News
Fallout, the beloved video game franchise that mixes 50s retro-futurism with the apocalypse, has its roots in a role-playing game…and then attempted two different licensing deals with role-playing game companies before they were tripped up by legal challenges. From Tunnels & Trolls to GURPS to D20 Modern, Fallout’s evolution was intertwined with both video game and tabletop gaming history.
Game Play
The GROGNARD Files return to ‘blast away the fiends of boredom’ with another T&T episode. This time they are joined by Big Jack Brass, Jon Hancock.
https://armchairadventurerblog.com/2016/09/16/episode-7-part-2-tunnels-and-trolls-rpg/
Trollish History
This essay is here to set the record straight on the creation of Tunnels and Trolls. I ought to know–I created it.
Although I’ve done a lot of things in my life, and in gaming, it looks like the creation of Tunnels and Trolls ™ will always be my main claim to fame. If you want to know why there is a Tunnels and Trolls game, then read on–otherwise, say goodbye.
I’ve always been a bookworm and a gamer. I invented my first games at the age of six when I turned Monopoly into an obstacle course race. As I grew up, I customized lots of games into my own versions of things. For example, after reading Chessmen of Mars, I built a Jetan set, but before I did that, I invented Combat Chess. (Combat Chess plays just like regular chess except that the attacking piece gets to roll 3 six-sided dice (3D6) and the defender rolls two six-sided dice whenever one piece tries to take another. The high total wins, and the loser is removed from the board. Special rules: doubles and triples add and roll over. In order to checkmate the King, you have to actually take him–there’s always a chance that he may fight his way out of the trap. Try it–it’s fun, and it changes chess strategy a good deal.)
I’ve always loved fantasy and science fiction. From earliest boyhood, Tarzan was my hero. Later, Conan the Cimmerian took over as the number one guy. I collected escape fiction, especially swords and sorcery. (I still do.) About December of 1974, I began to hear about a new game called Dungeons and Dragons–a new kind of game involving role-playing, and set in a pseudo-medieval/fantasy world. Wow! That was right up my alley–I really wanted to get involved with that. There was only one problem. The rumors came from California and I lived in Phoenix. Nobody I knew actually had the game or played it.
In those days, I was a gentleman of leisure, out of library school, but unemployed. My wife Cathy supported me very nicely on her earnings as a children’s librarian, and made it possible for me to spend days or weeks at a time writing things like new games. Without her physical and emotional support, none of this would have ever happened.
Then in April of 1975, I stopped by the Flying Buffalo game store with some friends one night, and David Sleight had a copy of the first edition boxed set of Dungeons and Dragons with him. No one was playing it. Wargames were supreme at that time. I borrowed it and sat down to read it. I must have spent about an hour puzzling over those first crude rules. It was mostly unfamiliar to me. I was not a miniatures gamer. I had never seen four, eight, ten, twelve, or twenty-sided dice. What’s all this stuff about campaigns? What’s all this religious alignment doing in the game? I didn’t read the whole booklet–just the parts that made sense. But I knew what they were trying to do. I remember saying out loud, “What a great concept! What a lousy execution! I’ll write something that me and my friends can play.” (Note the grammatical error–that’s what I actually said.)
So, I went home that night filled with inspiration. In the morning I went to the Phoenix Public Library and checked out a large supply of books about medieval weapons and fantastic beasts. I plundered my knowledge of mythology for monsters. The black puddings and purple suets of D & D sounded pretty stupid to me, when I could have trolls and griffins and unicorns, and sabretooth tigers, and giant apes and so forth. After a couple days of reading and note-taking I started to write–pounding out the simplified basis of a fantasy role-playing game. My objective was to make the game easy to understand, quick to play, and as humorous as I could. Multi-sided dice were the first to go. My game would use six-sided dice that anyone could get from games they already had like Monopoly. Next to go was character alignments. Why should characters be Good, Evil, or Chaotic? Nobody I knew fit into such a neat scheme.
Then I threw out attributes that didn’t make any sense. What the heck did Wisdom have to do with anything? Who needs Hit Points when the character already has Constitution? What did Charisma mean, anyway–I started out thinking of it as personal beauty and pretty quickly translated it first into leadership and then into impressiveness. I’d remember something from the D & D rules, and then I’d change and simplify it so that it made sense to me. I didn’t know that other gamers all over the country were doing the same thing. Between 1974 and 1980, there must have been 10,000 variants of D & D played all over the country. The first thing any Dungeon Master (this was before the days of the politically correct term Game Master.) would do when starting a gaming session was explain the house rules to his players. My difference was that I wrote my rule changes down and published them as an independent system. So did Dave Hargraves who created Arduin.
In about a week, I had a 20 page rough draft–mostly tables of weapons and spells and equipment that could be used as the basis for a game. I took an afternoon, and some graph paper, and “dug” my first dungeon–Gristlegrim. I invited some friends over and we tried it out. They loved it, when the trapdoor opened beneath their feet and plummeted them into the cell of a hideous female troll who told them they’d either have to mate with her or die. Out came the swords and battleaxes, and the first Tunnels and Trolls melee began. When the session was over, and about half the original party of adventurers had literally dug their way back to the surface, everyone had to have their own copy of the rules. Photocopiers were hard to find in 1975. We all went out and made a few copies for my immediate group of friends. What I didn’t anticipate is that they would try the game quickly on their friends, who would also want copies. My original draft got beaten up very quickly.
It didn’t take very long before people began making suggestions. Why not have rules for bows and arrows and other missile weapons? Why did you have to play a human? Why not a Dwarf, Elf, Hobbit, Fairy, Leprechaun? Those five were the first suggested, and along with Humans became known as the Six Good Kindreds.
A week after creating the game, I was forced to make my first major re-write of the game. I added all the stuff that actual playtesting had taught us. Then everyone wanted to copy that. At that point I decided it was time to publish. I had already done some fanzines–I knew it wasn’t that hard to get something published at your local photocopy store.
If I was going to publish it, I’d need some illustrations. At that time, I knew exactly one artist–a college kid named Robin Carver. I took the manuscript and went and camped out in his dorm room for an afternoon and got him to draw me some cartoons to illustrate the rules. Armed with all that, I pasted up a manuscript, and took the whole thing to the Arizona State University print shop to get 100 copies made. For a 40 page booklet with stiff covers, it was going to cost me $60 to print 100 copies by photo-offset. That was a lot of money for me at the time. I was out of work and newly married, but I figured I could peddle it to my friends for $1 a copy and get my money back. So I took the chance. Thus, in June of 1975, Tunnels and Trolls became the second ever published fantasy role-playing game in America. I did one thing that I considered very important. I copyrighted the game–got the forms, sent copies to the Library of Congress, paid the $10 copyright fee, and printed my copyright notice in the booklet. The first edition of Dungeons and Dragons was printed without copyright–Gygax and Arneson probably never even thought of it.
At first we all called my game “Dungeons and Dragons”. We thought that was a generic name for games of this sort, but when I was ready to publish the booklet, I knew I needed some other name.
It was Friday night and a bunch of us were over at Bear Peters’ bachelor pad playing either Risk or D & D, as we called it, when I told everyone we couldn’t call the game Dungeons and Dragons–that name belonged to Gygax and company. But, I wanted that alliterative sound to the game, and since our adventures were, up to that point, all underground, I suggested that we call it “Tunnels and Troglodytes!” (There was a popular rock song around 1974/75 called Troglodytes.)
