A Review of 4th Edition Underdark

I was broadly demoralised by this damnn book, but to make it bearable to get through, I will make a list, from back to front, of everything I actually liked.

TOROG - The King Who Crawls

The Level 34 Solo Lurker Himself! (“Huge Immortal Humanoid, XP 195,000")

God of Torture, Imprisonment and the Underdark. A few concepts in here govery hard indeed and Torog is the best. Entered the Underdark to fight some primordial horror in the Dawntimes and was cursed even as he killed it. He cannot heal, cannot leave, and as a God, cannot die.

Trying to escape the Underdark, Torog crazily crawled his way through the whole of the planet. He was cursed to never reach the surface, but he could madly smash his way into other planes, so long as it was into the Underdark of those planes. His crazed crawl created a permanently bloodstained Godroad which curls and spirals madly through the Underdark, and even breaches the walls between realities.

Now his palace is the hewn corpse of the Titan he killed to get here and Torogs servants have to constantly chew and cut away at it to stop it re-growing. Bitter, wrathful and in constant pain, Torog tortures and imprisons people, turning them into wracks. Unlike other Gods, he does not share his power or trust his angels. If he wants to communicate he will either send some horrid low level servant with his words sliced into its back, or the big guy is coming himself, in person. He likes to take cities of people who piss him off, and pull them down into the Underdark. I imagine this happening like two mountain-sized hands rumble up from the earth on each side of the city, fingers like arcologies, curling over, then down, down down.

Torog is so depressed he may actually want to die, which would form a neat apex to a long campaign. The guy was just messing with you because he wants to commit suicide-by-adventurer.

If he does die, he horrible presence is the only thing keeping the Abberant Outer Realms from infiltrating and merging with the Underdark, which will end up with Mind Flayers, Beholders and Grell turning everyone into pâté, which is a neat piece of setting-sustaining divine engineering.

Torog is novel, functional, has a cool picture and really holds the book together. Its not surprising they made the whole thing about him.

The Incunabulum

Vecna-Worshipping sort-of humans defined by Mum-Ra Drip. Obsessed with discovering and recording secret knowledge of all kinds, they have “the grisly ritual of the Unveiling” which strips every piece of memory from a (dead?) subject. This involves the questioner eating the subjects brain, which gives them access to their entire experience. BUT, the interrogator has only 12 hours to write down parts before the memories fade. They keep these secrets on parchment, (which is probably made from the victims).

The Incunabulum are culturally defined by their wrappings. When they come of age they are given a set of wrappings derived from dead Incunabulum. These contain knowledge and memories, and once they go on, they don’t come off till death.

The lore says elements of these memories date back to the first Incunabulum. The nature of replication and dispersal means that, while there must be continuity, I’m sure there will be a lot of alteration, adaptation, splitting and drift in what feels like a ‘written genetic signature’, each Incunabulum having access to a kind of edited, pathed together palimpsest of memories, dating first to one or two predecessors, and from them, back and back and back, all the way to the first. The patterns created by the memories no doubt being stronger than the details of the memories themselves, each Incunabulum being a kind of evolved book of memories, as well as a person.

I’m already interpolating too much into a very sparse 4e text. These guys look largely human, they hang out in a Cavern-Venice City called Glimmer in the Shadowdark, worship Vecna exclusively, make a lot of use of (dry, never wet) Undead, and generally love secrets and being evil. Good villains with some unexplored Borgesian depths.

Blood Ooze

A bad Ooze monster with fragments of interesting elements. One - its made from Torogs blood. Two - if it manages to Ooze you it gets inside you and puppets you. Three - “A blood ooze has no allies.” A koan to place alongside “Giant Oysters are never surprised.”

Lathan, River of Souls

“The lathan forms where streams of souls join together in a crevasse known as the Vale of Sighs. Here the moaning torrent becomes a true flow as spirits funnel through the narrowest part of the canyon ... its surface and depths are made of a rushing press of intertwined and glowing spirits.”

“Devils frequently sail the Lathan to the Soul Slough to find souls that had been promised to them. They float atop the spirits in iron-keeled boats and fish spirits out with ghost catching nets.”

“Only at one place along the Latham does a permanent crossing exist: the Worm Bridge. .. Its master, Bragarra the Bridge Witch, controls it constantly to keep it from being dashed to pieces by the tormoil of the Lathan.

The bridge is crafted from the corpse of a purple worm whose long body forms a tunnel through the water to reach the other side. On either end stand a pair of nightmares chained to the dead beast, and dark stalkers lurk nearby, ready to obey their masters commands. Nearly frozen and unable to move more than its head, the purple worm must be pulled up and down the river to compensate for the water’s movement. The dark stalkers drive the nightmares to draw the worm taught for crossing, and sin its coils deep to avoid floating dangers.”

Bragarra the Bridge Witch is very Chris Avellone-coded.

Esaham, Graveyard of Demons

This is actually a pretty bad section, but the very idea of a graveyard for Demons, a place of binding and repose for what are meant to be sempiternal, extra-causal entities, is provocative.

Icegloom Chart

Bad name, good concept. A fat shard of ice. “Barely visible channels and bubbles in the ice constantly reshape themselves to resemble a map,”

Fire Pit

One very good fragment from an overall tiring 4e ‘Encounter’.

“This magic fire pit burns only meat and leaves wood untouched.” From an encounter in the Feydark. Excellent Druidic/Ent horror concept.

Deadtrees

“These four titans shed dappled shadows over thier realm while gods and primordials still warred.”

Four primeval and long-fallen Tolkienesque super-trees. Their roots though, still exist, and now form tunnel systems. Very fey concept for the Feywild, but interesting.

Sick Gnomes

The GNOMES are wilding the fuck out.

“King Finutar’s court magicians assure the people of Drochdan that the haze is a hostile sending from a rival kingdom - perhaps the formorians. In private,some gnomes whisper that it is a curse ...”

“In reality, this magical ailment is spread by contamination of the Drochdan’s food supply by fungal spores. This fact explains why entire gnome hunting bands are stricken by it at the same time - they’ve all eaten the same rations.”

Look, even mildly interesting GNOME CONTENT is rare.

Inbharann

A Formorian Kingdom that has learned how to mass-produce Sauron-Eyes and uses them as searchlights.

They also have a neat succession system; anyone can be adopted into the Royal Family based on competence. When the Monarch dies they all have to fight it out. The war is over when one is left standing, however, if everyone dies, a tribunal decides which one fought with the “greatest cleverness”, and orders his or her resurrection.

Resurrecting the leader from a dynastic bloodbath is fun, and having a commission to decide which was ‘cleverest’ feels very loony-tune-talmudic.

Primal Mud

4e combat chess idea with mud which you can use to heal yourself. Stated in the text, this dries out when you call on its power. Unstated is that, if this is a pool of mud, you just healed yourself and then likely trapped yourself by drying the it out, which makes for a nice combat decision. Even better, in a combat situation with multiple liquid pools, drying them out here or there could make the place more or less navigable for allies or enemies depending on circumstance.

Mherkrull

“Just as Asmodeus rebelled against the god that commanded him to relinquish his power, so too do devils and angels alike occasionally challenge their lords. Those wise enough to recognise their error before being destroyed have no hope of mercy. Their only succour is to escape divine notice for a time, and those who succeed most often do so by coming to the cavernous godless realm known as Mherkrul.”

