Wednesday, October 31, 2012

TrollsZine! #6 Has Landed!

TrollsZine! #6 has landed!

The sixth issue of the fan-created magazine for Tunnels and Trolls™, edited by Dan Hembree, contains 58 pages of quality content brought to you by the fans of the game for absolutely free. This issue features two solo adventures, “Night Walk in the Wild Woods” by James Fallows and “Soul Survivor” by Sid Orpin, a GM adventure, “Ice Exile” by Mark Thornton, and a short story, “Old Kramm” by Roy Cram. TrollsZine! #6 also includes articles on obtaining food for adventurers, acquiring henchmen for solo delvers, alternate armor rules, an NPC elven wizard description, a short, one-room GM scenario, and more.

Contributors to TrollsZine! #6 include Roy Cram, E. P. Donahue, James Fallows, Dan Hembree, Paul Ingrassia, David Moskowitz, Stefan Jones, Sid Orpin, Mark Thornton, and Justin Williams. TrollsZine! #6 is amazingly illustrated by Darrenn E. Canton, Alexander Cook, Patrick Crusiau, E. P. Donahue, James Fallows, Jeff Freels, J. Lambert, Simon Lee Tranter, David Ullery, and M. E. Volmar, with cover art by Patrick Crusiau.

TrollsZine! is a Trollbridge production brought to you with the kind support of Flying Buffalo Inc., Ken St. Andre, and Rick Loomis.

Get you digital copy of TrollsZine! #6 for FREE at the Flying Buffalo storefront at RPGNow.

I would like to thank all of the writers, artists, and copy editors that have helped to make TrollsZine! possible. All of the material is freely donated by these talented and creative individuals. I hope that I have done their work justice.

Now go get your copy!

Friday, October 26, 2012

New Elder Tunnels and More from Peryton

Peryton Publishing has released their latest issue of Elder Tunnels. This is their annual Halloween issue, and it's a good one. It features a solo adventure, "Curse of the Three-Eyed Stone," by David Crowell of H'rrrothgarrr's Hovel, a GM adventure, "Junior's Return," by David Moskowitz (author of Amulet of the Salkti), and two monster descriptions, "The Bone Lords" by Peryton's own Tom Loney and "Woe Hound" by Jerry Teleha of The Delving Dwarf. Obviously the theme of this issue is horror, "Junior's Return" in particular; it is not for the squeamish. At only $5.99 for the pdf it's quite a bargain.

Also "recently" released by Peryton Publishing is When Good Games Go Bad, a solo adventure by Roy Cram author of the T&T solos Mistywood, Gamesmen of Kasar, and The Old Dwarf Mine. Good Games is a science fiction solo adventure intended to be a sequel to Gamesmen of Kasar and uses the New Khazan sci-fi T&T supplement by Tom Loney. Like many T&T solo adventures published recently, Good Games also includes expanded background information and notes to turn the solo into a game master adventure. Good Games features a color cover by Jeff Freels as well as a couple of interior B&W illustrations. A pdf will set you back a mere $3.00.

Not recently published (August actually), but recently purchased by me is the GM adventure Hot Nights in Lowhollow, an adventure by Tom Loney set in Scott Malthouse's (The Trollish Delver) Peakville setting. This is described as an "in-between" adventure in which characters can spend some time exploring the town of Lowhollow. Who says you have to go crawl into some dank caves or crumbling ruins to find trouble? Hot Nights lays out notable places, people, and events in the town of Lowhollow, as well brief descriptions of several scenarios to run players through. While not heavily fleshed out, this book provides a nice starting point for some great adventures. You can get a pdf of this one for only $2.25.

As a side note for those who think that there are no published GM adventures for Tunnels and Trolls, here are three.

You can find all of these fine T&T items at the Peryton Publishing web store.

Saturday, October 20, 2012

My Current House Rules Part 3: Character Creation

For the third installment of this series of posts, here are my currently favored House Rules for character creation. Once again, these are modifications to the 5th edition rules, so some of them are standard rules using the 7th edition rules.

Each character has the standard six attributes (Strength, Intelligence, Constitution, Dexterity, Luck, and Charisma) as well as Wizardry.

I like to have a separate attribute for powering spells as I stated in my last post on Magic-related House Rules.


To generate attributes, roll 3D6 seven times and arrange the scores in the order desired. You may re-roll any 3s.

I don't typically follow the "assign 3D6 in order" rule. Giving the player the option of assigning values to specific attributes allows more customization of characters. One thing I like to stress in my games is that there are no "dump stats." Every attribute is valuable. Any attribute may be called upon for a Saving Roll. If everyone has a low Charisma, for example, there is going to be trouble.

Allowing players to re-roll any natural 3s that come up, since I don't allow TARO, prevents utterly useless attributes.


Rogues start with one randomly determined (1d10) first level spell.

This gets back to some previous posts that I made about 5th edition rogues. I think that they should start with at least one spell (as they now do in 5th edition), but I like the idea of making the spell random with the idea that the rogue came upon the knowledge in a less than intentional way.

Everyone starts with warm dry clothes and a backpack (a 5 gp value!).

This is just a gift that I like to give. Of course, players still need to make sure that they purchase some footwear with their starting gold.


Simplified weapons and armor list.


I've presented this table in a previous post, and in implementing it I like it a lot. Keeping track of the dice, adds, cost, weight, and attribute requirements for the exhaustive weapons and armor lists can be a chore. This system makes it easy and it certainly speeds up character creation. Players are welcome to call their general weapon type whatever they like. So a "sword" can be a broadsword, saber, scimitar, or rapier; but they all have the same stats. This system also makes it easier for the GM to equip any opposition and stock shops.