Episode: 2276
Title: HPR2276: Tunnels and Trolls and Dungeon Delvers
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2276/hpr2276.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 00:45:01

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This is HBR episode 2,276 entitled, Tunnels and Trolls and Dungeon Velvers, and is part
of the series' tabletop gaming.
It is hosted by Klaatu and is about 31 minutes long and carries a clean flag.
The summary is Klaatu talks about Tunnels and Trolls solo RPG series and Dungeon Velvers.
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Hi everyone, this is Klaatu.
You're listening to Hacker Public Radio.
This episode is a continuation of my tabletop gaming series and in fact is part of the sub-series
within that on game books.
Game books, as I mentioned in the previous episode on Loan Wolf, are books that provide
a scripted game master for solo gameplay.
That means that instead of having at least two people to play an RPG that is a player
and a game master, you only need one.
So that's kind of an advantage and certainly I think when these game books were really big
back in the 80s, there was a need for that because if you were an RPG nerd
and you didn't have at least again two people to set up a game with,
then you couldn't have had a computer or you may have had a computer
but it wouldn't play a very detailed video game.
I mean it might, it kind of depends because the text adventure has existed.
I reckon but there was still a need for that kind of experience outside of a computer
because video games hadn't really gotten to the Baldur's Gate level quite yet.
So game books, I've been kind of exploring both historical and new
and you might not even think that there have been new game books around
because now we've got video games, right?
So who needs silly old solo RPG adventures anymore?
If you want that, you just download an app on your Android phone and play it.
And that might be true that we have more selection but the game books have actually been a lot of fun
and I've been trying, as many as I can really fit into my schedule
because it's a great way to relax and it's a great thing to take with you somewhere
because it looks like if you're going to a place that you don't want to have to go to,
it looks like you're just reading something or looking at a calendar,
like your diary, your agenda, whatever you call it,
or you look like you're studying some subject and really you're playing an RPG game.
As long as you're not rolling dice, that's another good reason not to have a physical dice
because that's kind of the giveaway.
But yeah, game books are a clever way to not pay attention to the world around you
and to have a lot of fun in an imaginary world.
So the game book that I want to talk about today, well, isn't really a game,
it's not a game book, it's a series of game books or it's any number of books
that fall within a certain rule set.
And that rule set, let's call it for now, Tunnels and Trolls.
There's a slight addendum to that, but before I go into the addendums or anything,
I want to sort of talk about Tunnels and Trolls.
Tunnels and Trolls is kind of an, well, it's an alternative to something,
for instance, like Dungeons and Dragons.
So it's just another RPG game.
And RPG games, as you may know, they're just delivered pretty much as books.
They are a set of rules that people follow when they're playing an RPG game.
And as I say, the most popular one, and certainly as far as I know,
the oldest one is Dungeons and Dragons.
And Dungeons and Dragons came out in the early 70s, like 74 or something.
And when it came out, it was a big deal from what I understand.
Like no one had ever called, had identified, hey, this is a role playing game.
Like that didn't exist until Dungeons and Dragons in 1974.
Prior to that, there were board games, there were card games, there were other kinds of games.
But no one sat down and said, this is, we're going to call this a role playing game,
and this is how it's going to work. There's going to be one person to kind of manage the game world,
and there's going to be some number of players to manage an individual character each.
That just didn't, and there's going to be like these point systems,
and people will keep track of their, you know, that just didn't exist before Dungeons and Dragons.
So it made a big impact on the gaming world, and still has a big impact today.
The thing about Dungeons and Dragons is that it is arguably very complex.
They're fifth or sixth edition, they're on their fifth edition.
It kind of depends on how you count, whether you actually say it's their fifth edition.
But it's been around a long time, and they've accounted for a lot of minutia in the game world,
and that's important to a lot of people, and it's really nice to have a system that detailed,
and that takes just everything into account.
There are a few questions about how a world might work, interactions in a world might work,
that cannot be answered in Dungeons and Dragons. It's really, really complete.
But that does mean that it is very complex, and that sort of to learn all of that stuff,
that there's, you know, it may be overwhelming.