That’s nearly all we get.

Xarcorr - Realm of the Aboleths

Some reasonably funky environments are sketched out;

“The area around Xarcorr tumbles and twits as if in pain ... stone shifts and mutates without warning ... Thoughts drift through the passages like smoke, choking the minds of the unwary with the nightmare imaginings of abhorrent creatures..”

These roiling rocks have islands of relative stability.

The Dripping Jungle; ”abuzz with glimmering creatures that make their own light. Ghostly insects glow in gemstone colours through transparent shells. leechlike rodents leave luminous slime trails behind their slithering bodies. Great behemoths stand on legs as tall as ship masts that shine with radiant blood, stretching their ruddy necks to reach ceiling vegetation”

The Stone Gyre; “the rock becomes fluid - the stone of the caverns ripples and moves while remaining in a cave shape ... Up is whatever direction air can be found.”

The Toothy Plains; “vast, flat expanses of ceiling and floor roughly 200 feet apart. .... massive crystal monoliths that resemble jagged fangs jutting from the ceiling and floor ... “glide along the surface from which they project..”

Then, once you enter Xarcorr itself; “a strange, still point, disorientating both in its contrast to the surrounding chaos and in the alien nature of the realm. ... Xarcorr overlays the place in the world that its area covers. it is both in the world and not, and what was in the world before its coming remains behind the unreachable barrier of Xarcorr’s existence. No mortal knows what lies in the world beneath where Xarcorr now rests.”

Within; Dreaming Vaults “in these long chambers the aboleths keep captives of many races alive in a shared dream state. ... Their captors observe the effects aboleth plans might have on the real world by looking at the reactions the captives have and how the sleepers imagine others would behave.”

The Warp Web; “rivers of slimy water from all over Xarcorr ... float out into the open air and split into a latticework of waterways that dangle down into the canyon.”

The Preserve, where the aboleths “modify the environment in extreme ways, hoping to scrape open a hole in the weave of existance and find a conduit to the Far Realm behind the flow”

Grell Colony Politics

We have a nice page here digging into the varying philosophies amongst a colony of Grells. I feel like these my have been written by a very angry, very cynical vegitarian;

The Byoll (”Opportunity for Use”) “Their philosophy permits captured prey to avoid being eaten by performing a dangerous mission of the grells devising.”

The Glatt “Equanimity of Harm”) “The Grell philosophy Glatt holds that harm to prey animals is a necessary part of life, but that the moral grell parcels out this unavoidable hurt so that no piece of potential food suffers more than other members of its litter, tribe or group.”

The Jrall (”Feasting in Knowledge”) “Jrall philosophy argues that it is acceptable to torment and kill sentient beings as long as they are ennobled by knowledge first. Thralls are kept in clean pens and taught the simplest rudiments of Jrall belief in anticipation of the day when they will be slowly devoured alive.”

The Kragg (”Consume the Willing”). “Like the Byoll - from whom they broke in a murderous conflict years ago - the Kragg send captured prey to perform hunting missions or other quests for them. The Kragg do this as part of a braoder exercise in bending future prey to their will. They use their psychic powers to make their victims want to be eaten. Philosopher Kragg asserts that this is the only ethical way to devour sentient species.”

Hraak Azul

A massive living multiple-fungus fortress/environment colony, slowly moving through the Underdark, going who knows where. Pretty similar to the Fungal Environment in ‘Forgotten Realms: Underdark’, but now mobile and with a nice image and some extra details.

Dark Lake Ziggurat

Its a big black Ziggurat on a dark lake. Neat element is that it is multi-planar, and perhaps multi-causal. The same ziggurat, built by different races and cultures, in different planes, in exactly the same place, and perhaps with multiple histories even within one plane.

Kind of basic Lovecraft tbh but a big black ziggurat standing alone above a dark lake, miles beneath the earth, is still a banger image. Its also mildly funny/das that the Lovecraft inspired Kua Toa have a colony nearby and keep sending Fishmen into the Ziggurat to perform what they think is ‘sacred work’ (they are being randomly hurled through other dimensions and driven totally mad.).

Maelbrathyr

Maybe the only part of 4e Underdark that keeps some of the old ‘Infinity Engine Location’ energy from Forbidden Realms: Underdark. Maelbrathyr feels very much like a city laid out in isometric graphics, with a dark and edgy backstory and a series of personally dramatic bossfights with Chris Avellone-style tormented bad-guys.

Story is that an Underdark City put together a team of heroes to rescue someone from Torogs Torture clutches. This they did, but the King Who Crawls was annoyed enough by this that he reached up and dragged the entire city down into the earth, leaving it a tiered collapsed city of ruins and levels.

He also cursed the heroes who ‘stole’ his prisoner, even the ones who didn’t survive. Now they are immortal horrors, mad and evil. One a half fire half ice slug centaur in undying agony, one given mega-schizophrenias by being inhabited by the souls of the comrades he let down, who don’t like each other or him, and who change his body when they take over, and one guy trapped in an eternal hamster-wheel/orrery torture device who can only roll around forever. Hilarious. Good one Torog.

This Image

Is this “4th Edition” in the room with you now?

Reading this was like suffering a flashback to an old, dull, war. 4e truly is a depressing system, with a kind of brutal, nasty, cognitive weight. Going thorough the text I kept wanting to argue with someone who wasn’t there, and who hasn’t been there for fifteen years.

Building your entire reality around a series of boutique grid-pattern ‘balanced’ combat encounters (which the PCs can’t actually lose without fucking things up), drags the imaginative potential of the human soul into a pit of mediocrity and tortures it - glistering pools of blood torn from a god who can never heal and never die and which still stain the passage of the King Who Crawls, give a +5 to fucking a fucking evoking surge but disadvantage on heals or some shit, its just the most depressing stuff. Torog would approve.

Even the really good ideas, like the Incunabulum, which have potentially fascinating concepts behind them, are all designed to be communicated via big dumb stat blocks, which are all built around combat-as-sport grid combat, its like watching fine French cheese be squeezed through a sieve onto the dirtiest burger.

Foaree Underdark also provides splatters of gaming advice, not so much wrong within itself, as the horrid product of post-apocalyptic mutational pressures producing something that approximates a previously health organism, but only through limb-splintering mutilations of an already horribly warped concept;

“One way to impress upon the players the dangers of the Underdark is tot talk about the deadly monsters that live there. But talk is cheap. I find that most players assume the DM will pit them only against foes they can defeat. They imagine difficult fights, but they also imagine winning all of them.

That’s great. D&D is at its best when its collaborative and everyone at the table has fun. Still, I like to put fear in the players and let them know that their decisions have real meaning in the game. If every choice has the same victorious result, the game gets dull.

I find the best way to do this is to call the players’ bluff. I’ll talk about some dangerous foe in a particular location, and if the players go there, they meet the danger. In effect, I put up a sign that says, “Here there be dragons!” If the players go past the sign, they meet a dragon - and not some wyrmling either.

