Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground

Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground, subtitled "A Guide to Tabletop Roleplaying Games from D&D to Mothership", is a book by Stu Horvath, published by MIT Press in 2023, that explains the history and evolution of role-playing games (RPGs) from Dungeons & Dragons in 1974 to the 2020s.

The book is constructed as a series of essays and reviews of role-playing games, organized chronologically by their publication dates, and grouped by decade. Each decade section has an illustrated frontispiece by Kyle Patterson pastiching the themes that dominated the works in that era.

Stu Horvath became a collector of old and sometimes forgotten RPGs, a hobby that solidified when Chaosium started to release boxed sets of their old games.^[1] As Horvath related, "I just got the collector's bug and started accumulating all this stuff. And then, because I overthink everything, I can't just appreciate it on its own, I started to try and make sense of it all."^[1] The result was a chronologically ordered examination of the evolution of RPGs titled Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground, published by MIT Press in 2023 with cover art by Kyle Patterson.

Lin Codega called this book "an encyclopedic assemblage of tabletop roleplaying games, both vintage and contemporary. It's also an acute analysis of game design during each decade." Codega also critiqued some omissions: "it doesn't quite get into some of the seminal story games work of the 2010s. For example, the 2018 game, Dream Askew/Dream Apart, written by Avery Alder and Benjamin Rosenbaum respectively, which introduced the Belonging Outside Belonging system, isn't included."^[1]

Mark Pilkington wrote in the Fortean Times: "While not intended to be comprehensive (it would be many times its size) its 200- chronological entries, all illustrated with photographs from Horvath's own collection, chart the evolution of the form, taking in the great (D&D in multiple iterations), the weird (Dallas: The Television Role Playing Game) and the simply un-categorisable (World Action and Adventure) titles that emerged along the way. Each entry is detailed, erudite and entertaining on its own but, read successively, they chart the flows of ideas, fads, themes and experiments found within RPG history's many hundreds of thousands of pages."^[2]

Thomas L. McDonald in Games World of Puzzles Magazine said it "is a heavy brick of a book: what a set of game rules might call a weighty tome of obscure and eldritch knowledge. For those who lived through all this, it’s a delightful nostalgia trip; for those new to it, it's a good overview of where this ever-evolving genre has been."^[3]