Tunnels & Trolls
| Tunnels & Trolls | ||
|---|---|---|
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| RPG published by Flying Buffalo |
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| Rule System | Tunnels & Trolls | |
| Authors | Ken St. Andre | |
| First Publication | 1975 | |
"I just wanted something I could play with my friends at a reasonable price, with reasonable equipment."
- – Ken St. Andre
Tunnels & Trolls (T&T) might be thought of as the original D&D knockoff, though it may be thought of more accurately as the also-ran with even TSRs Dragon magazine admitting as much. It has the dubious honor of being the second role-playing game ever created and as such is strongly influenced by D&D, but the creator of the game seems to have initially had more heroic (or at least reasonable and understandable) motivations for its publication than the slew of D&D clones that would follow.
The creator of this one is a man named Ken St. Andre, who at the time of D&D being a popular game in an obscure subset of the already obscure wargaming community, got a chance to read over the D&D sourcebooks of 1975. Ken rightfully deduced that the mechanics were messy and complicated. Remember, this is infant D&D and as a result, there are still odd elements of Chainmail meshed into it (morale check anyone?) like links in... chainmail. As a result, Ken created the world's Second-to-Original Fantasy Role Playing Game™. And he succeeded in something to that attempt with the first edition of T&T being 40 pages and greatly simplified in scope compared to D&D's white box of three books each of around 40 pages and additional reference sheets.
So what exactly has Ken St. Andre provided us in his first edition? In 1975 the D&D white box sold for $10 dollars which was quite a lot back in the day and required those exotic dice. You could play this game with only a six-sided die, no knowledge of wargaming, and still have a good time. In fact, the game is very focused on fun and, perhaps adequately for a game with trolls in the name, a sense of goofiness infecting the work as seen in the art and spells with names like "upsidaisy". Numerous reviews further point out that this game can be run relatively quickly. Sacred cows like alignment are entirely absent. Classes are reduced to Wizard, Warrior, and Rogue (which isn't your Bagginesque thief but a weird sort of rogue-wizard). Character creation is 2 pages, hitpoints are absent as a concept with health coming directly from your constitution. There is no monstrous manual, monsters are just assigned an arbitrary rating that directly corresponds to both the amount of dice it has to attack with and the number of hits it takes to die. Interestingly enough rules are provided for creating characters of various "kindreds" including the bog-standard men, dorfs, and elves but also "hobbits" (I guess the estate of a certain British author wasn't paying attention), leprechauns, fairies, and were-beasts. Additional rules are provided for sentiment monsters including trolls and all your standard greenskins which I guess could be adapted to a PC as well. If anything, T&T's rules-light system encourages you to make your own creative choices with it.
The game has been updated a significant number of times since then with a 9th edition, but the 5th addition which ran roughly from 1979 to the mid-2000s seems to be quite popular. It also supports solo play for the antisocial hobbyist.
Gallery
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The ever-popular 5e.
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The kindreds in the 2015 editions
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Fun art from 1e that shows how serious the game takes itself.
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