I recently was asked to review the T&T ‘A new Age’ Quickstart Guide. I wasn’t around when T&T came out, it was quite a bit before my time so I never really experienced it, but I can recognise a triumphant return when I see one.
Tunnels and Trolls isn’t a new game, it’s actually often cited as the second of the ‘modern’ RPG systems ever published, being as it was a kind of more player friendly and accessible take on a system like D&D. The original version was published in 1975, but since 2015 T&T has been a little neglected, as it was being held in limbo by licensing issues.
Recently though, it seems Rebellion managed to get a hold of the ownership, and for anybody who knows their catalogue that’s generally a source for cautious optimism, well I can say such optimism would be well placed.
Scene Setting
The Quickstart Guide starts out (after a short summary of what to expect in a roleplaying game) with a short history of the world of T&T, the ‘Trollmark’. It’s a very compelling snapshot into a land of giant slumbering monsters that was ravaged by a prolonged eclipse when the earth quaked and the sky split under the onslaught of elder creatures that only wake in the sustained absence of light. The world feels a lot more mysterious than many other RPG settings because it never over-explains itself, it hints at its bounds and gives you snippets of a time gone by where great empires stocked their libraries with knowledge and their vaults with gold, empires that were buried in the near apocalypse that occurred, promising the players great treasures if they can brave the deeps to find them.
It’s a very well written and interesting setting that doesn’t fall into the trap of being formulaic or too stereotypical of the genre, even though it contains many of it’s staples. It feels like something that has taken influence from folklore, or from the spirit of writers like Tolkien's work, rather than just directly ripping ideas. It’s as a result a lot fresher, while still having the familiar promise of a fantasy RPG.
Visual Presentation:
The Quickstart Guide features some really nice art that compliments the airy folk-fantasy feel of the setting wonderfully. Illustrations are drawn in bold lineart with soft colours that makes forms stand out while remaining slightly ephemeral and fairytale esque. The Characters are especially interesting, with many varied fantasy races and styles of dress, it helps to make the trollmark feel like a place with a real history behind it and different cultures that inhabit it.
The layout of the book is also excellent, it’s stylised and has a lot of decoration, but is also incredibly easy to read and set out in a way that your eyes are naturally guided through the important pieces of information. It makes itself easy to comprehend without looking like a chemistry textbook.
How the Game Plays:
The T&T system is very easy to get into, it’s snappy and lends itself to shorter sessions, but can be used well in longer campaigns too. The system uses D6s to make checks, usually in a fixed manner (1,2,3 being failure, 4,5,6 being success) that can be modified by the difficulty of checks and some skills, the player rolls as many dice as they have points in the skill being used or tested, which means that the better you are at something the more individual chances you have to succeed rather than increasing the value of the rolls, this means that every character technically has the same chance to succeed individual rolls, but more capable characters get more attempts in general.
The System also incorporates something called ‘exploding dice’, where if you roll multiples of the same number you get to add dice to an ‘explode pool’ that is rolled separately, and can again chain to another pool if more doubles are rolled. This means you can often have cool chain reactions occur which are very satisfying and can be useful to pass particularly difficult checks (though explode pool dice often carry risks with them, and can’t be paired with dice from outside their pool).
This system is really quick, fun, and lends itself well to oneshots, but there’s plenty of depth here for those who want to play a longer campaign, and the straightforward combat lends itself much better to storytelling than the sometimes tedious number crunching of more in depth systems.
The Quickstart Guide explains all this really well, and in a way in which even players that are completely fresh to the concepts of RPGs should be able to understand, walking you through the decision making process of checks on both the player and games master sides. It explains how the different interactions work and even contains snippets of an example game to better allow people to visualise what actually goes on in a round of combat.
Characters and Campaigns:
The Quickstart Guide by it’s own admission doesn’t contain all the classes and races that the main rulebook will, but it gives you more than enough to figure out what kind of character you might want to play in a T&T campaign. It also contains a small fully premade introductory session for you to try the game out with a few friends. It does a great job at allowing you to see what’s on offer in a campaign of T&T, and how a character of your own would fit into that.
The various different fantasy races are also extremely well written in their cultural descriptions and backstory. There are a lot of things here you’ll have seen before (orcs, halflings and elves to name a few) but all of them have a twist put on them that you might not have expected, brings them away from the stale well trodden ground of fantasy tropes, but still lets them feel like the thing they are supposed to be. It avoids the cliche while keeping the core of what makes something like an orc or elf interesting.
In Conclusion:
The Tunnels and Trolls Quickstart Guide is really, an excellent introduction for someone who’s always wanted to play an RPG but never experienced one, or someone who has played many but wants to see what T&T is about before committing to buying the full system. It accomplishes what it sets out to do, to provide a beginner friendly overview of the world and system, and allows anyone to pick it up, browse through it, and put it down knowing pretty much immediately if they’d like to see more or not.
I can easily recommend this book to anyone interested in an introduction to T&T or tabletop roleplaying in general, it really is a very well written and also nice looking little production.
Rating out of 100: 90
Artwork: 5/5
Complexity: 4/5
Replayability: 4/5
Player interaction: 4/5
Component quality: 5/5
Pros:
- An excellent introduction to the system for new and recurring players.
- Very nicely produced and aesthetically pleasing.
- Contains a fascinating glimpse into the setting that makes you want more.
- The recommended way to work out if you want to buy more into T&T
Cons:
Character class descriptions and abilities are quite barebones and only expanded upon in the main rulebook.
