Interview: Ken St. Andre (Creator of Tunnels & Trolls)-

(c) Copyright 2009 Ken St. Andre and Kyrinn S. Eis All Rights Reserved

The following is an interview with Tunnels & Trolls creator, Ken St. Andre, conducted via e-mail and re-printed here with his knowledge and permission.


* Timeshadows: Hello, Ken. Welcome to The Grand Tapestry. The bar wench will bring you a frosty mead in a moment. Do you mind if we get right into the interview?

Hello, Kyrinn,
Thanks for showing me The Grand Tapestry. Can't we just stick to the mead, best drunk warm, my lady, and skip the interview? Ah, I remember swilling mead with the Society for Creative Anachronism when I was a young and solitary troll--those were good times. To tell the truth, I'd much rather cavort with the barmaid than ramble on about ancient glories, but I guess an old troll has to take whatever pleasures are offered to him. So ask away . . .

* T: Alright, then. I know from other interviews, as well as our personal correspondence, that your original Point of View as regards Tunnels & Trolls was that of the fantasy titles that comic book publisher Marvel (and DC?, others?) put out in the '60-70's. Do you mind listing a few of the titles?

Marvel Comics made history with the release of Conan the Barbarian comics back in about 1970 with art by Barry Smith. I was already a big Conan fan, and I started buying them with the very first issue, which I still have somewhere in my back room. Conan was popular and other swords and sorcery comics appeared. Lin Carter's Thongor appeared in Creatures on the Loose even before Conan. D. C . Comics did an adaptation of the Grey Mouser and Fafhrd. I'm not going to do a history of fantasy in comics here, but there was plenty of good stuff available back in the 70s. I never saw a really good version of Lord of the Rings though (I saw some not so good ones).

* T: Which of those were your favourites, and what made them appealing?

I bought every sword and sorcery item I could find in those days. It wasn't as common as it is now. Conan, in any form, was my favorite, but I identified a bit with the Grey Mouser and also with Elric of Melnibone. Not that I was as short as a child or an albino by any means, but I never had the muscles of Conan, and always figured I'd live by my wits instead of my brawn in any fantasy world.

What made them appealing? Adventure, monsters, scantily clad women. All that carried over from my childhood love of Tarzan. Bookish, nerdy honor student Ken St. Andre would have done anything to be a fantasy hero--anything except join a gym and actually build muscles.

* T: With that knowledge, the 'explosive' Ability-score-growth of T&T makes more sense. Do you think that employing the 2-point per level Ability scheme found in Michael Stackpole's Mercenaries, Spies & Private Eyes would 'work' with T&T, or is the game intrinsically cinematic and for a lack of better word, 'heroic'?

Stackpole's MSPE was an attempt to do two things with T & T. He/We wanted to show that the game system could be used in any setting--and what is further from classic fantasy than 20th century detective/espionage fiction? And we wanted to add the whole concept of Skills to the Tunnels and Trolls rules. Mike jumped in and did all that with MSPE, and it worked well enough, but it never really satisfied me or caught my interest. Perhaps it's because I'm more of a swordsman than a shooter. In my youth I fenced (with foils and sabers), I wielded a 2-handed greatsword for the SCA kingdom of Atenveldt, I took archery in college and actually made the archery team for a semester--that despite having terrible vision. I could shoot, too, but I didn't shoot much or often.

As for the game being cinematic, imho, all role-playing games are inherently cinematic. They are crammed with fascinating characters and dangerous situations. The difference is in the game masters. A dull GM like me reduces it to an evening of jokes and dice rolling while a cinematic GM like Larry DiTillio (he of Babylon 5 fame) will deliver an adventure that you remember all your life.

* T: May I take us back a bit further?

Blow in my ear, and you can take me anywhere. :)

* T: demure smile

You have to understand that I was already designing my own games, (I did a Star Trek board game with competing empires that we spent many a Friday evening playing at the Cosmic Circle meetings) and writing my own fiction long before I ever heard of Dungeons and Dragons. I was heavily into fantasy, and hoped to write it for myself some day. Then around the end of 1974 I began to hear about this fantasy game called Dungeons and Dragons, but in the godforsaken wilderness that was Phoenix at the time, in the days before the internet, something you heard about in California was kind of hard to find in Phoenix. I was eager to play it, but clueless.