And as an answer to that, a guy named Kin St. Andre came up with this sort of other version of Dungeons and Dragons back in 75.
So pretty early on, if Dungeons and Dragons was released in 74, this was really, really quick on the heels of Dungeons and Dragons.
And apparently there were a couple of them like this, kind of like, oh my gosh Dungeons and Dragons is amazing.
Let's make our own version.
And one, the one that Kin St. Andre created is called Tunnels and Trolls.
You can kind of see the nod to Dungeons and Dragons in that I'm sure.
So sure enough, it is also abbreviated as T and T. And the goal was to make a simpler, lighter weight version of Dungeons and Dragons, basically.
That was the stated goal of this project.
For whatever reason, Tunnels and Trolls really took to the solo game experience.
They very early on started creating scripted solo adventures for anyone without a group of people that wanted to play Tunnels and Trolls.
And I don't know exactly how that happened, but it did, and it continues today.
So I think it is kind of whether they really meant for it to be or not, it kind of became ingrained in that gaming culture, in the culture of Tunnels and Trolls, to provide solo adventures for people.
And you can find solo adventures really easily if you just look for Tunnels and Trolls material online.
One of my favorite places for RPG materials is DriveThruRPG.com, or RPGNow.com, either URL works, it goes to basically the same place.
But DriveThru, I guess you could call it a chain or something, but DriveThru comics, DriveThru fiction, DriveThru, a bunch of different subsites within the DriveThru.
That's D-R-I-V-E-T-H-R-U, and then whatever story you want to go to.
But DriveThruRPG.com has a lot of great books, mostly RPG, well obviously, but mostly rule books is what I was going to say.
Like the actual books that tell you how to play a certain RPG.
But if you look just for Tunnels and Trolls, then you'll come across, you'll certainly find the rule system itself, the core rule book, which by the way is only about 130 pages.
So that's kind of, that gives you an idea of just how simple it is. And when I say it's 130 pages, I mean, you know, the actual rules, like the part that you kind of need to remember as you play a game.
It's really only about, gosh, maybe 30 pages at the most.
Which again, like if you're thinking of a manual or whatever, that you, like, how to guide for a card game or something, admittedly, 30 pages is a lot.
But I will say that the text is really large in this book, at least the copy that I have. I have the French translation version 8.
And so I don't know what the other versions look like, but yeah, it's very large print. And there's a lot of explanatory material in it.
It's not, it's not 30 pages of reading. It's a bunch of like, this is what an RPG is. This is how you're going to play.
You're going to love this. You can be anything you want, blah, blah, blah.
So it's not, it's not a whole lot to take into account. And in fact, they, they boiled all of this down into like a, I think maybe a two-page summary for free RPG day, which was like some event back in 2000, I don't know, 10 or 12 or 7.
And they, they were just trying to promote RPGs apparently. So you can look around online and find really just sort of like the basics of tunnels and trolls, like, just what you need to know to play a solo adventure.
You don't even have to really buy the whole book at first. You know, I mean, you should if you like it, obviously, but, but you don't have to. There is a free version of it.
Many rules. Oh, it doesn't look like it's free anymore. It looks like it's 99 cents. Still quite worth it. And anyway, all of this is going to, this is going to eventually come around to something that has something to do with creative comments, but, but not yet. Let's, let's keep going.
So tunnels and trolls, as I was saying, has it in their culture to, to provide solo mini games? And there's just a dozen and I've played quite a few.
One of the, probably the best so far that I've played is Castle Ironwood. Castle Ironwood was sort of a, well, a proper dungeon crawler really. You're, you're exploring an old decrepit castle called Castle Ironwood.
And you go through a series of, of rooms and sort of explore and see what you see. And that's kind of the game. Let's see, I've played I of the Serpent and Cauched and Legends of Algo Duro 1 and 2.
Hellas House of Dark Delights, you should play that one. Yeah, lots of great games out there for tunnels and trolls. And, and some of them, even, even more sort of crazy because they, they kind of step out of the, out of the typical, like, yeah, dungeon crawler model.
And, and go off and do their own thing. Like, I've got, I haven't played it yet, but there's a, there's one about a dark circus or something like that.