The key to making this approach work is letting the characters get away. Some players might want their characters to run, but one or two often stick around to see if you mean it. (”Maybe that Mind Flayer is a doppelganger. He wouldn’t really have us face a Mind Flayer.”) This inevitably draws the others back to hep out, but after a few potent attacks from the monster, everyone should be looking for the exit. When they do, let them go. if you need a reason for the monster not to pursue, perhaps some other threat attacks it (the big fish being eaten by the bigger fish). If you do something like this in the Underdark, the players will give each other worried looks the next time they need to delve into the deep, dark caverns.

Using this technique has the additional benefit of teaching players that it’s ok to run from a fight. I’ve seen many campaigns come to an abrupt end or have to be saved by some deus ex machina because the players didn’t see a way out of a fight that went south. letting them run away shows them that their decisions have consequences, but that you’re still collaborating to make a fun game.”

Not a good book but there were at least some good things in it.

A Review of Forgotten Realms; Underdark

 By Bruce R.Cordell, Gewndolyn F.M. Kestrel and Jeff Quick. Art direction by Robert Raper. Graphic Design by Robert Raper and Robert Campbell, Cartography by Robert Lazzaretti. First printing 2003.

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This book has some notable slop and a semi-regular patterning of some supremely boring ideas, which gradually frets like cloud to reveal increasingly good work in exploration, before dawning blackly into seventy pages (nearly half the book) of geographic information about the Underdark of the Forgotten Realms and in particular, of the period right in the middle of R.A. Salvatore’s ‘War of the Spider Queen’ novel series.

honestly, these covers are almost selling me

Prestige Classes, ‘Regions, Feats

These things are like dirty nasty crack to me, or cheap sweets I can’t help eating more of. With my heart and my soul they disgust me, yet like a low enslaved desire, some abandoned part of me yearns for them; what exactly would it be like to be a ‘Cavelord’ (a kind of Underdark ranger), and exactly how does that differ from a ‘Prime Underdark Guide’ (someone who helps others range under the dark). Perhaps these crystalline imagined alter-selves occupy something like the fragmentary dreams of other ordinary lives which sleet through our minds in quiet moments of the vaguest ennui; “What would my life be like if had Prestige Classed up to ‘Arachnomancer’? Sure there’s a lot of stuff I wouldn’t be able to do, but think of the spiders. At least then I would know who I was = an Arachnomancer.” O to be the guy who has a ‘thing’, and for everyone to know it.

A standout for its pleasurable ridiculousness is the ‘Illithid Body Tamer’ - for those who, not only want to play a brain-eating psychic octopus from a hyper-villainous made-for-crime cephalopod race, but want to play the buff , hand to hand focused version of that race.

These strong squid come with a range of whirling tentacle attacks; (Tentacle of Fate, Reaching Tentacle, Whirlwind Tentacle and Tentacle of Destiny) spiked tentacle attachments and a promise not to use their innate, deadly, and very easy murderous psychic powers. A promise which they will break if they feel like it;

“An illithid body tame is not slavishly devoted to its code. If using plane shift or mind blast is clearly in its best interest, then it does so, preferring to lose access to the benefits of abstinence than lose its life.”

This surely takes the already hypertrophied art of Prestige Classing close to the limits of its own absurdity. But perhaps its that very insane hyper-specifity that helps to cast the strange spell such thing have over a living game. The others in this book are more boring and lack the ‘tang’ of 3.5 hyper-absurdity. (The vision of a 3.5 influenced game where only the most deranged Prestige Classes are allowed; Cancer Mage, Candle Caster, Halfling Outrider and Fochlucan Lyrist anyone?)

Though some still mourn the loss; “Multiclassing, at its best, is a biography expressed through mechanics.”

Nothing in the ‘Races’ section is as good as these images of them;

which are amongst the best art in the book.

You are not (at least here), actually allowed to be a ‘Derro’, which is disappointing for the book that introduced the Mind-Flayer Body-Tamer. Perhaps even amidst these often somewhat-villainous races, they were simply too Chaotic Evil.

‘Feats’ are as you would imagine them, apart from a few sparks of fun; ‘Elfhunter’ only available to Drow? Very sad. ‘Graft Illithid Flesh’ lets you play Squid Frankenstein, which has at least one very boutique use we will discover later on.

Magic and Spells

Spends an alarming amount of time describing the for-this-book ‘Node Magic’, a system of magic and advantage built around dicking around with ‘Earth Nodes’. This is the kind of deeply embedded rules system that, once you know someone is planning on interacting with it, you have to integrate it into your whole campaign, placing various NODES of varying level here and there; and what NODES you place where will have a big effect on play.

If anyone has ever used this, leave a comment or a link. Its hard for me to believe anyone could be as into something called ‘Node Magic’ as is required to actually simulate and use it for a campaign.

I did find a handful of spells I enjoyed, all of which do what they say on the tin; Amorphous Form, Contagious Fog, Drown, Rushing Waters, Viscid Glob and my favourite; Stone Sphere, which creates a five-foot diameter sphere of polished stone which moves under your control at a speed of 30ft. The Stone has Armour Class 5 and 500 hit points. One round per level and its a Level 5 spell. After casting, directing its movement requires a move action, so you can still presumably cast more bullshit so long as you stay in place, rolling your bid deadly marble about. A wonderful alternative to ‘Fireball’.

Equipment and Magic Items

Things improve a little more with ‘Equipment and Magic Items’, almost all of these are very or slightly impractical outside of a handful of uses, but isn’t that the pleasure of a tool? And of having this particular tool? Perhaps this granular imagining is the true spirit of 3.5.

It also has a pleasing image.

Various odd or conditionally useful weapons, some bizzarro additions to armour. ‘Blackwater’ which cripples water breathing creatures in a certain volume of water, (there have been occasions where I wished I had some), the Caveharp, (less interesting than it sounds), the blessedly-specific ‘Darkvision Invisible Paint’, wonderful SHRIEK PASTE, a ‘Spelunkers Kit’ which should be standard issue for all characters anyway.

Then a range of poisons and chemicals, including ‘Virile Madness’, which is PCP, and another curious obsession of this book; templates. Here templates for magical weapons made of this thing and that, including ‘Morphing’ weapons, which I feel like would be much more insanely useful irl than in game, where the physical/kinetic problems such things are made to solve are rarely imagined with the depth, fluency and regularity to make their use worthwhile.

Armours of ‘halfweight’, ‘Drowcraft’, ‘Illithidwrought’ and ‘Xorn’. Cortical mucusy armour that blanks your mind to foes, psychic armour and Drow Death Armour that makes you invisible, gives you ‘disguise’ and ‘spider climb’, for if you want to fantasise about being the coolest most cracked ultra-high-fantasy protagonist EVAR - these are dreams and aspirations I think, more than tools, and its curious how much ultra-mega-high-fantasy begins to intersect with post-singularity science-fiction tropes. We will see this later in city design.

Rings, of which the most fun is ‘Antivenom’ (60,000gp), and just below it ‘Antivenom, Frugal’ (10,000gp), just for the image of a world that contrast creates. RODS always feel under-noetic, and Staffs (no room underground surely?). A Figurine of Wonderous Power that transforms into a giant spider you can ride around on, and I have always wanted to own one of these in D&D, the less romantic and perhaps more old-school ‘Figurines of Illusory Escort’ which cast an illusion of guards around you when you sleep. Some very boring Neutral-Themed items. Last; a magic tome so powerful its like carrying around a semi-divine limited-use A.I. (you must speak to it in a specific dead language or it eats your soul and makes you one of its pages), and the Illithid Grafts, finally, but they are mainly just sticking tentacles on things, apart from ‘Humanoid Skin’ which involves sealing up something (or someone, presumably horrific), inside;

“If the humanoid skin hides monstrous features below its surface (such as extra arms, tentacles or antennae), using those features requires thrusting them through the skins surface as a standard action. This act showers all nearby cretures with blood and deals 1d4 damage to the graft recipient.”

