Trophy Gold: A Review

Let Me Take You To One Side And Bend Your Ear About The Fine Role-playing Game Called Trophy Gold.

A version of this article was originally published on the TEETH RPG newsletter.

Trophy Gold, by Jesse Ross, is the game that I am most regularly recommending TTRPG people read and play. It’s not what I thought it would be, while also somehow being exactly what I wanted. A complicated feeling! But it scratches quite a profound itch. 

In the space of the following sentences, I shall try to explain.

Condone In The Dark

The earlier incarnation of Ross’ game, Trophy Dark, was interesting by virtue of being a one-shot where all the characters were destined to die, horribly. Trophy Dark is super, well, Dark. It’s a horror game, in a deep vein of hellish and doomed fantasy that has become oddly familiar in these times. Our experience with it – run by our kid Kieron Gillen – provoked me to think more about one-shots and about combat as a convention in games. (To fight a monster in Trophy Dark was to die, which didn’t mean you didn’t get into combat, just that you didn’t do it at the wrong time. It had to be narratively appropriate, for it was your end.)

Trophy Gold is a campaign-length version of much the same concept/world, with a host of campaign-supporting rules and caveats, as well as substantial rules for combat beyond “you die”.

It is also a setting. A setting which the game encourages you to… ignore? More on that in a moment.

The Bones Of It

Trophy Gold balances dice and story in a brutal and rewarding way that provokes inspired improvisation. That can be my box quote summary, eh? It also seemed to land just right and at the appropriate time. The groups I play have been looking for something since the wave of Forged In The Dark and other narrative-focused-but-rulesy things that we played in the last couple of years. Trophy Gold seems to be what we were hoping for. Working out why that was has been tricky, but I think for us it’s related to bouncing off Symbaroum but loving the setting, and then needing to play something that is rule-lite while also being rules-crunchy. And hey, this was also the reaction of Jesse Ross, who created the game. “I love the setting of Symbaroum, but I never felt like the mechanics matched the “forest as cosmic horror” idea that I felt like Symbaroum was trying to sell,” said Ross.

But let’s get into the crunchy bit: perhaps the oddest and yet most essential rule in Trophy Gold is the Hunt Roll. It is the tumbling plastic heart of the beast. The Hunt Roll is declared when players state that they want to explore a part of world and that action then triggers everything else that happens. I have huge admiration for how this has been done, because it propels the game forward in a way that is part random encounter, part improvised exploration, and part delivery of narrative currency. It’s sort of a perception check (but not really), where the fail state is not failing to find something useful – you always succeed to explore and the GM will tell you what you find – but encountering “something terrible”. 

Anything other than a six means something bad has been discovered: on a 1-3 that’s something that is encountered close up and immediately, such as stepping into a trap or coming face to face with a monster, and on a 4-5 that something that is a looming threat but not an instant calamity. On a 6 you explore and discover in relative safety.

But the real motor provided by the Hunt Roll is that a 4+ also gives you one of Trophy Gold’s narrative currencies: the Hunt token. I have never seen anything quite like this in a TTRPG, and I am surprised by how well it works. A token can be spent to discover gold for the individual character who spends it, but three tokens, potentially shared across the group, can be used to discover the Set Goal. Ah yes, it becomes even more interesting still, and that’s because of the structure that Trophy Gold’s scenarios take on. (And that mention of gold isn’t just about packing your wallet out for spending later, either, that too is tied into narrative motivation, which I will come to in a moment.)

Everyone In The Room

One of the best things about narrative-leaning games is how much they lean into improvisation and group story-building. In Trophy Gold it becomes super collaborative because in each stage of a scenario (or ‘Incursion’ in the game’s terms) you are presented with a scene (or ‘Set’ in the Trophy parlance) and then Out Of Character you are given the Set Goal, which is the goal for that… set*. This is super interesting to me, because it’s a case of knowing what the scene is about and then working together to achieve it: like a group of writers working through a plot. They need to come up with the details that allow the characters to reach the next plot point, but those details could change everything. And that’s precisely what Trophy Gold is doing here: providing a very broad range of possible plot points with each scenario, and then letting you range through it. Only it’s also going to be spiced to breaking point by the capriciousness of the dice and the inevitability of Something Terrible. 

If knowing the goal sounds prescriptive, well… it isn’t. Trophy Gold ends up being one of the most freeform and inventive games I have played. My group, playing the starter scenario, finished up the Incursion by looking at how much treasure they had accrued, comparing that to the horrifying nature of the situation they had discovered and… called time and ran.

And this is interesting in itself, because the other thing that drives this game, and means you need to keep making those Hunt rolls, is Burden.

