REVIEWS

Trophy Dark is the role-playing

game that offers doom instead of
glory
The highly anticipated RPG reaches the height of the horror
genre
By Charlie Theel Oct 24, 2022, 3:05pm EDT

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T
abletop role-playing’s most interesting developments of the past
couple decades have been taking place in the indie games scene.
Trophy Dark is emblematic of this movement, perfectly capturing
a horrific fantasy tragedy through collaborative storytelling techniques.
Players will come together for a singular game, exploring a world filled
with psychological terrors, environmental adversity, and supernatural
creatures that cannot be killed. Encountering these horrors will ultimately
lead to destruction. Trophy Dark impeccably spins tales that structurally
and tonally align with films like Annihilation, Apocalypse Now, and A
Field in England.

Trophy first appeared in Codex magazine in 2018, an RPG publication put out
by an entity known as The Gauntlet. Designer Jesse Ross sought to capture
setting elements from Free League Publishing’s Symbaroum, with mechanical
inspiration from titles such as Cthulhu Dark and Blades in the Dark. After
community refinement, the cultivated design found massive success on
Kickstarter with the intent to produce a stand-alone product titled Trophy
Dark.

Trophy Dark has arrived, and it’s as wondrous as it is poetic.

Outwardly stalwart, Wilhelm took the lead and pushed forward into the
frightening wood. He did not look back to see if Lady Pela or Yacomb
followed. Neither the unhinged widow nor the grisly smuggler held the
forester’s trust, but his attention was entirely focused on the mangrove-dense
fen that had swallowed them.

They were each searching for something different, something their own. One
sought a whisper of the Swirling Court, another the eternal reverie of the
Festival of Shiba, and the last desired restoration of the Temple of Tanahlot.
All intertwined at the mythic Flocculent Cathedral, for their devotions were
intrinsically wed to this bewitched holy site. They sought what could not be
found.

Despite the brevity of its ruleset, Trophy Dark is an inspiring system. Players
take on the role of treasure hunters that are explicitly doomed. Each character
will meet their demise through mental or physical degradation, and each is
given a guiding principle of embracing their tragedy. This isn’t D&D and no one
is getting out with the treasure. With a little effort, a group will walk away from
the session with an absolutely magnificent story marked with their indelible
fingerprints.

Characters are randomly generated from a series of tables in short order.

You’re given a background and an occupation that offer some skills, a central
drive to guide you, and a small group of black-and-white six-sided dice to
impress your agency.

During play, the GM only calls for rolls when the stakes are significant. The
simple dice pool mechanism consists of a single white die if you’re skilled in the
task and a black die if it’s perilous. Ideally your highest roll is a six and you
succeed; however, you achieve partial success with a four or five.

The act of rolling is less the focus than the collaboration bookending the
activity. Players and GM alike toss out suggestions for a contest’s stakes, and
may even offer the active participant a devil’s bargain. This comes straight from
Blades in the Dark, as the protagonist may agree to pay a price and gain a
bonus white die.

It gets better. The primary source of pressure is Ruin. This is a track measuring
the character’s well-being and their descent into madness or death. If Ruin hits
six, a character perishes and is reclaimed by the forest. This happens to nearly
everyone by the session’s climax.

Ruin increases when the highest roll in a pool is one of those dark dice and it
happens to be higher than the character’s current Ruin stat. This provides a
natural escalation to play as it pushes characters into anguish quickly, leveling
off as disaster looms. As Ruin increases, conditions are acquired as an outward
manifestation of the fraying soul.
After fighting through swarm after swarm of ferocious insects, the group had
finally found respite. They had broken camp near the effigy of one of the
sisters of the Cathedral. The figure was made of wood, thin branches shaped
in the essence of the woman. Her hair was straw, curling off the head and into
an open mouth. While Yacomb found this dedication calming, Wilhem found
no such peace.

He was clawing at his ear, claiming one of the insects had burrowed into his
skull.

Yacomb was appalled. Later, while in the torment of a fever dream, Wilhelm
had scratched and torn at his ear so fervently, that much of the outer cusp had
been torn off.

The bloody flap of tissue swayed with motion, framing what appeared to be a
macabre fungal growth. It was sickening.
Trophy Dark is very progressive. In addition to constantly calling for player
input and beckoning them to flesh out their characters and the haunted world,
the rules text also addresses issues of consent and troubling content. An entire
section of the book brings thoughtful guidance on the necessary discussion and
caution surrounding the dark places the narrative may go. It’s refreshing how
forthright the author is with a sensitive topic.

The vast majority of the book is dedicated to Incursions. These are rough
skeletal frameworks for the tragic adventure. The equivalent of a bare-bones
module with content centered on probing the participants with specific
questions and framing specific scenes to tease out the Incursion’s central
theme. The adventure is segmented into five rings, with the fifth being the
central destination of the Incursion and the focus of the character’s goals.

This structure is incredibly comfortable. It’s malleable enough to tweak and

adjust on the fly, encouraging the GM to work in new scenes and moments tied
into what’s occurred thus far. But it provides a great source of inspiration, and
can almost be run straight from the text if needed. This, combined with the
high degree of player authorship, means Trophy Dark can be run with little to
no preparation. And it hums along, like a well-tuned instrument intent on
playing its own entrancing ballad.
They had made it. Through a band of brigands and swarms of biting insects,
beyond the razor-sharp antlers of the Jade Stag, and over the ashes of their
own swollen doppelgangers. This was the end of their journey and the air was
vibrating.

The Cathedral itself was a massive growth of tightly woven trees, moss
covering the gaps between the boughs and shielding the insides from light.
What happened next was frenzied debauchery living between the space of
hallucinogen and near-death.

In the beat of a heart Wilhelm was dead. His body broken over the altar and
life slipping from his eyes as his lips muttered prayers to the sisters holding
court in the living dreams. Yacomb was stumbling through the dark in the
tunnels below the Cathedral, looking for the lost temple of Tanahlot. Lady
Pela was injured, nearly drowning in the washed away crypts, now seeking
aid from her fellow hunter.

Yacomb feigned aid, leading her into the temple and to the welcoming altar. It
sought blood and he was intent to satiate its thirst. Lady Pela was no fool.
Motes of dust and embers from Yacomb’s torch froze in the stillness of the air.
The widow had stopped time. When Yacomb regained body autonomy, a four
inch blade had worked its way into the small of his back.

If Wilhem was still alive, he would have heard the rhythmic thud of the corpse
being dragged up into the Cathedral proper. The widow had won. Stuffing the
ashes of her dead husband into Yacomb’s bloody mouth, she closed her eyes
and raised her voice, for the Festival of Shiba had begun.

Trophy Dark drives toward a striking and sinister conclusion. Since the format
of play is a one-shot, players are able to cross narrative boundaries into high-
stakes conflict. When the curtains have closed and the protagonists are left
ruined and sullied, the participants will be standing up at the table and caught
in the throes of delirium.

This experience was special. As soon as the epilogue concluded, we began

discussing returning to Trophy Dark, perhaps with some time for the traumatic
narrative to sit and find closure. For those wanting a more traditional
commitment, the sister product Trophy Gold does allow for similarly diabolic
stories to be played out through an ongoing campaign, although the tone is just
as dark and the challenges only slightly less deadly. However, there is a certain
allure to simply returning for new singular Incursions, weaving bits of previous
backstory into a grander tapestry and building our own collection of short
stories to serve as an eternal nightmare of time well spent.
TROPHY
$15
Prices taken at time of publishing.

$15 AT TROPHY DARK

$15 AT TROPHY GOLD

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