Review: Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground

I recently read and enjoyed Stu Horvath’s Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground (hereafter MAHG) but it wasn’t what I expected. I was expecting something comparable to Art & Arcana but not limited to just D&D. There are two differences between Art & Arcana and MAHG. The obvious but less important one is that MAHG has more text and less pictures. This is ironic given that the book grew out of Horvath’s Instagram feed.

The less obvious but more important difference is that Art & Arcana is ultimately a work of history written (in part) by an academic historian. In contrast, despite being published by MIT Press, MAHG is not a work of academic scholarship, but a collector showing off his stuff. Horvath’s tone is a bit like travel writing, with a heavy emphasis on the subjective experience. This is especially pronounced in his review of Old School Essentials, which reads like the grognard equivalent to asking Proust about a cookie.

Another way that the collector vs historian distinction comes out is that Horvath’s discussion of Tekumel is to describe Barker’s nazi politics and then say “I’m not interested in having the work of a neo-Nazi propagandist on my shelves and I am certainly not going to give space to one in my book.” It makes sense for a collector like Horvath to not honor a creep by including his work in his collection, but it would be unthinkable for an academic historian like Peterson to memory hole the first published campaign setting, the first campaign setting not based in western culture, and the first RPG with an integrated campaign setting, no matter how despicable the designer’s opinions (and Barker’s were as bad as they get). I think it’s worth noting that Appelcline (who writes like a historian despite his day job being technical writing) is extremely woke, but still has a very dispassionate just the facts approach in Designers & Dragons.

Horvath also has an annoying tic that whenever discussing woke critiques of games on such grounds as that it’s racist to say orcs are evil or it’s cultural appropriation for white guys to make a Sinbad the sailor game setting, he finds himself unable to just say “the game would latter be criticized for x, y, and z” without inserting the word “fairly” before the word “criticized.”

The only error I noticed was a pretty egregious misunderstanding of trademark vs OGL. Horvath says it’s the law that you can’t note compatibility between your product and another, which any trip to an auto parts store will show is simply not true. The actual reason for circumlocutions like “5th edition of the world’s most popular RPG” is that the OGL demands you don’t say “Dungeons & Dragons” as a quid pro quo for getting to use the D&D SRD. (The d20 trademark license allowed licensees to say “D&D” but gave them less other rights, such as you can only publish adventures and splatbooks, not corebooks, and d20 trademark license fell out of favor after The Book of Erotic Fantasy controversy and WotC never extended it to 5e).

The appendices are outstanding. His “Appendix N” (actually Appendix B) is very well chosen, he has a great list of fantasy and game visual artists in Appendix C, and something I’ve never seen before but really enjoyed was his appendix D, in which he struggles to find antecedents and representations of the dungeon in nature, history, literature, and film.

I recommend reading Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground, but keep in mind you’re getting the perspective of a collector in contrast to the history you’ll get from Peterson, Appelcline, or Riggs.