Happy Birthday to the Trollgodfather Ken St. Andre, and Thanks for All the Great Games!
I can’t quite remember it like it was yesterday, since it was some time ago, but I do remember the first time I encountered the concept of solo role playing. My friend Mark, who would eventually become my nemesis in the Sweet Pickles wars of 7th grade, told me that he had just purchased a new game that had modules you could play by yourself and that you didn’t need a Dungeon Master to have the full role playing game experience. I didn’t believe him at first, but then he showed me City of Terrors and showed me how it used a conceit similar to the Choose Your Own Adventure books to create an interactive role playing game experience. It was for a game called Tunnels & Trolls written by a designer named Ken St. Andre and I was a fan from that moment.
I went to my friendly local game store that weekend to try to buy a copy of Tunnels & Trolls and City of Terrors, but they didn’t have them in stock and I had to special order them. When they finally arrived, I devoured them and soon had played through the City several times and had purchased a couple more adventures. My personal favorite is Arena of Khazan because it is one of the most replayable, in part because it encourages you to create an entire library of gladiators as opposition. While Mark and I both liked D&D, most of our friends did not and between Baseball, Soccer, and other extra-curricular activities I didn’t play a lot of D&D in middle school. My friend Sean, with whom I most frequently played D&D, went to a different middle school. My family had moved to a different part of Sparks, Nevada and though Sean and I were still close friends, we also each had our new middle school friend circles. The halcyon days of 5th and 6th grade D&D weekends were long gone. I did, however, play a lot of Tunnels & Trolls in middle school, even more when my family moved to the Bay Area.
Let me tell you that those solo adventures made the move much easier and I owe a debt of gratitude to Ken St. Andre for his game. As I grew up, I continued to play Tunnels & Trolls as a solo game, even as I played Champions and Call of Cthulhu with the friends I made in high school. Eventually, I was able to thank Ken St. Andre for all of the fun he provided me over the years. First, as a subscriber to his personal fan website Trollhalla in the early 2000s. That’s right. Ken St. Andre was doing a subscription Substack long before Substack existed. His site was a combination of blog, message board, and micro video game site that was unique and wonderful. I created a character for that website named Dupin who was the World’s Leading Troll Detective, and my wife Jody drew up an avatar for me to use.
Ken was a great host for the Trollhalla community and we communicated enough that I began to think of him as a friend, a feeling that increased when I was able to play Tunnels & Trolls with him at Gen Con. That was the one and only time I’ve played Tunnels & Trolls as an in person role playing game. It was very interesting to see how the game “really” played. It was a wonderful experience, a definite bucket list item.
Today is Ken St. Andre’s 79th Birthday and a bit has changed since those early days, but he is still producing game material. The owner of the company that published Tunnels & Trolls, Rick Loomis and Flying Buffalo, passed away and the rights to Tunnels & Trolls were sold. Ken got a bit of money and the right to draft adventures for the game, but he lost control of that property. Given how much time he spent maintaining and building a community via Trollhalla and Facebook, I find that a little sad. So I’d like to take a moment to recommend you check out a game that he DOES own and control, Monsters! Monsters!
Monsters! Monsters!
In 1975, Ken St. Andre published his own vision of what a fantasy role playing game should be. He called the game Tunnels & Trolls and it was a set of rules that he came up with after attempting to unravel how to play Dungeons & Dragons. Given how different the mechanics are, I often wondered how he came up with his rules, but then I began thinking about how to play D&D using the Chainmail rules and it all became clear how brilliant Ken St. Andre’s adaption/innovation was.
That game is currently owned by Rebellion Publishing who bought the game rights from Webbed Sphere Inc. after they bought the rights from the Rick Loomis estate in 2021. Webbed Sphere Inc. didn’t really do anything with the property, Rebellion Publishing is doing more with the property and they just ran a successful Kickstarter for a new version of Tunnels & Trolls. The new version provides an opportunity for Rebellion to dive deeper into the table top gaming space, something they’ve already shown a desire to do with their republishing of older Judge Dredd board games and an in house magazine based RPG series called Adventure Presents that includes two games Tartarus Gate and Tiny in The Tower. Tartarus Gate is a science fiction horror game meant to be played in four sessions and Tiny in the Tower is a cozy fantasy adventure where the players take on the role of shrunken down adventurers. It’s a fun game and the rules are free for download.
If things go according to plan, I’ll be posting reviews of the Adventure Presents games in the near future. I like the mechanics and think they are fun scenarios, perfect for infequent play and busy schedules.
By the look of Rebellion’s marketing materials and playtest rules, I’m not sure if their version will capture what makes Tunnels & Trolls a unique gaming experience. While the rules of Tunnels & Trolls have an elegance that makes it easy to pick up and quick to play, that’s probably what draws me to the game least. For me, it’s always been the slightly punk nature of the game. Not only has Tunnels & Trolls been a largely DIY endeavor, and remained one over time, it’s also had the ironic edge you often see in punk culture. Where D&D eventually came to take itself “seriously,” Tunnels & Trolls never did. People might complain about spells with names like “Take That You Fiend!” but that’s always been a part of the charm of the game. The marketing image Rebellion shared this month lacks that charm. I think that the character in the ad might be “Fang the Delectable” (that’s the name of the sample character used to show you how to play the game), but I’m not sure. Compare the above illustration with Liz Danforth’s rendition of Fang.
