It’s a rainy afternoon in the Great Metropolitan Rain Forest and none of my projects seem to hold my interest. To avoid buying Minecraft Dungeons I found my old Diablo II disks, installed it, and spent a few hours with the carpel-tunnel-syndrome inducing game, and decided after all to finally do something I’ve been wanting to do for a few years: Pick up a Tunnels and Trolls solo adventure.
WARNING: Role-Playing Neepery Ahead
That meant rolling up a new character. The Deluxe T&T Rules are slightly different from what I remembered when I played 40-30 years ago, but the basics are still there and I decided to keep things simple and “challenging” by recording my first eight stat rolls into a first level human warrior. I rolled enough gold to give him a club and buckler and then set about trying to find an adventure.
There is always Buffalo Castle, but I’ve played that enough to not be surprised by it. As we’ll see, I probably should have done Buffalo Castle first anyway.
I have several old print copies of the classic solo adventures and also a folder full of electronic copies of solo adventures. I opened up the Adventurer’s Compendium, which is a collection of short solo adventures that were originally published in Sorcerer’s Apprentice, the magazine from Flying Buffalo that promoted T&T and fantasy in general.
The first adventure is Kingmaker by Michael Stackpole. This adventure appeared in SA #1. Despite thinking I had a chance with my club (3d6) and buckler (3 hits), the adventure strips that away from you and dumps you into the adventure
First thing I do is fail a L2SR on strength. Then I was faced with a fight that was mathematically impossible to beat: My poor schmuck only got 2d6+3 in unarmed combat, while the ogre was 3d6+17. He’d have roll negative numbers for me to have a chance. Now, the game designers understand this can happen and usually there’s an out that says if you can make a saving roll on Dexterity or Luck or something, you can can avoid all damage and wail on your opponent. It helps when the situation is a much smaller opponent (me) against a larger slower opponent (the ogre). Great. First level human character. Trollworld must be littered with the bones of 1st level human warriors. I rolled two 5s, Thanks to DARO I rolled again and got a 7 and actually made the L2SR on Dex to hit the guy but not enough to kill him.
Second round, tried again. Failed the SR. Fortunately there’s a rule in dT&T that lets human re-roll one saving roll, so I took it. My second roll was less than my first roll. Again, no mathematical way to win in a fair fight, so my character turned into paste.
I waved the magic wand and looked through my collection of adventures. A few years ago, in anticipation of this rainy afternoon, I purchased Hobb Sized Adventures from Rarr! I’m a Monster Publishing. Jumped in to the very first one, Tomb of the Toad and survived by first combat experience. The second was twice as difficult and I was just as dead.
More magic wand waving, and my twice-resurrected character (who I hadn’t bothered to name yet) tried Castle Ironwood by Michael Haensel. First thing, a monster I cannot easily beat (4d6+15 vs 4d6+3). Needless to say, my poor guy died AGAIN.
So the point of all this is to have fun, and suddenly it became a lot less fun.
I once tried to write a program that could store solo adventures and run characters through them, but it was simply too big a project for me in my spare time. It would be nice to have an electronic version of T&T to play. There was an Android app but I think the development on that stopped.