Then, on a gaming night visit, I finally found someone with the original boxed set of Dungeons and Dragons that he was showing off. No one was playing the game. Nobody knew how yet. But I borrowed it and read through it for a couple of hours. A lot of it made no sense to me. I had no background in miniatures, so talk about moving so many inches per turn was just gibberish. And the dice! What the heck was a 4-sided die, or a 10-sided one. Eight, twelve, and twenty sides!!! Not possible. At least, not obtainable by me at that time.

But I came away from my reading with a basic idea of what the game was supposed to be about. Adventurers invading the strongholds of wizards and monsters and coming back with treasure. Hey, this was just like the Conan stories I loved. I had to have this game, and if I couldn't easily get one, I wasn't about to wait. I would invent my own. And I wouldn't just copy what I'd read, but I'd make what seemed logical to me. Yes, adventurers needed attributes, and those attributes would be Strength, Intelligence, Luck, Constitution, Dexterity, and Charisma. What the heck good was Wisdom? Luck made a lot more sense. And they would need weapons and armor and magic. So, off to the library to research weapons and monsters. What does armor do? It absorbs damage. It doesn't make you harder to hit. Armor makes you easier to hit--it's heavy and slows you down, but if the hits bounce off, you don't get hurt.

And I used my antique typewriter and I wrote down everything about how to make a character, and how to make a monster and I created a dozen pages or so of something I could use to create that fantasy gaming experience that I had been hearing about. I tried it on my friends. They liked it. They kept borrowing and copying my notes, which were getting ragged fast, and they gave me ideas I hadn't considered at the beginning--like other kindreds. Why not play elves, and dwarves, and hobbits, and leprechauns? How could I have overlooked missile weapons? What do you do if you're in trouble--saving rolls were born--all on luck originally, but it didn't take long to generalize the idea to the other attributes. And it got to be such a pain having people borrow my notes that I vowed to produce a rulesbook for everyone. And by midsummer, with a lot of help from my friends, Bear Peters, Marc Anthony, Steve McAllister, Rob Carver, I got the first edition of Tunnels and Trolls typed up and illustrated and pasted together, and off to the Arizona State University print shop. 100 copies.

Basically, I saw a need, I jumped in and did something, and I got a deal with a gaming company--Flying Buffalo--that got my game out in the wider world beyond my own circle of friends. In those days everyone was creating their own versions of Dungeons and Dragons, but most people didn't publish, and their versions were closer to the original than mine, probably because they had played the original and understood it better. Thus, most of their variants perished and were absorbed back into the mainstream of D & D while T & T varied ever further from that basic inspiration to become the game it is today.

* T: What role do the fans of Tunnels & Trolls have in the release of, first, 7th Edition, and more recently, 7.5?

Fans provide demand. The idea that people would want the game enough to buy it is very inspiring to a writer/game designer. They also provide encouragement and feedback. T & T never really had any playtesting. I put it out there, and people played the games. If it didn't work for them, the rules say go ahead and change it to suit yourself. If someone told me how and why it didn't work, I might try something different via house rules which in turn might show up in the next edition. The current rate of advancement by using adventure points came from fans. 100 times the current attribute was way too slow for tournament games at a convention, but fans loved the ten times current attribute rate. Thus, to take STR from 9 to 10 only required 90 adventure points, and you could get that many in a couple of fights easily. Fans caused that change. Talents came about in 7.0 because of a perceived need (from fans) for Skills in T & T, and because I didn't like the mechanical sort of way Stackpole implemented them in MSPE.

* T: As an avid reader, I know you have a fairly expansive, favourite authors list, but I was wondering if you would share a few of them with us, as well as which stories/novels in particular you were most inspired by?

My favorite authors are all adventure writers: Edgar Rice Burroughs, J. R. R. Tolkien, Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock, Ken St. Andre (heh) and in comics I'd have to say my all-time favorite was Roy Thomas. There are hundreds of others that I like and admire very much, but those would be my tops.

* T: You have published fiction in Mage's Blood & Old Bones, and in your first novel, Griffin Feathers. How was that experience, and can we look forward to more fiction from you in the near future?

I always wanted to be a writer. I always thought I was. I've just been working a bit harder at it this last few years. And yes, there will be more fiction from me, right up until I die. Right now, you can read the continuing adventures (diary) of Lerotrahh on Twitter. It's fun, telling a story, 140 characters at a time.

* T: I recently saw your Top 25 RPGs list, and noticed several similarities to mine, even excepting our favourite KSA titles such as Monsters! Monsters! and Chaosium's Stormbringer. Tunnels & Trolls placed in the Top-10, didn't it?

