What does it mean for a game to be ‘Rooted in Trophy’? Simply put, it indicates that the game is inspired by and uses the System Reference Document (SRD) of the Trophy games created by Jesse Ross. The first and original game is Trophy Dark, a story of tragic fantasy in which a doomed party of treasure hunters are irreversibly changed or meet their demise at the heart of a hostile environment that doesn’t want them there. This game in turn led to Trophy Gold, a take on the classic dungeon crawling style of fantasy gaming made popular for a wider audience through the cultural ubiquity of Dungeons & Dragons. The Trophy books and other excellent games are available via The Gauntlet after a successful crowdfunding campaign.
The core rules listed in the reference document are a template, a little like the instructions for a piece of IKEA flat pack furniture. If you assemble them according to the instructions, you get something akin to Trophy Dark or Gold. But if you experiment and adapt them you get something new and entirely different! And perhaps a little twisted and strange. All Rooted in Trophy games contain the DNA of the original ruleset. The system is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY), allowing new uses and adaptations using the rules and even combining them with other openly licensed systems. The results can vary in their interpretation of the Trophy ruleset, and our games do, but the results always have a distinct character in play.
The genesis of the framework 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 a terrible cost, 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 Free League, a tabletop roleplaying game set in the dark forests of Davokar. The result combines dark fantasy, a Lovecraftian sense of dangerous excess, and a dark fairy tale fear of what lurks just beyond the boundaries of the familiar.
Like many indie games, Trophy Dark and its rules are a seed unfurling from a pile of rich loam made of 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 licences that encourage openly created games to be hacked, modified, remade, reborn and recreated. It is an ethos and an inspiration that the game creators of the Rooted in Crisis games have embraced in a variety of ways.
This summary is partially based on a 2020 review of Trophy Dark by the author which appeared in the Gothic Nature journal. You can read it for more detail on the rules.