to touch the sacred sword they had gone out to get, turning into dust. Both players had a great time with the mechanics of the building up of internal and external darkness, playing out their characters becoming literal monsters as they strove to save or humiliate their friends, purposefully failing tests of character and enjoying the punishment that was inevitable. They even tried out the Reduction rolls, as they figured their characters would do such a thing. They were rewarded with a richer narrative. They also may or may not have started a grudge match back in Trophy Gold and were excited that they had a reason to turn the game full PVP, which they did at the end. There was this rush of blood and betrayal, ending in moral failure that, once bought into, was one of the more cathartic things I've been a part of.

This game is absolutely not for everyone. It wants you to buy into playing out the degeneration of characters as they strive for something they shouldn't strive for, no matter how desperate they are. But my players, who had never experienced such a thing, were surprised by just how fun the experience was. They brought their A-game to the concept and were rewarded with a dark, eerie, and strangely comedic experience that had us all on the edge of our seats right up until the end.  I'm not sure if they forgave Trophy Gold (or me, honestly), but they do want to do it again. And so do I. It was awesome to maneuver between differing Drives in ten different ways and I really want to do it again. 

Trophy Dark can be found in the Dark 2 issue of The Codex. They'll also be releasing a book next year. Check it out!