So I anticipate that to be a little bit, a little bit different from, from the dungeon, dungeon crawl that, that, for instance, Castle Ironwood was.
Hobb-sized adventure was, was quite good. That was a kind of a silly, well, it was, it was a series of short adventures. So the goal was to do adventures in 20 paragraphs or less. So very short adventures, especially since, you know, keep in mind 20 paragraphs and you're only choosing, let's say, half of those usually.
So yeah, it's pretty short, but, but it's a series. So, so you'll, it'll take a while to play through the book. But, but the, the tone of tunnels and trolls as well, compared to, for instance, Dungeons and Dragons, is quite lighthearted. And that is definitely within their culture as well.
They, they don't tend to do the whole epic adventure, you know, kind of like powerful warrior kind of thing that you might associate Dungeons and Dragons with, you know, Dungeons and Dragons. They tend to really drum everything up. They're very, they're very much about epics and legends and, and Conan the barbarian type of, of warriors, you know, everyone's big and strong and powerful.
Everyone's a great wizard or a great warrior. Everything is big and beautiful and exciting in Dungeons and Dragons. And in tunnels and trolls, typically more often than not, I've not played an adventure yet that doesn't do this. It's kind of like you're, you're an adventure. You're usually either out of work or you are maybe too fond of the local pub.
And you're, or you're a goblin, you know, maybe you're not even human. You're just like a little goblin wandering around. It's always about the underdog. It's always about the loser. It's, it's, it's always pretty funny, really. So it's, it's quite enjoyable because it is just so lighthearted.
The gameplay itself is fairly similar, I would say, to, to, for instance, lone wolf series, which I described to you in the previous episode. I mean, it's, it is less narrative in a, in a sense, because there's just less material to it, you know, the, the tunnel, the tunnel's control solo adventures that I have played at least so far.
I've not found one that is anywhere near the length of a lone wolf book, you know, like if you mapped out all the possible choices to a tunnel's control solo adventure, it is highly unlikely that you're going to fill up pages and pages and pages, you know, a whole
dream of paper with your, your canoe plotted work to flow chart. It's just not likely. It's just, it's not, it's not how they, they do it. So a lot of them are, you know, kind of four and six and eight page adventures. And that's okay. It's, it's, it's just a different style. And sometimes, frankly, it can be refreshing that you're not going to have to commit yourself to a whole book, you know, if you're just looking for sort of a quick fix.
These kinds of little solo adventures are, are quite fun and a good way to, to just kind of doing, yeah, and low commitment, little RPG game.
I have to say, though, for, for its, for its brevity, I, I will say that tunnels and trolls, even though it's simpler than dungeons and dragons, it is a little bit more complex than maybe it sometimes wants to be.
So for instance, you'll recall in lone wolf, you've got pretty much two attributes, you've got strength or, or like combat rather, and you've got health. And that's pretty much what you've got. And then you've got your inventory. But I mean, in terms of what you actually have to think about on a page per page basis, it's your combat ability and what your health level is at. And that's all you have to think about.
Tunnels and trolls, I guess you could argue that that's similar, you, you don't necessarily have to worry about everything on every page.
But there are, it's, the, your character build is a lot more complex. You've got strength, constitution, dexterity, speed, intelligence, wizardry, or is it called, it's, I think it's wisdom, but they call it, they, they, they abbreviate it W.I.Z. But anyway, luck and charisma.
So you ought to, you, you right there see that you've got a lot more sort of traits than what you would have in, in lone wolf. And that means that, that a lot of choices in the, in the stories are going to be a little bit more complex.
And frankly, in, in most of the stories that I've, I've read, it is very frequently, you know, you never know in the story that you're going to read what you need to actually keep track of.
So you may have a character and you're kind of building this character and you're thinking, well, I'm going to give them this and this and this. And then you read the story and, and it's just none of it matters, you know, like all they used was, was strength.
And then, and maybe wizardry, if you're a wizard, you know, that sort of thing. So that, there's, yeah, it's a little bit for, for solo adventuring, I guess, even the lightweight tunnels and trolls rule system is a little bit heavy weight, which is, which is kind of interesting.