Jeez! The gamers almost laughed me out of the room. After the hooting died down, Rob Carver offered an alternative, “Tunnels and Trolls” and by popular acclamation that night, that was the name we decided on.
Well, I did all the writing, typing, and publishing on that first crude edition of Tunnels and Trolls. By late July all of my friends had copies, and I still had about 50 left over. In November I saw Rick Loomis, who I knew slightly from having visited his Flying Buffalo (Starweb) business a few times, and I asked him if he’d try to sell the rest on consignment. He took my extra copies to a convention and sold out–it was kind of funny–he was sitting in a booth next to Gary Gygax who was still flacking his first printing of Dungeons and Dragons. T & T was the simpler and cheaper game and it outsold D & D at that convention. Gygax took a dislike to me and Flying Buffalo that endured for years.
The complete history of Tunnels and Trolls is far too long to tell here. Besides, I wasn’t really taking notes at the time, so only a few high points remain, and they are colored by how I remember things. Loomis saw an opportunity to make a profit off this new game, and we struck a deal that is still in effect over 20 years later. Tunnels and Trolls has gone through a lot of changes and improvements since that first crude effort, and has received a lot of modification and development by people like Elizabeth Danforth, who started as my artist for the second edition, and Michael A. Stackpole, who is now a best-selling Star Wars SF author. Steve McAllister, a friend of mine, came up with the idea of solitaire dungeons in 1976 and Rick Loomis created the first one ever–Buffalo Castle–in that same year. (I did the second one–the Deathtrap Equalizer later the same month.) That was the very beginning of the “Choose Your Own Adventure” craze where R. L. Stine got his start. The whole history of T & T is a lot more than I’m going to tackle here, but over the years, we came up with a lot of innovations that are part and parcel of the fantasy gaming world now. It would be nice if we could get the credit for them, but I don’t suppose that will happen. (Examples: FBI published the first fantasy gaming calendar–TSR was second a year later though they had the money to do it in a big way with color art and all. Monsters! Monsters!, which I wrote in 1976, was the first game to encourage the players to be the monsters instead of the good guys. White Wolf has certainly made a fortune off that idea. FBI did the first, and still the best solitaire adventures for frp gaming. Over 20 years, we did a lot.
So, that’s my tale, or at least as much of it as I’m going to put on this web page.
–Never look a gift troll in the mouth!
Ken St. Andre, July, 1997
H‘aaarrrggghhh!
Khenn Arrth
Visit the Trollgod‘s Blog
Trollish History
I’ve compiled a list of crowd sourced questions for the game’s creator Ken St. Andre. Thank you Troll ITC readers, and special thanks to the community at Reddit.com/r/rpg – if you aren’t subscribed to that subreddit, get to it. – Nick Nundahl.
Nundahl: Ken, thank you so much for agreeing to this interview, I think our community can really benefit from your years of experience in the industry. I’d like to start with a question of my own, and I’m sure it is one you’ve heard countless times before. What do you say to the young game designer looking to break into the RPG market, particularly advice for starting up?
Ken: Hello, young game designer. What’s new? Everyone has their own way of getting into game design. Don’t waste a lot of time preparing, or getting advice. Do what works for you, and what makes you happy. Don’t count on success—you are not Crom’s Gift to Game Design (heh, neither am I), but believe in yourself and never give up.
Nundahl: Do you or Rick Loomis from Flying Buffalo have plans that would sustain Tunnels and Trolls for the next 35 years? Do you think T&T will be forced to evolve in relation to new game systems and technological advances or do you think it will instead remain as-is for the “old school” niche market?
Ken: Of course T&T evolves, but I don’t think it is being forced to do so. We’re not big enough as a game to actually worry about market forces. T&T glories in the creativity of its players. If they evolve, so will the game.
Nundahl: What, if any, games do you play currently, other than T&T?
Ken: I play dozens of games. Nothing dominates my gaming life. I very much like Shadowfist, but I spend more time playing Magic. Should you meet me at a Con, I’m up for any rpg I can get into. If I don’t know the rules of something like Pathfinder (and believe me, I don’t) I will just role play the character, let the Game Master tell me what to do next, and seek explanations when needed from the person sitting next to me. The WHAP system is a lot of fun, and I did a module for it called Cowboys and Dinosaurs. When it comes to computer gaming, Runescape, not World of Warcraft, is my game of choice. I really believe simpler is better in computer games too. I wish I had time to play Lord of the Rings, or Conan, or Star Trek, or Star Wars online, but there is simply not enough time or money in my life for those games. Damn!
Nundahl: The Outlaw Press controversy brought a lot of gamer and artist press on T&T. Do you think this negatively impacted the way people might look at 7.5 T&T, in spite of this edition and publisher not being linked to the art infringement?
Ken: I don’t believe the Outlaw Press fiasco has had much effect on T&T 7.5. Fiery Dragon uses their own art and everyone knows it.
Nundahl: That’s all for me, now I want to get into the good stuff, our reader questions.
Reader Questions
Undergarden: I remember how unique and fun the solo T&T adventures were. How influential do you think T&T’s solo-support was upon future game books like Fighting Fantasy, Fabled Lands, etc?
Ken: I honestly don’t know. Do you think there’s a connection?
Tomatospike: You’ve been involved in the RPG and gaming industry from the beginning. What other projects do you have other than Tunnels and Trolls?
Ken: Do you mean now or in the past? I am a freelance designer. I have worked on Stormbringer, Shadowrun, Wasteland, WHAP, Monsters! Monsters!, Starfaring, and some other stuff that I forget. Cross my palm with silver and I’ll be happy to work on games for any company out there. Currently I just released a T&T card game called OgreOcre. Look for it on Lulu and Drive-Thru RPG.
YakumoFuji: Wasteland is one of my top 5 favourite CRPG’s of all time. How much influence in the design did you have? Did your Wasteland experience sour you on CRPG’s or are you are not listed as having worked on other computer game designs?
Ken: Wasteland was a team effort. My greatest contribution was the idea for the Southwestern setting, the Terminator style robotic bad guys, and the general story arc. I also recommended that we bring my friends Mike Stackpole, Liz Danforth, and Dan Carver into the design team. They added most of the brilliance for which the game is famous.
GameHermit: One thing I would like to have him discuss is, what are some tips and tricks to keep the magic alive in the game?
Ken: Enthusiasm is more important than anything. Keep the game moving. Don’t let it bog down.
Khayd’haik: If the intent was to design a simplified system, why do the combat rules for higher level adventures require buckets of dice?
Ken: I like buckets of dice. The mere idea of rolling a couple hundred dice at a time is inherently funny. Besides, I knew that clever gamers would find ways around the problem of too many dice. If you can’t solve that problem, you’re really too dumb to be playing this game. Anyway, Khayd’haik, the original intent was not to produce a simplified system—it was to produce a game I could actually play. Being simpler was just a good side effect.
Graal: Is the Ranger a ‘Warrior Plus’, with all the normal warrior’s abilities plus the Missile Mastery Talent?
Ken: No. He’s a specialist, great with missile weapons, but he doesn’t get the warrior’s extra armor protection.
Deez: What was the process to bring the game from a cool idea to print production?
Ken: I turned a manuscript in to Jason Kempton of Fiery Dragon, and the rest of the job was up to him and his production crew.
Thor: D&D is widely known for dorkdom all over the world. Does he think that if T&T was released before D&D, would T&T hold that title?