Monsters are not a high point, there are rules for crossing things with Illithid (add tentacles), crossing them with spiders (add legs), crossing them with Chameleons, filling them with ‘Faerzress’, rules to mineralise anything; none make anything more interesting, producing largely globs. Multiple creatures that ‘swim through earth’ for various reasons and in various ways. A minotaur with demon blood? The ‘Lith’ has a good silhouette;

The ‘Maur’ as a hunched underground giant has a pleasing mechanic in which, if it can find room, it laboriously and horrifically stands full upright, “an agonizing, joint-popping experience for the Maur, though it relishes the change” and takes on a little of the noble potency of its forebears. The ‘Ineffable Horror’ which I can only assume got its name as an Underdark joke, since it is the most ‘effable’ thing ever.

The only really very-good monster is still only half-good and that is the ‘Annihilator’, a kind of Abberant solo Rust Monster with extra tentacles which can disintegrate anything. “The annihilator seems to derive sustenance and pleasure from destroying things, especially living things.” It has no ecology, background, sanity or reason for being, and likely would not benefit from them, it just likes Annihilating things and that is all it wants to do. A twist in the tapestry of the world and a gleaming contextless ambulatory disaster. Not bad.

just once in my life I want to say ‘call forth.. the ANNIHILATOR’

Exploring the Underdark

Things take an uptick here and its surprising, or unsurprising, how parallel to my own thought much of this is. We begin with a tour of underground features; Abysses, Caves, Dungeons, Gorges, Lakes, Rifts, Rivers, Seas, Shafts, Tunnels, Vaults and Volcanoes, which in this last section, does nothing to elucidate the Magma/Lava differentiation; what is lava encountered underground, but magma? What is Magma encountered in an open cave, but lava? Precisely when does water count as having left the tap?

From there into rocks and rock formations, including the classic trifecta of Sedimentary, Igneous and Metamorphic, to which we add MAGIMORPHIC rock formations - much could be done with the consequences of alternative geology and tectonics in a fantasy world, one far older than ours, and thus with a different arrangement of stone, or with magical warfare etc happening on the regular, with semi-regular portals to the Plane of this and that, D&D type Gods popping down to fundamentally alter reality for a certain place or time, and of the more Abrahamic, Tolkien-level God fundamentally changing the substance, history and nature of reality if, for instance, you sail too far West. (Discovering America is a sin.)

Then the Environment, climate, ecologies, plants and fungi, animal life. In almost every version of the Underdark the environment is still seperate from the solar cycle, as with ours, but is much higher in energy than our own cave systems. The answer is magic. The conception of the Underdark being ‘magically compressed’ appears in many tomes. This book imagines trees which feed on magic the way others do on sunlight. I can’t help but imagine what the leaf and branch shapes would be? Would the leaves have subtle dimensionally warped Escher shapes? The branches bend in directions you can’t go?

My own conception for this hyper-compression is that of the unification, compression and composting of multiple causal paths, the deeper in you go.

So for instance, if you go a mile down, civilisation is about 5,000 years old and modern humanity has only expanded since the last glacial maximum roughly 10,000 years ago.

But if you go two or three miles down, then there may have been 10,000 years of civilisation, perhaps even mutually-contradicting civilisational paths, either combined from alternate worlds or perhaps those paths wiped from ontology by divine hands, cannot be wiped down here, so if the world is ‘re-set’, this deepest layer of it cannot be re-set, and retains all the old programming and tombs and remnants of old dreams and old ideas, things which could never have happened, but did, but which are only remembered here.

Then if you go down four to six miles, you walk amongst the compressed relics of 20,000 years of civilisation, or 5,000 years X four, each semi-sperate yet interacting, interlaced and overlapping. This combined weight of time, experience and record, more than the surface could bear, is what creates the overwhelming magical compression of the Underworld. There is more down here than could be here, and more and more the deeper you go. Till if you go deep enough, perhaps the depths of all possible worlds combine into one vast realm of night.

That, at least, is my conception. We get ‘Underdark Hazards’, a limited but ok climbing and spelunking section, a bit on getting lost and then a long section on Encounter tables. I will be advising people make their own for Veins of the Earth

Finally for this ‘exploration’ section, we get into the once-again parallel conceptions of a somewhat ‘mythic’ underworld and the differences between this and the real-life underworld that inspired it.

A pseudo-natural aspect of the Forgotten Realms Underdark is that it is not contiguous, that is; it comes in patches and bounds, like islands, and its hard, sometimes impossible, to get from zone to zone. There are big areas of interconnection, but these are seperate to each other. Interesting and curious.

A classic situation for the ‘semi-mythic underworld’ is that its deeper than it should be, and the magma, water, caves and tectonics are much more spread out and interwoven than they ever should be. You can imagine our world like a densely layered cake, or lasagne, with interesting, but limited, layers of interaction. You have limestone caves, which were usually below, or on, the water table, but are now above it, then you have the water table, and its hard to explore beneath that underground, and then you have massively increasing pressure and heat, and then molten rock. Head to tail there is not that much actual depth to work with.

In the Forgotten Realms, and in VotE, there is way more depth and things are more spread out and intermingled, even at the cost of perhaps making less sense. Can you have a huge cavern beneath an ocean, with another (navigable) ocean in it? In our world, no, but in Fantasy, yes. Can you have navigable caves above, around, even below a magma flow? Not really, but in Fantasy, yes.

Geography - Faerun’s Underdark

A really nice piece of cartography and a slightly-frustratingly organised alphabetical section finish off the book, and much of it is this section. We are moving slightly more into a ‘Hasbro’s Invisible Cities’ vibe here; a list you can read like fiction, purely for the enjoyment of it. And its here that the propensity of the Forbidden Realms to build upon some very normative base concepts, but to keep building on them, to keep iterating and developing, and to bury the results of those developments deep in hidden corners of its world, helps it reach ramparts of innovative high fantasy you probably weren’t expecting going on. A lot of this is normative, some more interesting than you thought, and bits of it are very good.

Araaumycos - an entire kingdom-sized section of the Underdark is one fungal organism. It seems to be maybe possibly sentient, some of the time, and broadly neutral, or at least not expansionist. “On rare occasions enormous patches of Araumycos die, revealing ancient civilisations ripe for plunder beneath.” Even better, there is another, smaller, but aberrant and expansionist Fungal kingdom/entity/person.

Blingdenstone - A collapsed Deep Gnome city, but one of the ‘factions’ currently occupying it is ‘Ogremoch’s Bane’ a sentient cloud of magic dust. Its motivations are unclear but “In the back of the city, dozens of planar creatures of earth stand inert as the cloud swirls around them, whispering promises of victory and glory in Terran. Earth Elementals, mephits, Xorns, thoqquas, end even stranger creatures wait, still as statues.”