And I only say that because after I've played a lot of solo games, or even two person games, in the case of the Pathfinder car game, which I'll review sometime soon, you just kind of realize that that dynamics of a small group are different than a, are different than the dynamics of a large group with an actual game master.
And you just, you know, when you're in a large group of like four people and then the game master, all of these things can be calculated while other people are doing other things.
Whereas in a small group, everything comes to a halt while people figure out things out. And then it continues and then it holds again and it continues, you know, and it's, it's kind of, I don't know, the less you have to think about in a small group, really, the better.
So the other thing about tunnels and trolls is the, is the way that, that combat occurs. And, and I have to say, you, you heard me rave presumably about the combat system in lone wolf.
It's absolutely fantastic. I could just go on and on about it, but I won't. But it is, it is really good. And it's one of the things, one of the reasons it's so good is because it is very quick.
And it only requires you to roll really once and, and from that one role, you get like all the information you need for what feels like a valid two person battle.
That innovation, however, belongs solely to lone wolf. No one else has come up with anything nearly as nice. And that's, that's including tunnels and trolls. So any combat that you go into for tunnels and trolls, you're rolling, you're rolling twice, once for yourself, once for your enemy, and then you're calculating, you know, the damage that you do to your enemy and you're calculating the damage that your enemy has just done to you.
You're also having to calculate, and this is kind of where it gets probably, yeah, definitely too, too complex. You have to calculate their, their combat ability based on sort of several different aspects of, of that character, not not your character, but like the enemy that you're fighting.
And it depends on whether you're fighting a human or a monster. And I, I can't remember if I've actually ever played, or if I've ever actually fought a human in all, in all my tunnels and troll solo adventures, I think I may have always been up against a monster of some sort.
And monsters get what's called a monster rating. And for some weird reason when, when you're playing, it doesn't actually tell you what the, the monster rating is.
It tells you like the, the strength of that monster or something, and then you, or the, the, the, the health of that monster, I think.
And you have to take that and refer to this little table of, of, of, of how powerful the monster then is and figure out what their combat ability is from that.
So it's, yeah, it's a little bit, there's a lot of sort of flipping back and forth, except you're not flipping back and forth because you, you know, each game book doesn't come with the rule set in it.
You have to, you have to keep that on hand, or a cheat sheet of some sort on hand, plus the, the game book that you're actually playing.
So it's, it's, it's a little bit unwieldy. It is not self-contained the way that lone wolf is. And, and that does make it a little bit less of a casual game book to play.
And that's the thing about some game books is, I guess any game books so far. I said that it was a nice way to relax, but it's actually not all that relaxing because you're gaming, you know, so you, you kind of, you need to set it up.
You know, you kind of have to have a table or, or a desk or something or, or a space on the ground, if you're sitting on the ground.
You know, you can't, you kind of have to have a place to put stuff and kind of keep, keep track of stuff and you do your pen and your paper.
It is, it is something that you kind of have to work at. It's not sitting down and reading a nice big novel.
That said, it is a lot of fun. Tunnels and trolls uses a D10 die, I think. Does it? I could have lied to you there. Maybe it's a D6. I'm pretty sure it's a D10. And, and not necessarily only one D10. Sometimes you're, you'll be rolling a couple of die.
And in fact, what I was finding, frankly, I was just finding that the number of die that I had to roll sometimes was too much to be bothered. So I just kind of cheated and kind of averaged out some numbers.
You know, especially if I was going to win the battle, means the game. I'm playing against myself. I'm not cheating. Okay, I'm cheating, but I'm, I'm looking the other way.
So yeah, there's, it's, I'm simultaneously saying tunnels and trolls is really simple and really fun and also saying, but not simple enough to make it really relaxing.
So that's what I am saying. I mean, like those two things are coexisting and I'm fine with that. So if you want to play a solo game and if you want a rule system that seems to really, really provide a lot of solo gaming material,
then tunnels and trolls is something that you should definitely look into. Now, having said all of that, one of the things that I really like about RPGs and tabletop gaming in general is that there's kind of an implicit creative commons feel to a lot of what's going on.