Ken: No. Dungeons and Dragons has the cooler name. It even alliterates with dork. D&D has always had the money, distribution, and publicity that T&T has lacked. None of that makes D&D a better game—I think T&T is better in many ways. It just means that more “dorks” will be attracted to it.
Eric: Ask him if there is any way to resist hold that pose. That’s always bugged me.
Ken: In the first 5 editions of T&T there was no way to resist spells cast upon a creature, except to carry a kris made of meteroric iron. The character can still do that, but he can also resist being bespelled by simply having a higher Wizardry attribute than the attacking wizard.
Afterword
Nundahl: Anything else you’d like to say?
Ken: I’d like to thank you, Nick, for the chance to talk about Tunnels & Trolls and some of my other games. Readers of this interview who actually play and enjoy T&T are invited to join the greatest bunch of T&T players in the world. Details can be found at Trollhalla.com. You have to make a level 1 saving roll on your intelligence to get in.
Nundahl: Thank you a thousand times over Ken, Reddit, and Troll ITC readers!
Nick Nundahl is a wild haired demi-viking living on the East Coast United States. He’s run games in countless systems and tanked more game nights than he’s ever run successfully, but hopefully learned a lot in the process.
Visit Nick Nundahl’s websites:
Troll in the Corner
Nick’s Twitter page
H‘aaarrrggghhh!
Khenn Arrth
Visit the Trollgod‘s Blog
Trollish History
I’ve mentioned many times before that I was a huge fan of Traveller back in the day and that I considered The Traveller Adventure one of the few near-perfect products ever made for any roleplaying game in the history of the hobby. Among the many things that made that product so special were its illustrations, many of them created by Liz Danforth. Of course, Liz’s illustrations aren’t limited to Traveller; she’s probably better known for her work on Tunnels & Trolls, with which she’s been associated since the game’s beginning, at the dawn of the hobby. Liz kindly agred to answer some questions for me.
– James Maliszewski
I was part of the local science fiction club when I was in college, many decades ago. The group included a bunch of board gamers who played Risk, Regatta, and Diplomacy variants, and I enjoyed that. The gamer group included Ken St. Andre, who looked at the original early D&D and felt it was a cool idea but “way too complicated.” He created Tunnels & Trolls, and so that is what all of us played. I did illustrations for the early game and eventually worked for Flying Buffalo Inc, the publisher of T&T. Working for Buffalo, I attended many game cons, I met the rest of the industry and did a lot of freelance work for anyone who wanted the skills I had to offer — art, of course, but also writing, editing, game development and scenario design. I had the time of my life, honestly.
My first Origins — which was about 1976, near as I can recall — it seemed like every guy on the hall was staring at my chest. I was damn near the only female in the place. No one was unkind or truly rude, though. They just couldn’t believe I knew games, played games, or worked for a game company. They all figured I was somebody’s girlfriend, I think.
That said, I never ever had problems working in the industry as a female. People could tell I knew what I was talking about after a short time, and were willing to give me exactly the same opportunities they’d give any other artist, writer, or editor. My work spoke for itself and the rare examples of misogyny were just that — very rare.
That was another Ken St. Andre game and me and my gamer friends — Bear Peters, Steve McAllister, Ugly John Carver, and Ken mainly, with a smattering of others — were the ones playing it while he developed the design. We all participated. It was strongly based on T&T but Ken choose to go with Metagaming instead of Flying Buffalo at that particular time. I don’t recall if that was before or after the art I did for Steve Jackson’s early design for Melee (which eventually grew into GURPS), but M!M! was my first color cover for a game, if I remember right. It was a very long time ago!
As an aside, Rick Loomis of Flying Buffalo and I are talking about completing the rewrite and re-release of M!M! It seems to have a small but vocal following though it has been out of print for years. Bear Peters did a first draft rewrite (he was always the most wonderful of M!M! GMs, having overseen the burning of Khosht, which was our “home town” for both T&T and M!M! games) and that’s what I’d be working with. I have to put together the next Citybook for Buffalo before I get to M!M! though.
Absolutely! I loved the game then and still do. I also wrote/edited the Fifth Edition which a lot of people tell me they still play. I don’t play face to face RPGs much any more, I admit. Blizzard’s World of Warcraft puts all the dice rolling and charts into the background, and that makes play immediate and seamless. I like that. That said, my old friend Bear refuses to get into the game because you have to kill the monsters instead of being clever and witty; he says he’ll only play an MMORPG when you can wheedle a dragon out of its gold. He’s right, but the old T&T gang has dispersed to different cities as our lives have unfolded — but I can still play with some of my old friends through WoW, regardless of where we now live. Who I play with has always been more important to me than what game I’m playing.
That said, I find World of Warcraft deeply engaging and interesting not only as my entertainment but also as a game design, an intellectual property, and a fingerpost to the way gaming will change in the future. I’m conducting some academic research, a byproduct of getting my masters degree, looking at what are called the 21st Century learning skills acquired in WoW that may transfer to real life. The core data isn’t coming together as strongly as I expected — it is excellent but not emphatic — but the anecdotal stories accompanying the survey put me in awe, frankly. People are getting a very great deal more out of the game than mindless entertainment, that’s for darn sure.
I did quite a lot for GDW, actually — they were one of my primary clients for many years. As a reader of the science fiction/fantasy genre as a kid, I preferred hard science fiction to fantasy. It wasn’t until I stumbled on Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser than I learned to love fantasy. So I was perfectly happy to illustrate in both genres.
That said, the answer to your question is Yes, SF is harder for me than fantasy. Why? Not because one is mushy in terms of research to create believable images but because I am someone who prefers organic shapes. This is a topic I’ve discussed with other artists, and I find most artists have a decided preference — either for mechanicals or for organics. We can learn to do either, but one takes more effort.
For me, mechanical things are hard. I just don’t “see” them. Moreover, because one of my early influences was Art Nouveau and the likes of Aubrey Beardsley, my work has a strong “graphic design” look. Shape and flow are often where I start a drawing’s idea, so perspective took some retroactive learning on my part — particularly because I was almost entirely self-educated in art. (My bachelor’s was Anthropology.) It is extraordinarily difficult to do convincing mechanicals until you know about perspective and vanishing points, and are willing to use a straightedge or other such tools.
I certainly do. The hobby has done much to shape my life and while I’ve rarely been a high profile “personality,” I have always considered myself a gamer and working professional in the field. The last half-dozen years I was as distant from the hobby as at any time in my life and career. Everything in my life was in transition and almost all of it was exceedingly unpleasant and problematic. Now things have re-stabilized after far too long, and I’m glad to say that working in the hobby again is one of the things I’m enjoying getting back to. It’s not the same as it was before, but I am as excited by what I’m doing now as I was when I started my career at 20-something. It’s not many people who get to do two wonderful things in their lives, and I am incredibly lucky in that respect.
That’s what is so amazing about where I am right now. This is a LONG story, so you’ll have to bear with me.
History:
Twenty, twenty-five years ago, libraries and schools met gamers at the gates with pitchforks and torches. D&D was castigated as the devil’s work, Magic cards made kids into thieves and muggers, and the nascent video games were destroying children’s minds and morals — if you believed all the bad press.