Cairnheim, Demense of the Dodkong - a lava tube village of giants ruled by a crafty 1,500 year old Stone Giant Liche with a magical crown, ruthless, but being very old, he still clings to an ancient Giant custom of hospitality, (limited, three days of safety). Of course you need historical knowledge to even guess this custom still exists and he’s not going to tell you.

Chaulssin; a ruined city, half within the plane of shadow, on a precipice above an abyss, now occupied by a House of Assassins. An Illithid city ruled by a council of Vampire Illithids who took over when their Elder Brain died - but they are all going slightly crazy from absorbing the thoughts and memories of so many other Illithids. Also home to the twisted Illithid philosopher Nurr’Korzahg who, after a moment of clarity, has started developing the notion that consistently trying to subvert and dominate all other forms of life might actually be not a great long-term strategy (several cultures and locations in this Map are made up of Illithid-hating ex-slaves, and they have at least two ‘Slave Races’ (Gythanki and Duergar) who ended up escaping and turning into absolute 100% Illithid HATERS, could our own policy of literally making enemies be at fault here?)

Deep Imaskar is a really neat addition to the legendarium; an ancient city of Wizards which hid beneath the earth after a major slave revolt. Now a self-sustaining pocket-kingdom with buildings growing from its gravatically-warped walls.

Imaskar is so secret that the glowing ‘sky’ of its cavern is a gigantic seal made specifically to keep it hidden, a seal so complex that studying and repairing it is equivalent to stargazing, a seal that affects reality so much that, wherever anyone is outside Imaskar, if they imagine Imaskar itself, the seal subtly and invisibly tugs at their thoughts, suggesting to them that the city is long-gone, if it was ever real, nothing but a rumour or fantasy. Imaskar is so secret that if people are chosen to leave, to complete some mission or for other reasons, they have the very memory of Imaskar erased from their minds, and are dropped in some random place far from the city; a true Wolfian hero, (or an RPG hero), who literally does not know where they are from, has a general sense that they have a mission, and at some point, will face a deeply buried command to return... somewhere, somehow. An interesting literary experiment.

Drik Hargunen; a city overwritten on every surface with the testament of a Duergar god, with complex runes of warding and subtle interlaced command phrases for the cities self-defence system interwoven in the ever-flowing words. To live here you must know how to read, know what to read and know deeply what not to read, which is why the Duergar allow no sighted slaves into the city-proper, instead they bring in blind Grimlocks, their hands tied to the handles of carts, so they can’t touch anything they shouldn’t.

Dupapen; a village of Aboleth slaves who, in the mental absence of their masters, have set up a thriving commercial concern. Some time ago the Aboleths ate a bunch of Gityanki and absorbed their minds and memories of intra-planar life. These memories are so vivid and intense that the Aboleths have been sitting around, blissed out and vibing for a decade. They tried breeding new Aboleths to manage the slaves but since each new Aboleth is born with the perfect memories of its parent, they had the same problem.

A near-extraplanar city made up of portals and spherical spaces in solid stone. If you can’t naturally swim through stone, don’t bother turning up.

Llurth Drier; Drow but poor and covered in mud.

Looblishar; a Kua Toa settlement overtaken by devotees of the Goddess of Darkness. Utterly lightless, only those with perfect Darkvision need even try to enter, though small this is the Axial point for a range of portals which reach to oceanic and above ground exit points all over the world. Creepy cultists of the Dark Goddess use Looblishar to move things and people and to engage their no-doubt whacky schemes. The kind of place you drop a patriot missile on as soon as you find out where it is.

Ooltul; a Beholder city forced into a surprising level of cosmopolitan toleration by an infestation of planar parasites who control the head Beholders; “Considering that Ooltrul is a city of evil geniuses dominated by monstrously unhuman aberrations, it is reasonably welcoming of outsiders.”

Oryndoll; an Illithid city dominated by a cult who’s modus-operandi is not only to acquire knowledge, but to specifically acquire knowledge that can then be removed from all other records or minds world-wide, so that this thing once known, now only they may know.

Reeshov; a Grimlock fortress town of former Illithid slaves who surround their settlement with complex traps, free slaves but trust no-one (the Illithids consistently probe their defences with mind-altered thralls and they know this).

Rringlor Noroth; “a city in only the most liberal sense of the word”, a city of Cloakers built into a gigantic bridge, part sculpted from shadow, crossing an immeasurable abyss. “The cloakers of Rringlor Nortoth spend much of their time continuously moaning and flying in great swooping orbits around a bridge of shadowstone”

I love these guys, they manage to be effortlessly more alien than either Kua Toa (cringe and flanderised) or Mind Flayers

“The entrance is a series of cracks and flat passages no more than 4 inches wide within the Shadowspan. Cloakers peel away from the circling mass at random intervals and wedge their bodies into the cracks to crawl into the city.”

“Sometimes, cloakers just lie on the ceiling and stare at the floor for hours;” - same.

One human sage ‘inhabits’ this ‘city’; “Saibh is not insane, but he is immersed so deeply into the cloaker mindset that he cannot easily return and carry on coherent conversations in Common...”

Undrek’Thoz; a Drow mega-city, a bunch of very different Drow cities connected by hidden portals and unified by a general government, though outsiders won’t necessarily know about the portals. The gates between different sections of the mega-city are set to allow no metal to pass through, (to limit the craze for assassinations), this has lead to a sophisticated arms-race in pets and poisons. Economically, the city is unified by vellum scrip. In a high fantasy setting, things like this portal-linked mega-city would be way more common; such settings, if allowed to run, would inevitably develop into something a little like high-energy science fiction.

Final Analysis; Adventure Locations, Infinity Engine, Nostalgic Emotions

A last section on ‘Dungeons’ lets the book down again; single entry, mono-path micro-maps with complex ‘trick’ enemies and substantial treasure. Nothing really like ‘dungeons’ and the section is not large, but it does have an entry for ‘Citadel of the Fiendish Slayer’ which is a great title if nothing else.

Of the differences I have with ‘Underdark’ at least some can be put down to preference in design. I am not of the Kind whom suffers for the Prestige Class, or who enjoys the ‘build’, let alone picking an absurdly specific Prestige Class and playing specifically towards that for god knows how many sessions. A ‘biography expressed through mechanics’ has no interest for me, I am not amongst the elect, yet, I cannot despise them. We are cousins if not kin and I have enough of the hyper-specificity autism tingle to refuse a wholesale rejection. Neither will I live in, or near their, ghetto of stats.

Of the monster section; it is simply bad. Of Underdark exploration and transit; parallel, and respectable.

The best part of the book is where it enters into the beautiful twilight dream of the Forgotten Realms, a place so normative in fantasy that it gets interesting again, there are lots of odd ideas buried here and there in this ‘eventide of gems’ (which I can never believe to be ‘lightless’, the conception of a true devouring dark and of adventuring for weeks within a fragile bubble of light is something this Underdark book, and perhaps every book of this type, fails at), and I see this dream, strangely, through the medium of the Infinity Engine and isometric RPGs like Baldurs Gate and Planescape: Torment.

