Tunnels and Trolls
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Tunnels and Trolls is a role-playing game that was first released in 1975. It was designed by Ken St. Andre.
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 1980s 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 with 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 humans as player characters, 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 and Dragons actually absorbed damage rather than reduced 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 BRP game Stormbringer for Chaosium.
The only polyhedral dice you need to play Tunnels and Trolls are six-sided dice, however you 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.
External links
- Flying Buffalo (http://www.flyingbuffalo.com/)
- Flying Buffalo's Tunnels & Trolls page (http://www.flyingbuffalo.com/tandt.htm)
- A Tunnels and Trolls wiki (http://thor.acedragon.co.uk/tntwiki)it:Tunnels and trolls