Flash forward to the present, and the gamer generation grew up to become good citizens, attentive parents, desirable employees and respected entrepreneurs. For the last ten years or more, academia has been studying gamers — the video game generation mostly, but the older gamer crowd has gotten some attention also. What they’re finding, with reports released in peer-reviewed journals and at major conferences, is that by and large gaming can be very good for you. It develops a variety of cognitive processing skills; the MMORPGs develop leadership skills without regard to age, gender, or social demographics; the FPS games improve spatial processing skills important to engineers and scientists of various types; many games including RPGs enhance understanding of math, economics, and teamwork; and so much more. Games are strongly social, not isolating, and most people play with friends and family preferentially, whether in the same room or across great distances. The stories I hear that make me smile most are about parents who play games with their sons and daughters. Not only is that smart parenting, it is just plain fun for everyone concerned.
Learning:
Gaming of all kinds encourages reading and literacy even if you consider only printed matter to be “literacy.” There are countless tie-in books, graphic novels, strategy guides and cheat code books about almost every game ever made. The Pokémon cards rely on multiple nested conditional sentences well above the average reading level for the youngest kids playing the game — their motivation to do well in the game raises their motivation to acquire the vocabulary and parse the sentence construction. Several of the New York Times bestselling authors of today learned their craft writing for games first; I edited work by both Michael Stackpole and RA Salvatore in their earliest gaming days, before they had a single novel out. Ray Feist, Margaret Weis, and Kevin Anderson would have had quite different careers but for gaming. Today, fanfiction.net has tens of thousands of stories inspired by games and game worlds (Final Fantasy alone appears to have about 40,000 stories), and that is just one website! The converse is also true; through games you can explore the worlds created by authors like HP Lovecraft, Robert E Howard, and of course JRR Tolkien, to name just a few. Further, if you look into the “21st Century learning skills” as outlined by the influential The Partnership for a 21st Century Skills, then gaming encourages most of the key technological literacies that tomorrow’s citizens and employees will need to succeed.
The 21st C learning skills are of particular interest to me. Right now I am completing a research survey on how some of these skills might be acquired in WoW and their transference to real life. Results are mixed about WoW in particular, in part because a number of respondents are telling me they learned the skills in other games, particularly the RPGs. The positive anecdotal evidence I’m hearing is astounding: people telling me some truly amazing stories about what a positive impact the game has had on their lives: medical techs who feel they keep a more level head under pressure during surgery because of their experience in PvP; how a guild’s best raid leader — the tactician and strategy communicator leading up to 40 players into difficult conditions — turned out to be an 11-year old boy; how many women find themselves guild leaders when they’ve never been “leaders” of anything before. Over and over again, people talk about what deep and abiding friendships they’ve made through the game, friends they have since gotten to know well who they have since met face to face in real life. WoW gets a lot of bad press because it is a highly engaging, immersive game that can eat your free time and all your attention if you don’t have time management skills and understand the need to balance it as part of your whole life — but those also are skills you’ll learn in WoW if you don’t enter the game having them!
Libraries:
What does all this have to do with the American Library Association?
In 2006 I attended the first ALA Techsource Symposium on games, learning and libraries. I only became aware that games were of interest to libraries the year before, when I started on the road to getting my MLS. My mentor encouraged me to combine the two parts of my life. I’d been working 16 years in libraries already, as a part time paraprofessional — paralibrarian, we’re now being called — while making most of my living doing freelance for the game industry. Freelancing has its financial ups and downs, and my library system in Phoenix was very flexible if I needed free time to devote to a major project (as when I took a 3-month leave of absence to write the T&T computer game for New World Computing.)
I only remembered the BADD old days and was frankly astonished how much had changed. The Techsource Symposium opened my eyes to how far libraries had come, and I got to meet some of those leading the change, visionaries like Jenny Levine and Eli Neiburger and Beth Gallaway. I told Jenny how very impressed I was, and to let me know if there was ever anything I could do for her or for ALA since I still had contacts in the game industry and a deep understanding of the profession.
To my surprise, she took me up on it. In March of 2008 she and Dale Lipschultz asked if I’d like to work with a dozen others as part of the “grant experts team” being formed to carry out a two-year, million dollar “Libraries, Literacy, and Gaming” grant funded by the Verizon Foundation. Our job was to look at what the best libraries were already doing with gaming in the library, and then fund 10 new libraries to do new or expanded gaming programs. We put together a “best practices” toolkit that libraries everywhere could use, and the 10 funded libraries would let us “playtest,” refine and expand the toolkit too.
The team received 390 eligible requests for grant monies when the Request For Proposal went out. It was overwhelming. We had every kind of library coming forward — public, academic, and school libraries, from small towns, large urban areas, tribal libraries, and everything in between. The best 10% were given to the grants team to review — I read 10 proposals myself — and it broke my heart to know that only 10 libraries out of that 390 could be funded. Some were just amazing. As I write this, the winning libraries have been selected and informed, but not yet publicly announced. I am eager to see what has been chosen. I hope that there are ways to acknowledge and perhaps adapt some of the ideas of gaming librarians whose requests didn’t get funded. The energy, drive, and innovation I read in just the 10 proposals I saw were enough to rock me back on my heels.
And coming full circle:
My eyes and hands are getting old, and doing art as much as I used to is growing ever more difficult. I’m a huge adopter of Web 2.0 but not for art, where I’ve found the learning curve just too steep. I still paint and draw largely by hand, although I’m passingly conversant with things like Photoshop and other graphic programs. The fact that I can bring my knowledge of the industry and my love of games and gaming to the service of libraries, which I also have loved for decades, makes an amazingly satisfying combination as I look to the future.
For the games industry itself, I’m looking to do more writing and editing, as well as what art jobs cross my path — I can’t give it up entirely and don’t want to! — and I’m also working assertively on fiction writing which I mostly had to abandon in past years, although I expected to be a novelist long before I ever achieved recognition for my artwork. Sometimes life takes you on unusual paths and I’ve always been one to follow my nose to the projects and places that interest me the most. I’ve been lucky enough to find people willing to pay me to do what I love. There could be no better life, I think.
Or, as Michael Stephens said (of TametheWeb.com): “Learn to Learn, Adapt to Change, Scan the Horizon, Be Curious, & Bring your Heart with You.“. Words to live by, whatever your profession.
James Maliszewski started roleplaying in the late Fall of 1979, when he opened up a copy of the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set edited by Dr. J. Eric Holmes originally purchased for his father. More than 30 years later, he’s still playing.
Visit James Maliszewski’s website:
Grognardia: An exploration of the history and traditions of the hobby.
Liz Danforth is an artist, writer, and game developer. Her fantastic art and editing skills are a prime shaper of Tunnels & Trolls.
Visit Liz Danforth’s website:
Oakheart at LizDanforth.com
Trollish History
As all Tunnels & Trolls players should know, Ken St Andre is the man responsible for the game, or as the Runequest second edition puts it the man who reopened pandoras box (dedications). He very kindly responded to some questions that I put forward to him. As you may or may not know, he also produces his own fanzine, called TnT, it is produced by photocopy (as is DI) and usually costs $1 per issue, although nowadays he is publishing double and triple issues, the current one when I heard were issues 19-21 which include the Gauntlet of Doom GM adventure and the comments caused by the previous issue which dealt with Tunnels & Trolls as a super hero FRP. So anyway! Onward…
– Garen Ewing.
Demon Issue: Have you always been interested in Fantasy?
Ken St Andre: Yes, when I was a kid of 13 or so I discovered a library that had some of the old Tarzan books in it. I think what got me started on fantasy forever was reading Tarzan and the Ant Men. In the next year or so I discovered cheap copies of some of the Tarzan books published by Grosset and Dunlap for only $1.50 each. Every penny I earned went towards buying these books. At the same time I was already into comics, the more fantastic the better, and had quite a good Tarzan collection. A couple of years later in high school I discovered Conan in some of the Gnome press editions, and after reading those, I was hooked on fantasy forever. Today I have a huge collection of fantasy/adventure books, and I very much doubt that you could name any major fantasy hero that I haven’t read or collected.