Perhaps this is because such games were my only actual active interaction with 3.5 and its culture. Perhaps the physical design language of this engine seeped through into the worldbuilding for the entire setting. Wouldn’t be the first time there was conceptual counterflow. Deep Imaskar in particular seems set up for an ‘amnesiac protagonist’ RPG. The careful and quite charming visual design, including pseudo-crumpled ‘parchment’ edges, a boutique, or at least, rare, internal title font, and a handful of other things, speak of the fading edge of correct and comfortable warm and basking 1990’s page design. Summer.

Perhaps it is the sad, strange, isolated summer vibe I get from all these things and which seems to unify them. Of dreams engaged in darkened rooms while concrete bakes outside. Of a slight interior sadness and loneliness mixed with the deep possession of a fantastic land.

‘Stone Sphere’ is great.

(There is a side bar of ‘graffiti left around a portal’ so cringe it nearly made me want to kill myself.)

Take This You Fiends

This is the story of an encounter with Tunnels and Trolls by a guy who did not know that much about Tunnels and Trolls and still doesn’t, so if you are a T&T maven and don’t want to hear some half-interested newb bang on, then stop reading now. (Also; they are bringing out a new version of this soon, and by god my post has nothing to do with it! I literally stapled together the rules that I used from ancient box-sets and a PDF, and I ignored most of them.)

7.5

Somehow, I have the boxed set for the 7.5 edition of Tunnels & Trolls on my shelf. I must have bought back around 2009-2011 when I was getting interested in RPG’s . Yet more curious; I have a vague sense impression that I actually read these rules. I remembered nothing of them, but if sitting un-played on a shelf for fifteen years makes an RPG guilty then I don’t want to be innocent.

More recently I was listening to Chris McDowalls ‘Rule of Three’ podcast, where he interviews game makers about three favourite works, and he brought up the story of encountering someone at an Old-School meetup who had only ever played Tunnels and Trolls, and in fact, had only ever been in one campaign of Tunnels and Trolls, and had been gaming for years, this one game, this one world.

Clearly there is something going on with Tunnels and Trolls, I thought, and, foolishly, brought this up in a conversation with the Artist; “maybe that’s the secret, maybe we all should have been playing Tunnels and Trolls all along.”

“Oh, you should run it for us.”

Thus came the curse. My smallest statements are literally engraved on Votans Spear, and I am a pussy, a clock was ticking; could I read and absorb the Tunnels and Trolls ruleset AND develop a dungeon for Tunnels and Trolls in time, and well enough to run an actually functional game? (Watch my reality TV series to find out.)

(tldr; I can. Comments from two of the players, the ‘Rogue’ and the ‘Leprechaun’ are scattered through this post.)

Long hours of digging through this ruleset, producing documents to make sense of it, and writing dungeon ideas on the back of till receipts at work, which provoked some consternation when colleagues looked down to discover that I had been scribbling about Moon Mice and “THERE IS A COUNTDOWN”.

Character Generation

T&T Char Gen begins in a space broadly adjacent to Dungeons and Dragons, with Seven stats (in 7.5 at least) rolled 3d6 and in my case, down the line. Add Gold, a ‘Height and Weight table and so-on. When complete you get essentially three Core classes; Warrior, Wizards and Rogues. (There are more but I won’t get into those). So far so D&D.

What’s different?

TARO

“Remember, triples add and roll-over. This rule always applies in Tunnels and Trolls.” – Ken St Andre

It doesn’t always apply; one of a number of ways the 7.5 ruleset seems to be written by someone with an irregular supply of amphetamines. However, this fascinating and distorting rule probably should apply more fully across the ruleset.

If you roll a triple in Character Generation, you add everything together and roll again, adding the resulting value. If the second roll is also triples, you add and roll again. If the third roll is triples, you add, and roll again.

This means that while the general range of stats for an opening character is likely similar to D&D, it’s possible that one or more players may have one or more stats that are insanely ridiculously high, creating an utterly distorting effect on the game.

And in fact this did happen in the game we played, with one Rogue rolling an insanely massively high CHA score and very mid scores for everything else, resulting in one of the party being or a youngish Matthew McConaughey, roaming around the dungeon just charming the shit out of everyone.

This is important because, like a lot of things essential to T&T, it strongly effects the tone of the world in which you play, the nature of the challenges you face and a range of other things. The wilder the dice curve, the whackier the reality.

The Leprechaun – “T&T produces lawless, erratic game outcomes, but *appears to be* rigorously designed. There are a lot of rules but they don’t really work. The depthless complexity acts as a wax seal that legitimizes the game outcomes. In combat, you do a bunch of calculation and roll a big pile of dice, which is a ritual act that irreversibly moves the game timeframe forward one increment.”

Liz Darnforth

Kindred

Kindred is ‘Race’ in old D&D terms, and while it looks like earlier editions had a relatively narrow range of ‘normal’ Kindred you could be, the 7.5 edition has gone utterly loopy and included stat tables for a gigantic (literally, you can be a Giant), range of possible races, from Skeleton to Vampire to Dragon.

Almost all of these Kindred are measurably better than standard humans. Even Skeletons are a bit better. There are no gates or limits on what Kindred you can be. This means, if you are playing 7.5 as written, you can be literally almost anything and that almost all of these are better than standard human stats.

If you include one or two of these ‘hackable’ or ‘optimisable’ elements in a game ostensibly dedicated to a balanced experience then they are flaws, but if you flood the game with them, then you fundamentally alter the expectations for what kind of game it’s going to be. This is one of a wide range of ways in which Tunnels & Trolls is protected from the negative effects of being Tunnels and Trolls by the fact of it being Tunnels and Trolls, the games own anarchic spirit keeps it… stable?; if you are the kind of person who wants to min-max and powergame, (which you could theoretically do easily in T&T), why on earth would you be playing this loosy-goosey game?

I set bounds that no-one could play a Kindred too large to actually fit in the dungeon. We ended up with one very charismatic human rogue, one Leprechaun (size and weight reduction tables are included) and one Star-Obsessed and (below average for his people) strong dwarf with a BIG AXE.

Talents

Every PC gets one ‘talent’; a particular thing that they do, and this could also conceivably be power-gamed but generally is not. They roll a d6 for their talent value and add this to the stat being used when rolling for this particular thing.

Level

Your Level in T&T provides a number of benefits, and is based explicitly upon your highest essential stat. This means you can start play at Level Zero, Level One, Two, or even possibly Three, and that as your stats fluctuate through play, you can possibly change Level, back and forth, within the range of even one adventure. (NONE of the specifically-designed character sheets I saw online were built with the essential changeability of the PC stats in mind. You are better of just using notepaper.)

Loony Tunes Adventure Gang

It’s clear that through the 7.5 editions it took to reach me, T&T had been through a lot of rules changes and additions. As I will describe later, I think many of these are errors, or at least, non-optimal.

Two things I agree with fundamentally are TARO and the more-recent extended-Kindred chart. I actively want a Loony Tunes Adventure Party with a bunch of whacked-out and distorted stats and a range of weird presences in the game. (How would a Leprechaun react to hanging out with a Vampire?). I think it’s generally fine if someone with crap stats inflates themselves with a Kindred, so long as they actually play that role (remembering they are still a below-average member of their own Kindred). I didn’t set it as a hard rule but I would probably state next time that anyone who gets a TARO roll and a massive single stat, should stay human, but everyone else can pick a Kindred.

