Tunnels & Trolls

• 1. Introduction

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  Tunnels & Trolls began not in a publisher's office, but in the mind of a public librarian named Ken St. Andre, sitting in Phoenix, Arizona in the mid-1970s. He had borrowed a friend's copy of Dungeons & Dragons, loved the concept, and found the rulebook baffling. So he wrote his own game. "I just wanted something I could play with my friends at a reasonable price, with reasonable equipment," he said. The first edition appeared in April 1975, self-published. Two months later, a company called Flying Buffalo put out a second edition, and the second modern fantasy role-playing game was formally in the world. What made Tunnels & Trolls different from its famous rival? How did a librarian's home project survive and evolve for more than five decades, through eight editions and a corporate acquisition? And why did one historian, writing in 2023, trace an unbroken line from this game to something published in 2019 called Thousand Year Old Vampire?

• 2. A Simpler Path In

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  St. Andre's core design instinct was accessibility. Where Dungeons & Dragons demanded polyhedral dice, Tunnels & Trolls ran entirely on six-sided dice, the kind found in any board game. Where D&D built a magic system around spell slots and memorization, T&T used a simple point-based approach. Combat resolved quickly, folding mass engagements into a single set of rolls rather than tracking every individual fighter. Characters were defined by eight prime attributes, including Strength, Luck, Constitution, and Dexterity, each generated by rolling three six-sided dice. Personal adds, derived from Strength, Luck, and Dexterity, modified combat results for characters who excelled in those areas. In the 7th Edition, Speed was added to that formula.

  The Saving Roll gave the system a versatile all-purpose test mechanic. Checks combined a character's attribute with two six-sided dice, and doubles required the player to add and roll again. According to the source, this was one of the earliest uses of that roll-and-add-on-doubles mechanic in any role-playing game. The difficulty formula, 15 plus 5 times the level of difficulty, gave game masters a consistent scale for setting challenges.

  Character classes kept things broad: Warriors and Wizards were the foundations, with Rogues and Warrior-Wizards serving as hybrids. The Rogue class deserves a note because it confused people familiar with D&D: in T&T, Rogues were not thieves but something closer to self-taught magic users, free to use weapons and armor like Warriors but without the Warrior's armor bonus or a Wizard's spell-crafting power. Later editions expanded the roster to include Specialist Mage, Leader, and Ranger.

• 3. Spreading Before D&D Did

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  The 5th edition of the rules, published in 1979, did something remarkable. It reached markets abroad before Dungeons & Dragons arrived in most of them. Translations appeared in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Finland, and Japan. That kind of international footprint, built on a game written by a Phoenix librarian, was not accidental. The simpler ruleset and the reliance on ordinary dice made the game easier to localize and easier to play without specialist supplies.

  In France, that early foothold had lasting consequences. In 2012, a company called Grimtooth re-released the game in French-speaking markets under license from Flying Buffalo. The resulting French rulebook, officially the 8th edition, drew on the 7th edition text but wove in elements from the 5.5 edition and clarifications written by St. Andre himself. Interior artwork mixed illustrations from the 5th edition with new work by Liz Danforth. That French edition, when Flying Buffalo's head Rick Loomis saw it, proved so handsome that it pushed him to pursue something better than a simple reprint of the 5.5 edition. His reaction, direct and candid: "The French edition came out so beautiful that now that I have run out of 5.5, I am not satisfied to just reprint 5.5. I wanted to have a deluxe edition even better than the French one. Competition is what drives us to be better!"

• 4. Solo Play as a Frontier

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  Tunnels & Trolls holds a specific distinction in publishing history: it was the first role-playing system to release a series of fantasy gamebooks designed for solo play, adventures a single person could complete without any game master present. Flying Buffalo published at least twenty such adventures. Among the authors who worked in this format were Ken St. Andre himself, who wrote Deathtrap Equalizer Dungeon, Naked Doom, and Arena of Khazan, and Michael Stackpole, who contributed multiple titles including City of Terrors, Overkill, and Elven Lords.

  The format depended on two features of Tunnels & Trolls that made it portable: its simplified rules and its use of only six-sided dice. A player needed no referee, no polyhedral dice, and no group. The Fighting Fantasy series, which achieved wide popular success, later used this same gamebook format. Sorcerer's Apprentice, the game's dedicated magazine published by Flying Buffalo, first appeared in Winter 1978. St. Andre described it in the inaugural editorial as a publication based around T&T specifically and fantasy role-playing in general.

• 5. What Critics Said

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  Critical reception over five decades showed a pattern: reviewers consistently found the game simple, and differed sharply on whether simplicity was a virtue or a flaw. In the third issue of The Space Gamer, Brant Bates called the first edition "very playable, and a lot of fun," though he aimed that verdict at readers who were not purists. Lewis Pulsipher, writing in White Dwarf issue 2, was blunter: he suggested that anyone who enjoyed T&T would eventually "graduate" to the more widely-played D&D.

  Steve Jackson, in the March-April 1980 issue of The Space Gamer, took the opposite view of the 5th edition, calling it worth the price for any adventure gamer. That same year in Ares issue 3, Eric Goldberg dismissed the same edition as "a pleasant puff piece," saying the game would be passed over by everyone except completists. Jon Freeman, writing in the 1980 book The Complete Book of Wargames, objected in particular to the spell names, citing Too-Bad Toxin, Dum-Dum, and Upsidaisy as lending the game "an air of Ali Baba and the Three Stooges," and rated it no better than fair.

  Rick Swan, in Dragon issue 184 from August 1992, praised the magic system as "exceptionally clever" and noted that a beginner could master the rules in an afternoon, a veteran in under an hour. He judged it not the most sophisticated alternative to D&D but certainly the easiest to learn. In a 1996 reader poll by Arcane magazine, T&T ranked 32nd among the 50 most popular role-playing games of all time; the magazine's editor, Paul Pettengale, suggested nostalgia explained much of that standing. Stu Horvath, in his 2023 book Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground, offered the most generous long-term reading: by embracing simplicity, T&T became "the first major divergence in RPG design," the root of a stripped-down design philosophy that still ran through games published decades later.

• 6. Corporate Turns

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  Flying Buffalo remained T&T's home for decades, but the game's corporate history grew complicated in the 2020s. In July 2021, a company called Webbed Sphere acquired Flying Buffalo along with its catalog, excluding the play-by-mail games. Within two years, Webbed Sphere terminated licenses that Rick Loomis and Flying Buffalo had previously granted to third-party Tunnels & Trolls publishers. No new editions appeared during Webbed Sphere's ownership.

  In May 2023, Webbed Sphere sold the game, along with Flying Buffalo's full range of role-playing titles, including the Citybook and Grimtooth products and Mercenaries, Spies and Private Eyes, to the tabletop division of Rebellion Unplugged. The new owner moved quickly. Across March and April 2026, Rebellion Unplugged ran a Kickstarter campaign for the first new edition since the 2015 Deluxe release. Named Tunnels & Trolls: A New Age, the campaign set a goal of £20,000. Pledges exceeded that figure by more than five times before the campaign closed. The new edition, planned for delivery in May 2027, included a Core Book, a City Book, and a Campaign Book, alongside dice, a map, and game master aids. The previous edition was to be rebranded as Tunnels & Trolls Heritage, preserving its legacy while the new ruleset aimed at both newcomers and veteran fans.