DI: Did you have any heroes that inspired T&T?
KSA: Yes. My conception of the T&T world was based on The Lord of The Rings as it would have been done by Marvel Comics in 1974 with Conan, Elric, the Gray Mouser and a host of badguys thrown in.
DI: How long did it take to develop the T&T system?
KSA: After I got the initial idea, it took me five days to write the first draft of what became T&T. After a bit of playtesting with my friends, it took a month to type up the first edition and get it illustrated. That was April 1975. T&T has never stopped growing and changing since then, though many of the changes have come from other people. The game as it currently exists in the 5th and mythical 6th edition owes an awful lot to everyone who liked it well enough to make it their own.
DI: Did you enjoy working on T&T?
KSA: I did the first draft in a white heat of inspiration. I have always enjoyed the game, and sometimes sit around rereading the rules just to luxuriate my own writing. I hope it’s fun to read for others too.
DI: Did you ever feel like giving up?
KSA: No. T&T may well turn out to be the most important thing I do in this life, and the enthusiasm that the game has generated among others, and the friends it has won for me from all over the world, help keep my interest at a high level.
DI: Did your ideas come from any other role playing games?
KSA: When T&T was first written back in April 1975 the only other role playing game that existed was the first edition of Dungeons and Dragons, which I had seen exactly once. Great idea… lousy execution; hence my decision to write my own FRP game. I remember that I was determined to keep it simple, amusing and easy to play with commonly available equipment. In those days I didn’t know any place where a person could buy dice. I got mine from Monopoly sets and Yahtzee. I’ll admit that I was influenced a bit by the early D&D, but not nearly as much as some people who came after me… like Hargrave’s Arduin for example.
DI: Who helped most with T&T?
KSA: The people who helped with T&T are all credited in the rules. You see their names on the charts dedications etc… But I’ll list them one more time in order of appearance. Mark Antony, Steve McAllister, James Peters, Greg Brown, Rob Carver and Liz Danforth. Then, too, I do owe Rick Loomis a lot for publishing and distributing it, and for writing the first solitaire Buffalo Castle.
DI: Did you encounter any amusing episodes during the systems development?
KSA: More than I can count or remember. The first time we ever played the game, I strewed the floor of the exit room in Gristlegrim with thousands of uncut diamonds. Talk about getting rich in a hurry! When I needed illustrations for the first edition, Mark and I went over to the college apartment of the only artist I knew, Rob Carver, and told him we weren’t leaving until we got enough pictures to fill the booklet. And we didn’t either. It was a fun afternoon, brainstorming out illo ideas, and watching Rob create them on the spot. Then there’s the classic dungeon delving joke… Orc with arrow through head laughing and saying , “You missed all my vital organs.” This developed out of an adventure I ran in Gristlegrim for Rob and several others. At one point I jumped the delvers with a monstrous cave lion, and they shot it with bows and arrows, but did not kill it. Rob was upset… he figured that lion should have died. I suggested that maybe he didn’t hit any vital organs. He growled. The next day he gave me the cartoon. In the earliest days we called the game Dungeons and Dragons, but when I went to publish my own first edition, I knew I couldn’t use that name. So I came up with a better name… Tunnels and Troglodytes… which was promptly hooted out of the house by my players. I think it was Bear Peters who said it should be Tunnels and Trolls, whose name was chosen by acclamation.
DI: How involved are you now with Tunnels & Trolls?
KSA: I’m very involved at a private level, but in reality, the fate of the game has depended almost entirely on Rick Loomis, Chris Harvey, Mike Stackpole and Liz Danforth for the last five years or so. Since I don’t work for Flying Buffalo, and never have, I’m usually not on the scene when gaming decisions are made. The 5th edition for example owes much of it’s contents to Liz Danforth, the FBI editor in 1979, who asked me to rewrite the rules, and who rewrote them with my permission when I had done all I could.
DI: Do you do much role playing now?
KSA: Unfortunately, no. My old gang of players has broken up, and I don’t get many chances. I’d like to role play more, but only manage it at special occasions or at gaming or SF conventions.
DI: What about Sorcerers Apprentice?
KSA: The magazine was originally my idea, and I was the managing editor for the first six issues. With my contacts in the SF world I was able to get articles and stories for it, mostly by asking people to contribute. Liz Danforth was production editor, and actually did the work that made sure the magazine was produced. After a while, Rick Loomis got smart, and made her the managing editor as well as production. This saved FBI $100 an issue since he didn’t have to pay me anymore. Sorcerers Apprentice has not been published for a couple of years now, but it was recently acquired by Bob Liddil who is planning to put out his first issue sometime in early 1986, maybe April. Or you might ask me about back issues. I have a few extras that I can sell off, but I warn you they are expensive.
DI: Do you have any hints for the GM?
KSA: Keep the game moving along. Keep it fun for the players. Play by the rule that if they say something, then they’ve done it.
DI: Finally, how do you feel about the way T&T has turned out?
KSA: I wish it had gotten some mass distribution and a good computer version of the game earlier. I’m very disappointed with the Coleco fiasco… if they had done the job right Tunnels and Trolls could have been the major hit that the Ultima games are. Still on the whole, T&T has given me thousands of hours of fun, and made me some money also. I’ll always love the game, and a few special people will always support it. As long as I keep my interest, I don’t think the game will completely die, it may change but it won’t die…
Garen Ewing is an illustrator, comic strip writer, artist and author of The Rainbow Orchid.
Visit Garen Ewing’s websites:
www.GarenEwing.co.uk
H‘aaarrrggghhh!
Khenn Arrth
Visit the Trollgod‘s Blog
Trollish History
In a way it is all the fault of Steven McAllister, he whose name is immortalized in the Peters-McAllister chart in Tunnels & Trolls. We had only been experimenting with the most basic rules for a couple of weeks when he rejected the notion of Monster Ratings and started to individualize the creatures in his dungeons. The first result of such a fairness policy was the chart that regularized the creation of Elves, Dwarves, Fairies, Hobbits, Trolls, Orcs, Giants, etc.
After that, the very nature of Tunnels & Trolls, and my own sense of fair play, made the development of Monsters! Monsters! inevitable. For a fair description of how the game actually arose I refer you to my introduction in Monsters! Monsters! It only remains to say that M!M! already existed in rough form as early as November 1975, and that Howard Thompson had agreed to print it as early as January 1976.
This article really has to be a designer’s explanation of two games in one, because I can’t really talk about the guiding principles of M!M! without actually talking about T & T at the same time. T & T started as a revolt against needless complexity in Dungeons and Dragons. I don’t like 4 and 22 and 20 sided dice. Such polyhedrals are difficult for the average person to acquire and are also quite expensive. (Since I was unemployed at the time, I was strongly opposed to anything that inflated the price of gaming, and on strictly anti-inflationary principle I still oppose the kind of elaborate equipment that raises the cost of my gaming. I am probably a minority of one opposing the use of miniatures in fantasy gaming, preferring the picture in my own imagination to a piece of painted plastic every time.) So guiding principle number 1 was: whenever dice were needed they would be the conventional 6-sided cubes that anyone could go down to the corner drugstore and acquire.