In its simplicity, adaptability, broadness of concept, lightness and gonzo-feel, T&T feels well-adapted to the ‘Island of Misfit Toys’ style of play. It also seems to suit well a ‘play whatever/whoever you want’ ethos. So long as you stick with it, and take it seriously (coherent and sustained), though not seriously (with tragic gravity). [The two forms of seriousness will prove a vitally important distinction going forward.]

(I also made the PC’s buy clothes out of their initial gold store, which kept them all relatively poor. Though gold doesn’t matter that much in T&T. (Also, TARO applies to your Gold Roll in Char Gen too, so one PC may just have ‘being loaded’ as their core trait.))

The Rogue - “I liked having to buy my own clothes using the gold generated by character creation, it was like starting out in Oregon Trail or something. I appreciate that the clothes list was long and carefully priced out and if I was in charge I would add even more carefully described clothing choices which could be used to define the character you are playing. What if you sunk it all into one really great jacket, no mechanical effects. Could you describe a jacket in such a way that it is really tempting even if you are gonna have to put that arbalest back on the shelf?”

Liz Darnforth

The Combat Sequence

Farewell happy fields, where joy forever dwells. Hail, horrors, Hail! The Tunnels and Trolls combat sequence makes no sense. Attempts to fix have made it worse.

Conceptually it is brilliant. Once it was simple, intuitive, somewhat baggy and clean to play. I think years of people asking questions (filthy nerds) has ruined it. I tried to boil it back to what I thought was the core; a battle is on, both sides roll all their dice; whoever gets the biggest number wins.

Adventurers and Monsters calculate these differently; Adventurers have Combat Adds derived from their physical stats, and whatever weapon they are using. Monsters have a Monster Rating, which breaks down to their dice rolled (The Monster Rating divided by 10), and their own Combat Adds (Half their Monster Rating). Confusingly, some posh and special Monsters can also have stats like Adventurers, but let’s not even get into that.

Everyone has a big pile of dice. Everyone rolls. Bigger is better.

Over time additions have been made, (as a result of questions). Some wise, most I think not.

One positive addition is ‘spite dice’; every roll of 6 on either side, always counts as damage. I think this was made to amend the horribly brutal attritional effect of these massive dice pools contending over multiple rounds, and it works ok.

Other additions are complex arrangements of specific damage set aside and re-integrated during the round to account for people sniping ranged targets or similar, and specific arrangements of spellcasting where damage from certain spells is accounted like a weapon and the effects of others are placed before-this-and-that etc.

I Ignored Almost All of This

I ran combat description-first, rules-light, quick and high consequence. It ended up not unlike a storygame or a Dowlain modern ruleset.

Surprise Rounds are a slightly weird thing in T&T, (if rounds are truly meant to be around 2 minutes long), and thankfully I was able to ignore them. Likewise I ignored sniping in or out of combat.

How I conceptualised it was like this;

First; describe fully where everyone is and what is going on as combat breaks out, be above all vivid, quick and physically exact. Go round the table asking, quickly, what each character wants to do, or “what do you want to achieve in the next two minutes”. PCs can combine actions, do tricks stunts, etc or anything they like, but they can’t take too long thinking about it Tunnels and Trolls does not respond well to planning.

Second; everyone rolls their dice and we add them all up.

Third; whichever side won inflicts damage, and I describe the events of these two minutes turn out largely as they intended. However, the T&T ruleset does say that the losing side of this can decide who on their own side takes what damage. This infers, and I applied it as such, that the losing side gets some vote in how exactly things turned out in these two minutes. They don’t achieve their aims but they do get to choose events relating to damage to their own side (though not whether they take damage at all).

Last; I tried to go for big, consequential swings in the description of events that would rapidly lead one side or the other to be disadvantaged, to flee, surrender, negotiate, be trapped etc, I did not want this shit going on too long.

Liz Darnforth

Why Ignore the Details?

The game does not seem to want to be played that way.

I think the inclusion of Ranged and Magic attacks being, at some points, their own special thing, is ultimately fucking stupid, as you are rolling to make these special pre-attacks (each of which requires their own segment of the round to work in) and then counting them towards the total value of the HPT? And then at the end, you focus special damage on the specific targets of the magic or Ranged attack? At this stage why are you not just going person-by-person?

Even the rules seem confused about this as the details seem to change from edition to edition.

It looks like the simple, basic concept of the opposed, simultaneous, dice rolls, has been subjected to so many tactical questions and faffing about that over time, it has developed so many exceptions, set-asides, layered sequences and so on that it has, in effect, become exactly as, or even more complex than an equivalent D&D combat turn.

But D&D has the saving grace of being sequential-by-person, so at least while you are faffing with big numbers you are doing them one after another. T&T has the elegant conception of simultaneous action, but that then divided, excepted, specified and detailed so much that now the DM deals with an equivalent cognitive weight to D&D and the initially non-intuitive simultaneous action of T&T at the same time. It seems to me the worst of both worlds.

I forwarded description, and tried to keep it forward. Everything that happens can only be allowed to make sense in terms of what has already been visually and spatially described in natural language. The results of dice rolls feed into this and are fed back out as more description. The vivid description of events fills the need for specificity that the rules either ignore or don’t do well. Most of all its meant to happen light and fast.

The Rogue - “I remember way back starting a D&D game with some friends who had never played before, and at first when we got into fights they would say all these wild ideas of what they were gonna do (’I’m gonna put my bow over his head and grab the string and shoot the arrow in his neck that way”) and then get discouraged as the rules generally would at best penalize for you for trying something different than: hit with sword, watch hp go down. Doing the combat as narrative first, even if that did not have very much to to do with the dice rolls, and then narrative again after all the rolls (deciding how the damage gets doled out) was kinda nice. I am surprised at feeling this way as I do not usually like story game rules.

Everyone goes at once feels more nervewracking & unpredictable as a player: instead of things slowing way down you are all making immediate guesses about what would be best to do, which feels more real than if you have to wait your turn & can adjust your actions based on what happened to the person who went first. On the other hand, every time we got into combat seemed to end after a single dice roll: either we got crushed & ran away or the opposite happened- which on the one hand is hugely superior to sitting around waiting for your turn to hit guy with sword, but sometimes made things seem anticlimactic: players all do one thing each, roll dice, cool that’s it evil is defeated. I guess one has to lean heavily on narrating what’s happened (either on the DM or player side) to make things properly impactful? It’s possible this was just on account of lucky rolls & combats could have taken longer? It seemed like our characters were appropriately balanced to the dungeon though (the leprechaun died)”

Rob Carver

The Leprechaun – “T&T combat as written is almost pathologically bad. We generally want things to be useable and simple; if a ruleset has complexity, each complication should justify itself in producing a better play experience. Instead, the rules work together to produce an appalling result. Rolling a large pool of dice that’s the same every “round” makes it likely that there’s a consistent result, so that combat is guaranteed to feel samey and yield similar outcomes from round to round. But there’s also a disastrous feedback effect: damage reduces your Strength, which gives you lower combat adds and less weapon access, so you roll fewer dice, so you lose faster and faster, and you have to do a bunch of paperwork to figure out how much worse you’re going to do each round.”