The Weight Of Gold

If the Hunt Roll is How, then Burden is Why. Each character has a Burden, derived from their Rituals and Equipment, which must be paid off at the end of the adventure. Fail to meet it and it’s curtains for them. They will never fill their Hoard, and never meet their Drive. Hell, I’ve not found a path to even talking about character creation yet, but it’s Burden that is the one which hits hardest and most immediately. You have to go into that dungeon, you have to keep going, because not doing so could be fatal. Worse, for those of us who hate a show being cancelled on a cliffhanger, dead characters will never get to resolve their Drive, which is an artful and evocative one-line motivation for the character that is just completely hooking me every time.

So yes: Burden as a motivating mechanism is so simple it makes me wince. My own regular group, so gentle and sensitive as they are, have sometimes baulked from the scariest games I have faced them with. Playing Mothership they just wanted to hide in a locker. In Trophy Gold that impulse to save the skin of your character is immediately outweighed by mechanical concerns: you need Gold! To not take risks is not to get it.

This reminds me that I should mention a couple of other mechanical points that the game rests on: Risk and Combat. Trophy Gold has an excellent mechanism for dealing with perilous moments, which is the Risk Roll. This requires a look at the skills, which are all one word and non-specific, like Hiding or Death or Surprise, and then a look at Equipment, to see what’s relevant enough to get you one single die. Then you have to decide what bad consequences you might want to roll up as “Devil’s Bargain” for another die (sounds familiar?) before going ahead. And if you are risking life and limb you take an extra “dark” die. If the dark die is the highest roll but is above your “Ruin” (hit points, but Ruin could be any vector of harm, from physical to psychological or spiritual) then you take a Ruin. At six Ruin, you are finished. The game is tense. However, on a mixed success you could also add a Dark die and re-roll, pushing your luck even further. I am running out of space to go into the implications of that, but the consequences of it in play can be emotional.

Combat, too, has a sort of push-your-luck sensibility to it, but also cleverly represents the threat of and to a group of players. Each player is represented by a die in the initial combat pool (and to be included they just need an appropriate weapon), as well as rolling their “weak point”. If that number comes up, they take a Ruin. If the creature isn’t defeated by the highest two dice (and it’s perfectly possible to defeat even a relatively tough creature in one round) another die is added. If someone runs away, another player takes their weak point number. All this means that combat moves urgently towards resolution, and is always, always horribly dangerous. (And note that this means combat is harder for a smaller number of players, but there are also fewer chances for their number to come up? Maybe? Is that how probability works?)

Did I mention that the players get to name the creature when they have defeated it? No? Well then did I mention that despite having a ludicrously evocative worldbook of leads and prompts in a world of cursed forests, corrupted cities, and horrifying cults (Trophy Loom) the game rules encourages you to (mostly) ignore them and just go with worldbuilding as a group? I really cannot think of another game that has published an entire book and then instructed you to ignore it. (And it’s a great book! But the possibilities for player-improvised world building are greater.) Thinky emoji indeed, my friend.

The Dungeon Of Social Endeavour

Anyway! All of this is rich and interesting stuff, but I haven’t mentioned the expectation-defying thing that I opened with. What I think wrong-footed me about Trophy Gold was that I expected a game set up like this to be a proper old (school… revival?) dungeon-crawler. You know the sort of thing: traps and goblin nests and ten-foot poles all the way down. But the scenarios that come with the book are far more subtle than that, and a number of them could absolutely be approached by social means. In fact, the characters that Trophy Gold so rapidly generates for you often come with skills that are absolutely skewed to social actions. I could imagine running this game in a purely social scenario, where the Something Terrible you encounter is a ruinous social situation, such as humiliation or embarrassment leading to crushed social standing. Hunt Rolls where what you find is a horrible buffet or a nightmarish bore. Risk rolls involved in flirting or dancing or talking about literature come to mind, and if you gave all that a wrapper of cosmic horror, then Oh Man, we are talking. But then we do have form on wanting to create games with such themes.

Final Boss Conclusion

Look, I am not sure whether I have really got any of this across properly. I haven’t mentioned Rituals, which are Trophy’s take on magic, or how the Contest role gave us an incredible highlight of the week as my players fought over a cursed figurine, or even how effective Trophy Gold’s brief character creation or downtime rules end up being. But then TTRPGs always sound so arcane when you explain them, especially ones like this which hang a Rube Goldberg Machine of improvisation off some neat dice rolls. So what I am saying is this: Trophy Gold is interesting. Just super interesting. And I am telling you that you should read it, and then play it.

*DYK the word ‘set’ has the most meanings of any word in English? Interesting!