Tunnels and Trolls came in 8th (behind 3 versions of D & D which I think should have ll been lumped together) in the RPGBlogII list of the top 25 rpgs. He got 150 responses, and I mobilized Trollhalla at the end to vote for T & T. Nothing like a little ballot box stuffing.

* T: One of our Top-10's, both, was MAR ('Phil') Barker's Empire of the Petal Throne (originally published by TSR). What comes to mind when you think of that product or Tekumel in general?

I heard about Tekumel from the beginning, and I love the world creation that Barker did with it. It's easy to see pre-Columbian and Japanese influences on the game along with other exotic cultures. Most of my familiarity with Tekumel comes from Barker's excellent novels about it--those I really admired. Barker and I exchanged letters once only back in the days before email, where he advised me to be more open-minded about other people's creations. I've tried to take that advice, but I never became a Barker follower.

* T: What is your current level of involvement with Tunnels & Trolls? Are there new T&T products by KSA being produced? Where does T&T live these days? Can you tell us more about Outlaw Press' as a producer of current and older-edition products?

I am more heavily involved with T & T these days than ever before. A lot of it comes from running the fanclub a Trollhalla
Jim Shipman of Outlaw Press is always after me to write stuff. With all the encouragement I'm getting, it's easy and fun to turn out new stuff for the game. The creation of T & T 7 and 7.5 has given me back that sense of evolution in the game that we had in the early years when I went through 5 editions in 8 years.

Outlaw Press is the creation of James L. Shipman, and it has figured prominently in the renaissance of Tunnels and Trolls in the marketplace. The best thing any T & T fan could do (or even if you're just curious) is visit their website and look around.

* T: Thank you, Ken St. Andre.

Thanks for giving me this chance to talk, Kyrinn. But I've probably put my foot as far into my mouth as I can get it for now. Now, where did that barmaid with the mead get to? (Trollgod looks around for action.)

End

Grocery List of the Mind-

Aberrations (Shre <'Chaos'>) and Latent Mutants have been fleshed-out a good deal, and still exist within any given Ethnicity. This follows the treatment Humans received, including Eugenics and Imperial Legacy.

I need to pay attention to my spell lists, or simply add new spells and let Referees use their own good sense (perhaps with a recommended/not-recommended list like Privateer Press did with Iron Kingdoms).

Which then brings me to gear and loot, namely, weapons and armour...

Today I thought to parse out the pertinent Ethnic/National sections of the history and place them within the character creation section to further condense the information. Stat-block, then description, history brief.
I am uncertain what to recommend regarding the variable costs for the Ethnicities; whether to count the cost into the starting Design XP, and if so, at what effect on the starting total?

I have been separating and collating the various portions of character generation, and plan to 3-ring bind them with the Exploration & Adventuring, Creatures, and What I have of the Gear and Loot sections. I may achieve my month's-end goal for the entire text, but I will have to be very diligent.

Progress: Ken's Interview-

Due to a rather large impromptu sporting event in Trollhalla over the weekend, Ken St. Andre has been detained, and has sent dispatch that the e-mail interview is now under-way, as it were.
When it arrives, I will post it, post-haste.

Friday Pre-Game Monologue-

Hi,

* Ken has said that my questions actually forced him to think, so that is causing the delay. Let us take that as a positive sign.

* I have been expanding the role of the Ancients in shaping the PCs through four d% rolls to determine actual heritage, and the possibility of Imperial Legacy. Through this, I hope the little hints help form the image of the evolution of the setting, and how unique aberrations can develop into systematised mental routines or defining physical traits.
This is one reason why I think the subsequent book on Aberrations is necessary, as the full extent of the genetics-theme in the setting could easily drown the fantastical/adventurous, if included in the core rules -- and, may not even appeal to some play groups. By packaging it separately, it can play whatever role a given group assigns it in their game.

* It looks as if it was propitious timing for me to have started the APG secondary-characters, as Tybalt's player will not be present, again.
The new Apothecary 2ndary was happily fortunate to have rolled as an ancestor a Medical Officer, and along with the odd dreams and deja-vu, she gains a degree of competence at related Tests.
Ashta's ancestor was a Ship's Superstructure Technician, which immediately suggests a link to the Yirinn/Dryvv, and makes her Western Isles Vrun ancestry even more interesting.

* I need to think of which creatures will make the final cut of the book. Recent grog-hive-mind consciousness has informed me of the importance of a select and defining group of regular miscreants and inimicals upon whose weapons the PCs may fling themselves.

* Thinking of where I ought to look among my stuff, to find my copy of Jorune.