The next thing I wanted to do was make a player-character’s dice created attributes directly applicable to the play of the game. Thus, heavier weapons required greater individual strength to wield them. When using magic, higher level spells are equivalent to heavier, more powerful weapons, and so, required more strength to cast them. What is the point of giving a character a Constitution rating if you’re not going to use it for anything? So I defined Constitution as how much damage it took to kill a person. Luck has always played an important part in my own life, and from my extensive reading in the field of heroic fantasy (and just plain history) it has always seemed that luck was a major factor in the success of any kind of hero. Logically, when one is in a situation where nothing else can help, luck can still come through and save your neck. Thus, a character’s luck became the sole basis for Saving Rolls (which are used when a character needs a chance to save himself from something unpleasant). Here I must disagree with something Steve Jackson changed in the rules of M!M! On page 29 there is a discussion of Saving Rolls, and there is a column labeled minimum roll required. Since a character’s likelihood of making its Saving Roll is meant to depend solely upon its luckiness, the minimum saving roll required would always remain the same. I like the number 5 on 2 dice because it is truly a minimum, very easy to make but yet not automatic. I have no hassle with those who say 5 is too easy and move the number up to 7. The reason for putting a minimum on Saving rolls in the first place was so they wouldn’t become automatic (Say you have a Gremlin with luck of 24. 20 minus 24 = -4. He would automatically make all first and second level Saying Rolls, but that’s not fair, because even the best of luck fails sometimes.). On the other hand it is not easy (even when doubles add and roll again) to make a 9 or an 11 on demand. It also unfairly penalizes characters who have built up their luck rating to a fairly high level. The Saving Roll for a character with a Luck of 28 should be 7 on the fourth level of difficulty, not 11. The other attributes also have a direct bearing on the play of the game. A snollygoster with a dexterity of 3 will not turn into a deadly missile weapon fighter.
Another very important aspect of the design of MIM! is the premise that characters who manage to survive will be able to improve themselves. Personal growth is most of the incentive to continue playing the game. Individual ratings may get to incredibly high levels by the standards of other game like D & D, but within the T & T/M!M! universe. No matter how high ratings in an attribute get, they will be internally consistent. Thus, while it is rare to have a human character with a gigantic strength of 60, it is not impossible, and granting that there was such a character, the extra advantages that it derives from such superhuman power are quite reasonable. One of the pitfalls of this kind of open-ended attribute system is the incredibly generous or thoughtless game master who paves his tunnel complexes and city streets with diamonds and enchanted doodads that double all attributes without the character really doing any work except to pick up the goodies. This becomes a form of monster creation all its own, and can lead to ridiculousness, with gremlins or hobbits more powerful than any 3 giants. However, such problems tend to be self-correcting. Game Masters have the right to forbid the use of such absurd characters, or alternately the whole game turns into something done purely for laughs, and everyone has such a good time being silly that you don’t mind the absurdity of it all. Personally, it is my belief that magical benefits should be hard to come by, both for humans and monsters, which will then limit attribute growth to what could reasonably result from a character’s efforts to improve itself.
The thing that pleases me the most about T & T and M!M! is the sheer open-endedness of it. I try very hard to get the players deeply involved in their own intensely personal creative. Efforts. For T & T you are expected to design at least one tunnel complex; for M!M!, I really expect the players to design their own city. That is a lot of work, but the rewards are tremendous . . . and educational. When you get into city planning, the details of how this place could really work, you will learn a tremendous amount about what life must have been like in the Middle Ages. If you want to run a city of 20,000 people, you have to provide a way to feed them, a reason for 20,000 people to be in one place, a world or at least a nation for them to be a part of, and dozens (or hundreds) of other details. Once the geography is taken care of, you must be ready to evoke the personality of potentially any one of the 20,000 inhabitants. Not everyone the invading monsters will run into in this city is going to be a fearless member of the guard who bravely leaps up and attacks every troll he sees. Probably the most fun I ever had creating characters in Kosht was the time the troll tore down an outer wall of a brothel near the city wall and found a houseful of women, one or two of whom were actually good-looking. For the rest of the trip I amused the players by having these captive whores try to seduce the more humanoid monsters, all the while demanding the most outrageous fees.
In fact, the possibilities for invention are endless. In M!M! we give you 52 different varieties of monster, but that is not to imply that you are limited to those monsters in the glossary. A thorough examination of the monsters’ attributes table will give you a good idea of how to go about creating the monster of your choice. Suppose you wish to have a were-eagle. You can have it. Imagine the dismay of a city guardsman who thinks he has apprehended a normal thief who turns into an eagle right before his popping eyes. Let us say you are fond of dinosaurs. There is no reason why you can’t have T. Rex running rampant. No IQ to speak of, and very little dexterity, but strength right up there with a dragon and a constitution to match. Say Tolkien is not your favorite author- -you don’t care about Elves. Dwarves, Orcs, and Hobbits. Instead. you dig the Arabian Nights and would rather have an Afrit, or a man-eating camel. All you have to do is persuade your friendly local game master to let you ransack the place with a genie. Just don’t be surprised when a corps of 7th level wizards show up to greet you, just happening to be in town for a wizard’s convention that weekend. Essentially this is what Liz did in painting the front cover, invented her own brand new monsters — the green beastie — right on the spot. And we did the same thing with the Shadowjack, inventing, as a type, a character who had been an individual in a Zelazny novel.
I have tried to avoid repeating information about the game actually given in the rules for M!M! or T & T. I haven’t said much about why magic is the way it is, or how the combat system works. For those who read the rules, the logic and the problems are apparent. I would like to note that there really should be an asterisk on the “Take that you fiend!” spell, the effect being to multiply the caster’s IQ by the level the spell is cast on.
I’d like to say a few words about the problems of producing this kind of role-playing head game. It looks easy. If you are an average reader you can get through the rules of M!M! in about half an hour. But it is like writing a salable story in that one must he careful in what one says. The object in M!M! has been to give all the information necessary to set up and play the game without going on in boring length on any one thing. I have also tried to he amusing about it, and Steve Jackson seems to have felt the same. The whole thing has been proofread at least a dozen times to try and eliminate contradictions between something explained one way on page 8 and completely different on page 32. Last, and most difficult, is the task of getting your artist to come forth with material to bring animation to what starts as a bunch of abstract ideas. I want to give pounds and buckets of credit to Liz Danforth whose graphics are, in my opinion, easily the finest part of the whole M!M! production. Even though I had to spend all my spare time cajoling her to draw, offer incentives like cash out of my pocket and a cut of the profits forever, and almost camp in her living room at times to keep her brushes to the easel, this game never would have seen the life of print without her artwork behind it. My advice to other game designers is make friends with as many fabulous artists as you can, and when you’re ready to publish, include is much art as you can get.
Space Gamer/Fantasy Gamer The Magazine of Free-Style Role-Play.
Visit the Space Gamer/Fantasy Gamer website:
Space Gamer/Fantasy Gamer
Steve Jackson Games Founded in 1980, publishes books, games, and magazines for game fans.
Visit the Steve Jackson Games website:
Steve Jackson Games
H‘aaarrrggghhh!
Khenn Arrth
Visit the Trollgod‘s Blog
Trollish History
I want to give you some idea of the history of Tunnels and Trolls, and of how it is played, and what it takes. And, since I am the inventor, I wanted to make a few critical comments that I haven’t had a chance to express elsewhere.
