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The second role playing game published was Tunnels & Trolls. Ever since, it has led a small independent existence, doing it’s own thing.
T&T quickly went through editions early on, ending with 5th in 1979, and then seventh came out around 2005 (they skipped 6th). Meanwhile, Ken St Andre, the designer, did Monsters! Monsters! in two editions (1976 and ’79) with Metagaming, which is the same system, but focusing on the monsters with those nasty dungeon delvers as the bad guys.
Tunnels & Trolls is owned by Flying Buffalo, and now Revolution Games is working on a new edition. Meanwhile, St Andre has self-published a new version of Monsters! Monsters! that stands as his current word on the RPG system he designed. By the introduction to the current version, he plans on doing a more thorough rework in the future, so this “2.7” edition is something of a placeholder. Trollgodfather Press (Ken St Andre’s personal publishing company) has followed up with supplements and adventures, generally set in a new world he has been developing along with a few other authors. (I assume this means Trollworld, where all the old Scottsdale group’s adventures happened is also owned by FBI/Revolution.) I believe there is only one rules supplement, Humans! Humans!, which details how run and equip humans and other civilized races for reasons that will be clear below.
I’m used to 5th edition T&T, and there are some decided changes here, but my understanding is that they’re mostly from 7E T&T. That said, if you’re familiar with any version of either game, everything here will be very familiar. And I worry that familiarity might be needed. The base system is very simple, needing just ten pages of the 112-page PDF to give all the essentials. But, it is written in a fairly conversational style, and there are places where I worry that someone who doesn’t already know the system would be missing important bits.
So, on to the actual system. This is a very simple and streamlined RPG, borrowing ideas from original D&D while often doing its own thing. There is no skill system, and really no differentiating one character from another other than what they do and the primary attributes. There are no secondary attributes. Your Constitution score is your hit points. Wizardry powers magic casting, and so on. T&T has character levels but they’re actually tossed out for monsters, so MM! doesn’t use them.
There’s eight primary attributes (it was six in T&T 5E), so you roll 3d6 eight times, and assign the numbers to the attributes. There’s five monster types in the beginning quick-start section, and after picking one, you add or subtract from what you rolled, and generally get a special ability (regeneration, fire resistance…), and since monsters don’t use a lot of tools, you’re basically done.
Later on, there’s fifteen pages of monster descriptions (including some extensive summary tables). Because this is a game of monsters for monsters, most of these can be player species as well. …But here the you multiply the scores (which is what T&T 5E did, and had a similar summary chart ported from the original MM!), instead of a flat add or subtract. I don’t know why the change, and only a couple appear in both sections, so the results could end up a bit odd.
The combat system is geared towards fast resolution… on a per round system. It can drag out a bit with evenly matched sides, as not a lot of damage will get delivered. Both sides roll damage, without any intermediate ‘do I hit’ step. Instead, the lower score is subtracted from the higher, and that difference is taken as damage. (This is great for one-on-one, I feel it loses a lot when you’re combining multiple people on each side, and then distributing the resulting damage out.) Armor subtracts from damage taken, anything that gets through that is subtracted from Constitution, and when that runs out, you’re dead. There’s no option for tactical maneuvers, no movement rates, nor turning it into a miniatures game.
The heart of the game is the saving roll, which is essentially a very early version of the attribute check that started showing up as a regular mechanic in D&D in the ’80s and is now one of the main parts of that system. The GM determines a difficulty level which defines a target number, and the attribute the check is made against. The character rolls 2d6 and adds his attribute score; if he hits the target number, he succeeds. Oh—and we get the first application of “exploding dice” here: if the character rolls doubles, he rolls again (and again, as long as he rolls doubles) and adds everything together. The attribute check/saving roll system is logical and can be easily applied to anything so it takes most of the load of attribute checks and a skill system with no problem. While mechanically differentiating two characters with similar characteristics but different backgrounds would be nice, it would be a burden on a system this light.
A new section (to me) is stunts, which is really just a proactive version of the saving roll. Saving rolls are generally called for to avoid something (level 1 vs Luck to avoid setting off a trap, level 2 vs Dexterity to get out of the way of the giant boulder, etc), while stunts are for characters to try and do something special like a maneuver to get out of combat. The player says what they want to do, and the GM assigns a saving roll to it.
T&T has always gone for massive characteristic totals. Character advancement involves getting a bonus to one of your attributes, which is always handy because there’s always harder saving rolls possible. In T&T you pick an attribute and get a bonus every time you level, MM!‘s level-less system gives you adventure points every time you take a saving roll (pass or fail) or defeat an enemy, and then you spend those to get stat bonuses.
There is one page for equipment, but then we move on to descriptions of various species on Zimrala, which includes more gear, and even goes into guns and other advanced gear.
And then magic is presented. There’s about fifteen pages of spell descriptions. This is largely the same system as T&T, but in 5E casting spells took energy in the form of strength, meaning a wizard would literally exhaust himself. Now, Wizardry is a separate attribute, and spellcasting normally comes from that instead (which at least gets rid of a lot of amazingly buff wizards). The spell list has some crossover, but also has a lot of different spells. I’d need to go through them, but I think you could mix-and-match easily without any oddities cropping up.
The second half of the PDF is setting information. The usual overview, some maps, a guide for a few places, and two GM adventures are given. I haven’t really gone through these yet, but of course it is all expanded upon in other products.
Because of the writing, I am a bit concerned with this edition occasionally skipping things, but it made sense to me. It’s a very stripped down system, and it does miss things that can be nice. If you want to be better at jumping than other people, or your Intelligence is focused on study of one subject, there’s nothing here. The only dials to work with are the eight primary characteristics. You can up your Dexterity, and become better at passing Dex-based saving rolls to make that jump, but every other saving roll on the same attribute gets better too, and everyone with the same Dex score is just as good as you.
But this is a very stripped down system, and it does a great job of getting out of its own way. As long as you’re willing to role play the rest, the main system is extremely easy to handle, and a system that’s barely changed since 1975 holds up very well today.
Book two of The Expanse has the same outline structure. Bad things happen, a man becomes very single-focused obsessed with finding a missing person, he runs into James Holden, mayhem ensues.