I can see certain similarities, but Danforth’s Fang looks much more unprepared for the horrors he’s certain to encounter. After buying his equipment, per the rules, he doesn’t even have shoes. Now that’s a low level character if I’ve ever seen one.
While I’m not sure whether Rebellion’s Tunnels & Trolls will be a worthy successor to the original, that’s not a problem because Ken St. Andre has already provided us with a worthy successor. In fact, he provided it almost 50 years ago when he created Monsters! Monsters!. Here’s a description of the game from the DriveThru RPG entry:
In 1976 Ken St Andre, the creator of the 2nd oldest role-playing game Tunnels & Trolls created another RPG called Monsters Monsters! It was first published by Metagaming Concepts and then again by Flying Buffalo in 1979. The game remained unchanged from then until now - with the release of this completely NEW, rewritten and re-edited edition of one of the oldest RPGs in existence, Monsters! Monsters! now in a 2nd edition after 40 years!
This 2020 2nd edition of Monsters! Monsters! retains much of its original appeal and structure, but with all new art and new options like stunting and monster chaos factor. The new M! M! rules also lists 49 monster kindreds you can play, gives you their dice modifiers and now each has a special power unique to its kindred. Each monster is described in a separate section. Its also better organized and easier to use. (For example - now the monsters are separated into humanoid and non-humanoid types) There are two different types of character sheets, one that includes portraits you can add. There is a Spellbook, weapon and armor lists, new abilities and chaos factor, 18 cut-out full-color standee figures and much more!
And to really cap off the rules, we are including in the book a brand new 26 page Monster! Monster! GM adventure in the ruined dwarven city of Hael’Ku. Filled with treasures, danger and mysteries to solve... Download your copy of Monsters Monsters! today!
Tunnels & Trolls and Monsters! Monsters! are two of the earliest role playing games ever produced and they were created as a direct response to Dungeons & Dragons. Lawrence Schick wrote that T&T was the second role playing game ever published in the invaluable history of rpgs Heroic Worlds, but Jon Peterson’s analysis regarding the Rules to the Game of Dungeon demonstrate that it may have been beaten to the punch by another small print run game.
As I mentioned earlier, Tunnels & Trolls was created as a reaction to Dungeons & Dragons. Some friends of Ken St. Andre wanted to play D&D and handed him a copy to run. He couldn’t understand the rules, and having read the “Little Brown Books” many times I can see why. Ken St. Andre describes how he created the game in the introduction to the reprint of the 1st edition as follows:
The key point here is that he wanted a simple game that was not derived from miniature gaming. In that way, his game is very different from Dungeons & Dragons. While we may play D&D with a theatre of the mind approach, or not, the mechanics of the game are very much rooted in miniature skirmish rules. I’m working on an extensive post on this that includes references to Geoff Engelstein’s excellent Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design, but it will be some time before I run it.
What is important here is that T&T and D&D have different mechanical DNA. Tunnels & Trolls and Monsters! Monsters! aren’t based on miniature skirmish rules, instead combat (when it’s done at all) is based on abstract die roll comparisons where the higher roll wins and the difference is the damage. For example, a player character might roll 4d6 and add 12 to the roll for high attributes, while a monster might roll 4d6 and add 20 to the die roll for its monster rating (only in the first round in some editions after which it would be +10). It’s very abstract and open to interpretation.
The Saving Throw mechanics of T&T are also very different from D&D at the onset. First, because they were attribute rather than attack type based (modern D&D “borrows” from T&T in this respect) and second in that they are given a “level of difficulty” so you might have to make a 2nd Level Strength (or Luck) Save in Tunnels & Trolls. The basic formula for a saving roll on 2d6 in T&T is:
or for higher levels the following equation minus the stat.
So a first level character with an average (11) Luck would need a 9 or better on 2d6 to save. That might seem very unlikely at first (approximately 28%), but the fact that Tunnels & Trolls is the first “exploding die” system (in this case exploding on doubles) increases the likelihood significantly and adds a nice random element to the game.
Given that Rebellion’s new version of Tunnels and Trolls is yet to be published, and because I want Ken St. Andre to see some royalties on my recommendation, I’m shifting away from recommending Tunnels & Trolls and into recommending Monsters! Monsters!. This game is a mechanical spinoff of Tunnels and Trolls, it has the same DNA and foundation, but the players take on the role of monsters instead of humans. Have you ever wanted to play a Reverse Dungeon where the monsters take out their frustrations on Humanity? Then this is the game for you. I highly recommend buying Monsters! Monsters! and giving it a spin.
Happy Birthday Ken! You truly are the Trollgodfather.
I'm envious that if Jason wanted an RPG he didn't ask me about the rights to Dragon Warriors -- but I'm pleased for Ken. He's done landmark stuff for the hobby (Stormbringer is another favourite) and he deserves it.