And implicit doesn't mean explicit obviously. So in tunnels and trolls, there's really not a whole lot of implied kind of, oh, we should all share this stuff because in spite of them having given some mini rules away, mini rulebook away on the free RPG day of 2007 or whenever it was.
Everything under tunnels and trolls is, is copyrighted. So if you, if you are doing tunnels and trolls and that's, that's what you're doing, you're doing tunnels and trolls and there's not really like there's permission to, to write adventures for tunnels and trolls, but there's not really any permission to ever sort of borrow anything from tunnels and trolls.
That being said, it is tabletop gaming, so kind of like you can't really stop people from borrowing ideas, you know, that's just kind of, it's how things happen and there is also kind of a, you know, that's how it, there is a culture in the tabletop gaming world that ideas are going to sort of migrate from one thing to another.
That's not the case with something like, for instance, Dungeons and Dragons, which, which doesn't use creative commons, but it uses something called an open game license, which the company behind Dungeons and Dragons created back when sort of the canoe licenses were popping up everywhere and people were sort of curious about how this might work.
And so the gaming industry is kind of starting with wizards of the coast from what I understand, kind of decided that what had always been implied, i.e. hey, you should use ideas and share ideas and modify these rules so that the game is more fun for you or for your gaming group.
They kind of made that explicit and this, and they created this open game license and said that their material was open game license and everything that they had laid down in terms of how an RPG was played is open open source pretty much or creative commons really because open source implies that you could submit patches, for instance, and that's not really the model here.
But it's essentially a creative commons thing with the exception of obviously or maybe not obviously, but with the exception with the significant exception of trademarks.
So you can't call your gaming system that plays remarkably like Dungeons and Dragons, Dungeons and Dragons, that's not allowed.
And in fact, some people have taken advantage of that. Some people around Dungeons and Dragons, 3.5 or so, forked it into something called Pathfinder, which I'm going to review in the next episode in this series.
But yeah, so there's this thing open game license and tunnels and trolls does not use any of that is what I'm trying to say.
It is something that they just never got into or didn't feel was necessary. I don't know. I never asked.
However, if you want to play tunnels and troll solo adventures without supporting copyrighted material or because you're poor and you just can't afford it or whatever, and although as I said, there is a free mini rule set available still online.
So you can actually do that. But the alternative that I also found, even though I did purchase a book of tunnels and trolls, but there's another sort of method of sort of adapting tunnels and troll solo adventures.
And that is simply to go over to Brent Newhall.com, that is B-R-E-N-T-N-E-W-H-A-L-L.com.
Slash. But just go there and click around and find his RPG materials. Turns out he came up with this mini rule set called Dungeon Delvers, which is Creative Commons.
And it's a two page PDF containing all the rules on one page and an expanded spell list on the second page. So that's pretty easy to sort of get your head around. And that is the entirety of the rule set.
So it's designed to be a quick and easy and miniature RPG rule set that just kind of gets everyone up and running pretty quickly, pretty easy to build a character and start roleplaying with something that only takes you one page to read.
The little booklet, such as it is the two page booklet, is pay what you will, pay what you want. And it's available from DriveThruRPG.com.
And like tunnels and trolls, it also has a couple of solo adventures that people have come up with for that rule system.
So straight from the Brent Newhall webpage, you can actually grab two of those. And then pretty much I have discovered with some modification, but basically a tunnel and troll solo adventure can be relatively easily migrated to Dungeon Delvers as well.
So if tunnels and trolls is a little bit too complex for you, which again it may be, then using Dungeon and Delvers, especially Dungeon Delvers, especially since it is one page and can fit into your pocket quite nicely, that way you have like a cheat sheet right there.
It's a little bit faster, a little bit quicker. You do have to modify some things like Monster Combat. There's no equivalent to the wonky way that tunnels and trolls decides how powerful monsters are.
So you have to come up with your own sort of convention on how you want to adapt characters to fit into Dungeon Delvers. But mostly everything else is pretty much the same.
So yeah, Dungeon Delvers, tunnels and trolls, solo adventures, they're all available on the internet and they're a heck of a lot of fun. I encourage you to give it a go.
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