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Tunnels and Trolls

Tunnels and Trolls is a fantasy role-playing game first released in 1975. It was designed by Ken St. Andre. more...

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Published by Flying Buffalo, it was developed to be an alternative to Dungeons & Dragons, aimed particularly at solitaire and play-by-mail gameplay. In the early 1990s a computer version (Crusaders of Khazan) was put out which embodied many of the favorite old solo modules, but which (in a fore-shadowing of modern computer role-playing game production) was buggy and somewhat difficult to play.

Tunnels and Trolls is a simple game that is rich in detail, easy to play and has a sense of humour. It was one of the very earliest roleplaying games from the late 1970s and was greatly influential on later systems. The game introduced the idea of playing a variety of character types including non-human species, using a core character generation system, such that non humans were given greater strength or lower intelligence but still operated as any human in systematic terms. This led to players rapidly playing a wide range of non human characters in a pluralist setting. (A simpler system for monsters ran in parallel and most solitaire adventures used this simpler system). The game also introduced the idea that armour — which had been merged with defence in Dungeons & Dragons, making a character harder to hit — actually absorbed damage rather than reducing the danger of being hit. The game also published one of the earliest spell point systems, where magic is powered by mana points rather than memory slots derived from level, as in Dungeons and Dragons. The game was greatly influential on other early games such as RuneQuest, and Ken St. Andre went on to author the Basic Role-Playing game Stormbringer for Chaosium.

Tunnels and Trolls underwent several modifications between 1975 and 1983 when the definitive 5th edition of the rules was published. This edition was also translated and published abroad in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Finland, and Japan, and it entered these markets before Dungeons & Dragons did in most cases. (It didn't make more money, however.) In 2005, Flying Buffalo updated the 5th edition rules with a 5.5 publication that added about 40 pages of extra material to the end of the rules. During the same year, Fiery Dragon Productions of Canada produced a 30th anniversary edition under license in a tin box complete with CD, map, and monster counters, and not one, but two new versions of the rules. Ken used the opportunity to extensively update the style of play and introduce new role-playing concepts, such as character level being determined by character attribute statistics instead of by arbitrary numbers of experience points.

The game requires only standard six-sided dice, but can need quite a lot of them. The phrase "buckets of dice" has often been used to describe how many a high-level campaign requires.