In early 1975 I began to hear about a new game called Dungeons & Dragons, but since Phoenix, Arizona is somewhat of a backwater, it was April before I was even able to see the rules for D & D. After examining them carefully, and not understanding them very well at all, I threw up my hands, yelled phooey! and vowed to invent my own game, something simpler that I could understand. It had to be something that would avoid all the things I thought were wrong with D & D, notably the use of polyhedral 12 and 20 sided dice. (Before going any further with this history, though, I wish to give the inventors of D & D all the credit they deserve for inventing the method of describing characters by die rolls in terms of attributes. It was a tremendous breakthrough in gaming, and I am eternally grateful for the idea. However, once discovered, it is like the principle of the lever – something that rightfully belongs to everyone. Thank you, Gygax and Arneson, for setting my mind to running in that direction.) In about a week I had come up with something, which I immediately tried on my friends. They loved it, and they suggested improvements. In about 2 weeks T & T had spread to at least a dozen people around town, and it was much too difficult to go on making xerox copies of the rules for people who wanted to play. So I promised them that I would get the game printed up so that everyone could have a copy. It took about 2½ months to get the thing typed up in camera-ready copy, and getting some good artwork to illustrate it was even more difficult. I only knew one artist, a very talented but indolent fellow named Rob Carver, but finally he agreed to do some things for me. And it’s a good thing that he did, because his graphics illuminated what would have been a rather humdrum set of instructions. The first edition was printed at Arizona State University in 100 copies at a cost of $65.00 which was a lot of money to me then as I was totally unemployed, and the U.S. was deep in the recession. However, it wasn’t too hard to dispose of 100 copies. At the time of writing, Flying Buffalo have probably sold 5000 or more copies of T & T, and it is a steady money-maker for them. I think my biggest stroke of luck was in being near a professional game company that was willing to take a gamble on something new.
Having once tasted success, of course, I didn’t stop there. And so was born the sequel to Tunnels and Trolls, which has just been published by Metagaming, Inc. in Austin, Texas – MONSTERS! MONSTERS! It is the inverse of Tunnels and Trolls; instead of having human protagonists who go down into the tunnels in search of easy money and death-prone monsters, you have monster protagonists who invade the world of men to wreak destruction and take revenge on their human foes. It is a lot of fun, and is also good practice in seeing life from the other fellow’s point of view.
But first, for those of you who have not yet tried fantasy gaming, a word of explanation is in order. Tunnels and Trolls is a fantasy role-playing game of a type where the action takes place not on some map-board, but exclusively in your head. You play not with whole armies or nations, but with one or two invented characters, who, in time, come to have their own unique personalities. The setting is a world of imagination carefully and lovingly constructed by another player called the Game, or, Dungeon Master. The immediate object is to stay alive in a hostile environment (usually one that is populated with all sorts of hideous monsters and insidious traps). Your secondary objectives are to collect as much treasure as you can, and also to accumulate experience points. If you are successful, your player-character will eventually improve himself into some sort of demi-god or super-hero. If you fail, the character usually dies, and you can start all over again. The environment chosen for these mental adventures is most commonly a tunnel complex, but may be if the Game Master is inventive enough, a forest, a jungle, a throbbing metropolis, or an alien world entirely.
Primarily, the whole game of Tunnels and Trolls is built around the creation of the characters that you play with. We define a character, call him Ugluk, by saying he has certain attributes which can be assigned a numerical value. The greater the value of the attribute, the better it is for the character. We then define these attributes as Strength, Intelligence, Luck, Constitution, Dexterity, and Charisma. You roll 3 ordinary six-sided dice once for each attribute and record the totals. The lowest possible total is a 3 (which is terrible indeed) and the highest is 18 (which is damn good). Each of these ratings tells something about the character. Strength is a measure of how much weight a character can carry, and of how heavy a weapon he can use in combat. (Heavier weapons do more damage and thus are an advantage to the character who can use them.) Intelligence is used to determine whether you are smart enough to use magic, how many languages you can speak, and whether the character is supposedly smart enough to figure out certain traps or puzzles the Game Master may set for him. Luck is just what it says – a measure of how well you do in situations where individual good fortune is the most important thing. Constitution is a measure of how much punishment ·you can take before you die from your wounds. Dexterity is a measure of skill; for example, it serves as a relative standard of marksmanship in archery. Charisma is basically a criterion of personal attractiveness, sex appeal, etc. Where Tunnels and Trolls differs importantly from Dungeons and Dragons is in the fact that the attributes, once established, are not fixed for all time, but can be modified in a manner which causes steady fluctuation by magic, combat, changing levels, or other unusual circumstances. Generally, the tendency is for all attributes to steadily (or by leaps and bounds) improve if the character manages to live through several individual games.
Of course, it is all much more complicated than the paragraphs above imply. First, there are 3 types of characters: warriors, modelled after Conan the Cimmerian; magicians, modelled after Gandalf the Gray; and rogues modelled after the Gray Mouser. Then, it is also possible to create such non-human beings as Elves, Dwarves, Fairies, Trolls, Giants, etc., etc. Then one needs to arm the character with the appropriate weapons. The T & T rulebook has some 6 pages of medieval weapons charts. (Though there is no especial reason why a game like T & T need be medieval in concept – Flying Buffalo just put my latest game, STARFARING, which applies T & T principles to interstellar exploration, on the market – that kind of primitive fantasy is what appeals to me most.)
After more than a year and a half of intimate involvement with Tunnels & Trolls, my biggest criticism of it is that it is still too much like Dungeons & Dragons. Though there are many differences between the two games – say the differences between rugby and soccer – yet they are really very similar. The whole concept of experience points and the number of levels possible (17) was almost exactly the same as the system used in D & D. Also, many of the magical spells available to human magicians are just copies of spells that had previously been invented for D & D. There is difference enough in application and description so that you couldn’t call it plagiarism (and then much of what is common to both D & D and T & T is found in older fantasy material such as the general folk-lore of Europe) but still I must admit that D & D was a great influence on me back when I was first designing the game. I regret that now, and wish there were some way to widen the gap between the two games. You can bet that my next game, which is in the design stages now, will be vastly different, even though the same principles; namely role-playing, characters with dice-created attributes, a world in which magic works, and simplicity of equipment needed to play the game will remain the same.
In appraising Tunnels and Trolls I would say it is a good bet for people who would like to get into fantasy gaming at an elementary level for a very reasonable cost. It is not the Mercedes of fantasy games, but like a good dependable Ford, it will get you around very well as long as your imaginative fuel holds out.
Many thanks to Eric Solomon, the publisher of Games and Puzzles Magazine for allowing me to reproduce this article.
Visit Eric Solomon’s homepage
H‘aaarrrggghhh!
Khenn Arrth
Visit the Trollgod‘s Blog
And many thank to James Corwin St. Andre (Corencio) for providing me with the article.
Trollish History
In the beginning…
Greetings! I want to thank the editors of White Dwarf for providing this opportunity to get together with you. I intend to write one or more essays for this magazine that are a cross between gaming column, an article, an editorial, and a personal chat. In the future, if this series lasts for long, I’d like to think we’re all sitting around a blazing fire eating popcorn and talking about whatever interests us.
First, I’d like to describe myself a bit so you can feel that you know me. I am 34 years old. I live in Phoenix, Arizona with my wife Cathy and daughter Jillian Charmaine. Gaming is not my major source of income – T&T and the other things I have done have not made me rich. In my everyday mundane identity, I am a lowly cataloguer for a great metropolitan library system (Phoenix Public).