Running the Dungeon

it all began to go wrong when they re-named Ralph

Play Time

I came up with a relatively simple 12-room dungeon with a lot if diegetic ‘safety rails’ and potential in-world guidance. The Rogue told me that a normal group will only handle about four rooms an hour, if that, so I planned for two possible sessions of up to four hours each. In fact they cleared the thing in just over two hours. Apparently I run games ‘quickly’(?)

The Rogue - “Patrick DMs like he is driving a bus with a bomb on it.”

Rob Carver

“Take That You Fiend!”

People seemed to like the principal of ‘Saying the Spell Names Out Loud’. I felt like it kept the tone right.

The Leprechaun – “I agree that saying the spell names as though you’re casting them yourself is a splendid idea. You can’t cast a spell without literally saying the magic words.”

Post-Adventure System Issues

I only had to make a single, one-shot adventure so I was saved any of the scaling complexities of ‘how much gold is there’ or ‘what do you do with the gold’? Or any worries about ‘what happens after this adventure? T&T (at least in 7.5) bases advancement on ‘Adventure Points’ which you hand out regularly, mid-adventure, and which can be used, mid-adventure, to improve PC’s stats, which effects what level they are. Gold or treasure is mainly used for buying spells or equipment.

The Leprechaun – “The one idea I was interested in was gaining lots of XP and spending it incrementally whenever you wanted. It really changes the texture of the game to be getting these drips of XP and feel like you could realistically, in one session, change something meaningful about your character. This is also a place where narrative and ruleset dovetail nicely: players can spend their XP to level up a given stat *right before they need it*, which feels like the character rising to meet a challenge.”

Rapid Monster Improvisation

T&T’s Monster Rating is a raw, single number from which are derived both the number of d6’s rolled and the ‘adds’. The ‘adds’ are reduced as the Monster suffers damage while the dice are not. This is perhaps even simpler than the Hit Dice concept and makes inventing, moving and shifting around monsters for change and improvisation relatively easy. It does result in some big dumb dice pools though.

Big Dumb Dice Pools

Everything is based on the d6 and everything is Dice Pools, rolled in big piles, simultaneously. The PC’s add up theirs and the DM adds up the monsters. It’s a lot of adding up. I am not sure how this will actually work once you get into the Monsters with really big numbers or the really big amounts of monsters. I think I recall in some Ken St’Andre ruleset, seeing his rules of thumb for managing huge dice pool numbers, which was essentially multiplying smaller pools, which is fine, but also; it’s your ruleset dude.

The Leprechaun – “3d6 * 6 is a *dramatically* different roll from 18d6 and would totally change the texture of the game. I kept finding things like this in the T&T ruleset. Most early TTRPGs seem “game design naive”, even most modern TTRPGs do. This can make them characterful, or introduce some loveable features by accident, but can also lead to miserable gameplay patterns.”

Liz Darnforth

Growing and Shrinking

Probably inspired by the ‘small’ and ‘large’ tables for character generation in 7.5, I included a shrinking rules in the dungeon. While I may have intended to use some complex coherent system based on alterations to the core stats, in fact I just eyeballed it, using patched together rule-ideas that were systemically inelegant but procedurally quick and functional; I made it up. T&T’s super-simple core stats make it easy to adapt things relatively quickly.

‘Lightness’ and Speed

They re-named the Dragon Continent :-(

It seems to me that the speed of T&T combat, combined with the relative lightness and light comedy of its setting, are key to how this is supposed to work.

The description of events plays a huge shaping part in deciding what seems reasonable to happen in a fight, i.e; is it reasonable that one guy might hide out in a corner and try to snipe with arrows? Is everyone going to end up in a big melee or are they spread out or separated? Is the environment going to do something odd?

The enormous potentiality of this simultaneous-resolution roll is only moderated by a mutual, vivid, lively and quick description of events.

Put simply, this shit falls apart rapidly if you are autistic or power-gamy about it, and gamers do tend to be autistic about everything. There should never be arguments over numbers or spazzy autistic D&D arguments over precisely what the rules should allow – if it seems like it makes sense then it can be done, or tried with a Saving Roll, or if not just a flat ‘no’. If this decision or roll didn’t go well, there will be another along soon! Very soon! And another and another and another.

Conversely, if you are lively engaged, largely trusting, and more committed to acting out an adventure than managing risk though careful play, then you may get a great boon; of a rapid, complex unfolding and multifarious range of combat events which might never happen in another game.

There must be a rapid, and easy exchange of description and descriptive power between the Players and DM, especially in combat. It’s like dancing. It only works if you go in moving and go forward. If you hold back and try to plan and limit risk, or hyper-plan, you fail.

The Leprechaun – “Despite working on TTRPG systems myself, I think the ruleset barely factors into how good a given game session is. I had a wonderful experience playing Mausritter a few years ago and that game is rancid. My actual play experience with T&T was excellent, because you’re a great DM, and [The Rogue], [The Dwarf], and I are good players. I still think I would have preferred a system where every single outcome was decided by coin flip. But then my choice to be a leprechaun wouldn’t have been legitimized by doing a bunch of arithmetic with tables!”

The slight silliness of the setting, along with the ridiculous range of possible ‘Kindreds’ (I can play a Leprechaun with a Bardiche), and the slightly light tone, all help to control and manage the kinds of personality drawn to the game and the way that they play. (A meta-game effect like a Gonzo X-Card).

I feel like getting rid of this (slight) silliness and trying to make the setting and the game answer more ‘normie’ Fantasy questions actually ruins it. The absence of tangles and argument is just an effect I can describe of a cause it’s hard to define; it is the spirit of the game. It’s why the Dragon continent is shaped like a Dragon and (should still be) called ‘Ralph’. If you don’t like the idea of running, or playing on, a ‘Dragon Continent’ shaped like a Dragon, and called ‘Ralph’, or of a Skeleton teaming up with a Dwarf, a Vampire and an Elf, then the game has done its job.

The Rogue - “Maybe it is not so important that a game system have any particular level of seriousness as that it have like, any discernable character at all? While there’s a utility in basic fantasy tropes ( everyone knows what a dwarf is like so it is easy in your personal character to subvert or exemplify it) most world building in game systems ends up just being like the collecting of influences listed on such as a Kickstarter page as a reassurance that you won’t find anything too surprising or new here.

Anything in the games rules/setting that is discernably created by a real idiosyncratic human ( whether that is being unfashionably comic or having edges that are not sanded off entirely) is a chance to have an actual experience of art that’s your own interaction with another real person not with a corporation or like sales goals and it’s worth forgiving a lot of shakiness of rules and so on to get that.”

This is also built into the nutty world-creation of ‘Tunnels and Trolls; Trollworld is literally built on wizards. Or at least, huge numbers of whacky wizards have inhabited it over time, burrowed into its crust and disappeared under the earth, building their own strange ‘magical realms’, which form the nuclei of, one would assume, huge tunnel complexes. In in-world history is literally ‘a wizard did it’. Gonzo dungeon design is the actual geology of Trollworld. Gonzo, or a Toybox, or very ‘Dungeony’ gamified non-naturalistic dungeons work well with this ruleset and play experience. It’s not a ‘flat’ game, either in its aesthetic, or the probability curves that underlie it. I am not sure if its modern re-creators have grasped this.