* When this work is complete, I think I'd like to run a Mercenaries, Spies & Private Eyes - Villains & Vigilantes crossover game. Likely just a mini-series (5-session?) affair, with pre-generated characters, likely on based on my most loved Bill Willingham Elementals setting.

[Milieu][RPG] (Alkemikal Lords)-

(c) Copyright 2007, Kyrinn S. Eis All Rights Reserved

THE ALKEMIKALS-


AETHER: LORD HYPERION
CREATURE: GHOST

+ LIGHTNING: PRINCE THUNDER
CREATURE: BOLT

SHADOW: LORD SHADOW
CREATURE: SHADOW WOLF

AIR: THE MOON-FAERY SISTERS
CREATURE: SYLPH

FROST: LADY ARCTISE
CREATURE: ARCTIC FOX

SMOKE: CHANCELLOR SNUFF
CREATURE: MATCHSTICK MAN/WOMAN

FIRE: PRINCE WICK
CREATURE: SALAMANDER

STEAM: PANT THE IT
CREATURE: LECH

WATER: PRINCESS WAVE
CREATURE: NAIAD

SILT: LORD WORM
CREATURE: GRUE

DUST: MR. DUST
CREATURE: DUSTDEVIL

EARTH: PRINCE TREMOR
CREATURE: GNOME

GLASS: PRINCESS VAIN
CREATURE: VISION

RADIANCE: PRINCE LUCENT
CREATURE: SPECTRAL RAY

- LIGHTNING: PRINCESS NYX
CREATURE: VAMPIRE

VOID: MISTRESS ABYSS
CREATURE: CHAOS

Bulletin Board Post (BBP)-

* I have amassed a small book of mutation tables from various editions of various games, and now need to distil a list for inclusion in the RPG, while the rest get reserved for a potential subsequent product.

* Ken St. Andre has been kind enough to be interviewed, and I will post that soon -- likely this week.

* Re-focusing on the essential list of topics that still need to be covered for UWoM, using BFRPG as a comparison of what to include and what to leave out.

* Further the wargaming rules outline.

[RPG] Critter (Limited OGC)-

(c) Copyright 2009 Kyrinn S. Eis

The statistics block is designated Open Gaming Content under the terms of the Open Gaming License version 1.0a.

Qetswn ('Exceedingly Subtle, FAST, Wise Spirit')-
]OGC[
Fight Dice: 1+2 to 8+16 depending on age
Resolve: (+8 + FD)
Defence/Armour: variable: (+12 + FD +1d6/1d6EM)
AB: (+1 + FD)
# Attacks: 2 By Weapon Type/Claw-Claw-Bite/Bite
Damage: Light-weapons/1d4 + .5 FD/1d6 + .5 FD
Move: 40 x FD' LoS Phase Travel, at will
Organisation: Family (2 adults, 1d4 kits)
CT: (+5 + .5 FD)
Loot: +67% Types IV-I
XP: (75 - 1,875 Base) + (42 x FD)
]OGC[
These sleekly-angled, long and lean creatures are capable of both upright and quadrapedal locomotion, and have three-fingered hands with opposable thumbs and padded palms and digits that terminate in claws of iron. The Qetswn are rather adept with their natural weaponry which extends to their toothy bite, but prefer the Shizar (thrusting Rapier) or the Brumshal (Cutlass). Clothing tends to be loose and easily shed, and often includes a long coat and a broad-brimmed hat with a rust-coloured feather tucked in its band.
Qetswn are vulpine (fox-like) in appearance and behaviour and rarely settle down in an area if it is heavily populated, although they will gladly traverse a metropolis in search of their victims. Their usual tactic is to disguise themselves with their coat and hat and operate near taverns and docks, as well as other areas frequented by prostitutes. Depending on the 'clientèle' either a female or male Qetswn will move forward toward the client, while the mate will co-ordinate and attack as soon as the trap is sprung.
Victims are then raced off to a feeding ground, where the parents ingest the food for transport and delivery to the kit(s). It is through this contact and systemic familiarity with the victim that the Qetswn's remarkable Humanesque ability gains a broader pallet, for it is the way they are able to assume a generic human-like appearance, in face and full body. Feeding humans to their young, early, provides a great aid in their survival and propagation. It lasts for (24/FD -- meaning it is easier for a younger Qetswn to maintain their human form than it is for an older creature) hours before another human must be eaten to re-activate the extremely taxing ability.
Qetswn are only injured by High Energetic or Magicked weapons.