I own a house in an older section of town. It has a huge ill-kept lawn with a giant pine tree in the back. The popular image of Phoenix as the capital of Arizona is probably of stinking desert with sage brush growing on the streets, cowboys swaggering in and out of the bars, and coyotes howling to the moon every evening. Although it does get to be 120 degrees Fahrenheit here every summer, you can forget the rest of the image. Irrigation has made Phoenix surprisingly green, and air-conditioning makes it very comfortable. The only coyotes I know about are in the zoo, though my neighbour’s dog seems to have a wild streak in him – Spot has certainly awakened me in the wee hours with his howling often enough. Behind my house is a large redwood room stuffed with hundreds of books belonging to me and my wife. Pride of place goes to my collection of Robert E. Howard, J R R Tolkien, King Arthur material, and books about the pre-Columbian civilations of America, notably Aztecs, Toltecs, and Mayans. I have a moderately huge collection of science fiction, fantasy, mythology, folklore, ancient history, comic books, fanzines, and amateur publications of all sorts. There are several shelves full of games. The fantasy role-playing games that I keep on hand are: Tunnels & Trolls (of course – both American and English editions), Monsters! Monsters! RuneQuest, Traveller, Stormbringer, The Fantasy Trip, Empire of the Petal Throne, Space Opera, Villains and Vigilantes, Land of the Rising Sun, Bushido, the Thieves Guild stuff, and the old Arduin trilogy. Conspicuous by its absence is any form of D&D or AD&D. People often ask me if I play D&D. The answer is no. I have only the vaguest idea of the actual mechanics of the other game system. Games that I like to play and sometimes do are T&T, Runequest, Stormbringer, Traveller, and Villains and Vigilantes. There isn’t time to play and understand everything.
People often ask me what is the difference between Dungeons & Dragons and Tunnels & Trolls, assuming that my game is just a poor man’s variant of D&D. The difference is basically one of viewpoint between E Gary Gygax and myself. T&T was deliberately designed to be simpler in its basic concepts and game mechanics, less expensive, faster to play, and more whimsical. T&T is often blasted because the spell names such as take-that-you-fiend! or poor baby sound silly, but I feel it is better to sound silly than to be dull. Spell names like fireball and heal don’t show much imagination, do they?
Back in December of 1974 I began to hear rumour of this game called Dungeons & Dragons. It sounded fabulous – something that every true fantasy lover would need to own and play. In April of 1975 I finally saw a copy of D&D. A couple of hours later I put down the D&D rulebooks (and I have never looked at D&D rules again) and said “What a great idea! What a lousy execution! Nobody can play this. I’ll write my own rules that my friends and I can play.” And I stalked out into the night, went home, sat down and started writing. One thing I decided at the beginning was that I didn’t need funny many-sided dice – good old six-siders would do. Another thing – the game didn’t need to be dominated by some pseudo-Christian religion. Out with clerics! There were a lot of decisions made rebelling against what I remembered of the D&D rules. Who needs hit points – Constitution will do. At the end of my first day of writing the two systems were already radically different.
In two days I had produced a dozen pages of notes towards a rule system – there was no thought of making something to sell and compete with D&D. I just wanted something I could play with my friends. I called over Steve McAllister, Bear Peters, and Mark Antony, showed them how to roll up characters and opened the gates of Gristlegrim for them. The first thing that happened was a ghostly hand grabbed the leading character and dragged him into a hole, eventually dumping him into a cell with an amorous lady troll. Fortunately for him, his comrades leaped into the hole and got there in time to rescue him. The players had numerous other adventures – I killed half of them by dropping the roof of the tunnel on them. I made them all wealthy by letting them exit through a room whose floor was strewn with uncut diamonds. That was incredibly, extravagantly generous, but I had no models to go by back in 1975. They went ape. They loved the game. Photocopies of my original hand-written rules began to proliferate with people always begging for more. Others began throwing in their ideas. It didn’t take more than a week for McAllister to come up with as many different spell names and powers as possible. I got Rob Carver and Mark Antony – the only artists I knew at the time – to do some illustrations for me. The name Tunnels & Trolls was chosen by a popular vote at a meeting of people who were playing the game. Everybody had been calling it Dungeons & Dragons though we knew it wasn’t really. I wanted to call it Tunnels & Troglodytes, but I was shouted down overwhelmingly.
By mid-June I had a 41-page book of rules and Robin Carver had given me a couple of pieces of art to use for the covers. I took it all to the print shop of Arizona State University and laid out $60.00 to get them to do 100 copies by photo-offset. That was a lot of money for me at the time, considering that I had been unemployed for half a year and was living off my wife’s salary. The day after I got it to the printer, Cathy and I went on vacation to Lake Tahoe, San Francisco, and parts in between. Steve McAllister was left with the responsibility of picking up the finished product, collating it, and getting copies to all our friends who wanted some at $2.00 per copy. When next I saw him and Tunnels & Trolls it was the 4th of July in Oakland at the Hotel Leamington at the WesterCon science fiction convention. I didn’t have a room there and was trying to stay awake for 3 days. Steve had brought a few extra copies with him, to show me, and to try and sell some at the convention. We sold about 4 copies. It was at this same convention that my path first crossed Liz Danforth – I saw her and some of her art, never dreaming that within a few months she was going to become one of the most important elements in the continuing evolution of T&T.
As it turned out, I couldn’t sell 100 copies of T&T. My friends took about 30 or 40 copies and I got my printing costs back. But in November I met Rick Loomis at TusCon I, a small science fiction convention in Tuscon, Arizona. He told me about his game company, Flying Buffalo and I told him about T&T. I asked him if he’d try selling it for me on commission – after all I already had coast-to-coast sales – one friend in Florida and 4 sales at Oakland. Rick took the game with him – my 60 remaining copies – to a few conventions and quickly sold out. At $2.00 a copy it was 5 times less expensive than D&D. It occurred to him that there could be money in this fantasy gaming and he came back and made me an offer to produce and distribute T&T. It was settled with a handshake, and the second fantasy role-playing game was launched.
The current fifth edition is almost completely different from the original first edition, but the philosophy of play has never changed, nor has my intention to bring you players the best possible game for the least amount of cost. New things continue to happen and I’m beginning to think that a 6th edition is inevitable. Right now I can only advise you to subscribe to Sorcerer’s Apprentice if you want to find out what the new developments are for T&T. And just possibly White Dwarf. If you wish to do your own T&T articles, dungeon designs, variants, commentary, what-have-you, now is the time to send such material to White Dwarf. They have told me that they are interested in seeing and publishing more T&T material, but the truth is, I, Mike Stackpole, Liz Danforth and most of my friends are too busy to try and produce a lot of new material for White Dwarf. This is your chance. After all, it really is your game.
If you can write to me, I’m always interested in comments from players, though I don’t promise to return all letters received – that could mean constant letter-writing and no time for design work (and I have lots of projects I’m working on). You can reach me through the editors of White Dwarf, or by writing to Flying Buffalo, or by writing to me directly …[via Trollhalla]…
-Best,
Ken St Andre
April/May 1982
Reproduced by kind permission of Games Workshop
Visit the Games Workshop website.
H‘aaarrrggghhh!
Khenn Arrth
Visit the Trollgod‘s Blog
Game Play
Part one of a very Trollish podcast has been published on (the) line:
https://armchairadventurerblog.com/2016/08/14/episode-7-part-1-tunnels-and-trolls-rpg/
…underrated thing of genius…
…Have a day off, play some Tunnels & Trolls and have some fun…