(We do get free access to the Bundle of Holding contents, but this happens whether or not we plug them. We didn’t get anything for talking about Good Society.)
How about Trollope? I read The Warden and was Not Impressed. (“I’m going to tell you a joke. This is a joke. You are now amused. It’s funny because of this. That was a joke; it was funny. Now I’m going to tell you another joke…”)
Incidentally, my method for generating Roman names is to use words with roughly appropriate sounds. As this has led to such memorable NPCs as Tremulous Anus and Fatuous Thermos (whose wife and daughter were called, if I remember correctly, Labia and Chlamydia) I recognise that it’s not a universally appropriate approach. Something of an Up Pompeii! style.
My memory is suggesting that “Mooks” in Bushido were “Extras” - possibly “rabble” were one of the types of extra - unskilled (soon to be) bodies - I also recall you could have extras with class and levels - these could be more dangerous, but still only had 1 hp per level so “paper tigers” (especially since Bushido only had 6 levels…)
Checking in my battered old copy of Bushido, I find that you are right: the one-hit-point mooks were indeed “Extras”. They had “classic man” stats and (reduced) professional skills, they could even have high levels, but with -2 to all saving throws and only one hit point each they were there to be mown like hay and stacked like cordwood.
The “Rabble” that I remember were weak opponents but not nerfed so thoroughly as Extras. They had with classic man attributes and (somewhat reduced) professional skills, -1 on saving throws, and 1D10 hit points (or “if desired”, 1D10 per level).
Tunnels and Trolls did indeed have rules for fully statted and playable monsters in its first edition, 1975, although only for humanoid monsters. The Peters-Mcallister Chart for Creating Manlike Characters and Monsters is on page 20 of that edition and will happily let you play a troll or a giant if you fancy. By the time you get to the fifth edition in 1979 the available races are greatly expanded and there’s an additional table for all sorts of monsters that may be less acceptable as PCs. Standard monsters are represented by the Monster Rating shorthand, so a troll might just be noted down as MR40, for example.
Monsters! Monsters! was a standalone game rather than a supplement, published in 1976 by Metagaming (and edited by Steve Jackson, as it happens). It has different charisma effects for monsters than for PCs (this was later revised) but it lets you play an amazing range of creatures: in a memorable game I ran one of the players ran a shoggoth.
The first game to explicitly allow you to play a monster as a PC was Dungeons & Dragons, which actually suggests the possibility of playing a “young” dragon. However, it provides pretty much no support or rules to help you do it.
