Welcome to the inaugural Vintage RPG Newsletter! Thanks for signing up.

What's this all about, then? In a nutshell, I'm tired of providing daily value to platforms owned by gigantic corporations who then fuck about with who sees my posts. There is a charming simplicity in this day and age of sending a newsletter out and it arriving, unimpeded, at the inbox of everyone who signed up for it. So, all my posts will be published on the site daily, and then sent directly to y'all every Friday. You can read them as mini-essays as they drop, or wait to get on big essay all at once.

The Instagram and Tumblr aren't going away. I'd love to scale back what shows up on Insta, but we're a long way off from that. In the meantime, I'm moving everything I've put up on Instagram since April of 2017 over to VintageRPG.com, so it will all be here, searchable, archived and, if I may say so, good-lookin', for as long as someone keeps paying the hosting fees. It feels surprisingly good to be getting all these words and pictures set up on my own piece of digital real estate.

Anyway, thanks for comin'. Please forgive quirks, errors, broken links and any similar weirdness. We're still in Beta. Comments and suggestions are appreciated!

- Stu

The Complete Dungeon of the Bear (1982)

Tunnels & Trolls is the second RPG (give or take), and like D&D, it was born out of a legendary dungeon built by the game’s creator as a sort of testing ground: Ken St. Andre’s Gristlegrim. Like Castle Greyhawk and Blackmoor, Gristlegrim has never been released to the public and, according to St. Andre, the original no longer exists. That makes Bear Peters’ Dungeon of the Bear the oldest extant T&T dungeon. Originally released in three parts in 1979, this 1982 edition collects them all and puts them under Michael Stackpole’s Castle Ward.

Before I go on, I should note that unlike most of the T&T adventures I own, this one is for a party of players, not a solo, and it is organized as you might expect, with keyed maps and room descriptions.

Castle Ward is a ruined keep meant to prevent people from accessing the dungeon, but was sacked by the dungeon inhabitants (cheeky). A number of demons guard the entrance now, armed with riddles to keep adventurers out. These are in the vein of “I want a sieve that holds water” and I can’t tell if I love them or think they’re obnoxious. Maybe both at the same time!

Once past the gatekeepers, we have a funhouse dungeon that is atypical of the era in that it maintains a level of amusing charm throughout. It never gets old, which is quite the accomplishment. Some highlights include a room that rains copper coins, a titanic ballista (crewed by orcs and giants and aimed at the party), a mostly submerged giant statue that chases the party if they try to steal its ring (which commands nearly all the monsters in the dungeon, if any are still alive at that point) and an unusual number of piranha. There are lots of other animals as well, but, I might have missed it, of course, but I am not sure I read about a bear…

Regardless of its ursine inhabitants, this dungeon is a classic of the earliest form! Also love the Chris Carlson cover art and the lots of early Liz Danforth illustrations that populate the interior.

Deathtrap Equalizer Dungeon (1977)

This is Deathtrap Equalizer Dungeon, the second Tunnels & Trolls adventure module, and one that saw several printings. The first two pictures are from the spiral bound 1977 edition, the second set of two from the revised 1981 edition. It is cool to see both the Flying Buffalo production value increase and to see how Liz Danforth’s skill as an illustrator evolved over the four years between the two versions.

I said adventure module, but really, this is an adventure gamebook meant for solo play. It is, I believe, the first “teleport” adventure, in which a quest master—in this case the demon, Umslopagaas of the Shiny Teeth, the fellow on the cover—blinks you in, around and out dungeon situations, rather than adhering to more prosaic methods of exploration and traversal. There are two modes, the frog trail and the lion trail. Frog adventurers dip in to test themselves in a single encounter, where lions proceed through the gauntlet of all sixteen.

The encounters offer a variety of challenges, many of which break the conventional rules of the game (hence the “equalizer” in the title). I don’t really know what to make of it. Characters were supposed to move through a series of solos in T&T, growing as they go, but the teleportation here seems at odds with, say, exploring the City of Terrors or even taking part in the battles of Arena of Khazan. You can use the frog ring multiple times to minimize risk and maximize reward, sort of a gamebook version of save scumming or XP farming. S’weird. On the other hand, this is literally the second adventure gamebook published, after Buffalo Castle, so it seems wrong to hold it a super high standard.

Sewers of Oblivion (1982)

Sewers of Oblivion (1982) is a sort of sequel to my favorite Tunnels & Trolls solo, City of Terrors, in that it takes place under that city. You get mugged, you get pitched into the sewers, and voila. I guess that is one way of limiting your starting equipment. It’s kind of funny that you are expected to take solo characters through gamebook after gamebook, getting more and more stuff, but the later books recognized how impossible it was to balance for all these potential magic items, so they went to greater and more improbable lengths to take all your kit away at the start. The muggers, you’ll be relieved to know, are caught while you are on your sojourn and the city guard has your stuff waiting for you back at the precinct house.

Anyway. Lots of underwater combat here. Lots of potential for catching diseases (there is a two-page appendix full of ‘em to choose from). A surprising number of potential amorous encounters for a sewer adventure, too. You get a guide, which is neat. For the most part, its a by the numbers dungeon crawl. Which is fine, its just a little disappointing after City of Terrors, which so often feels like exploring a bustling, ever-changing city.

Liz Danforth art throughout, and we’re all the better for it. I really love the one of the guy pitching it at that waif over the bleeding corpse of a giant rat. Ah, the romance of the sewers!

Sea of Mystery (1981)

Sea of Mystery (1981) is an interesting Tunnels & Trolls solo. The concept is pretty straightforward: you get on a boat, looking for adventure and, generally, it finds you. In practice, this is essentially another teleport dungeon like Deathtrap Equalizer, its just that the meandering whims of the seabound life obscure the mechanisms a little better.

As I said, you get on a boat. From port there are a number of short adventure paths to follow, some silly, most extremely deadly, one surprisingly horny (I did not realize until this batch of T&T solos how horny this game is, generally). The Sea has some strangely convenient magical properties that mess with your equipment, essentially acting as the rules equalizers in the Deathtrap encounters. Finally, you can exit the solo whenever you hit port, which is a little more plausible than teleporting out with a frog-shaped ring.

Does it work? I think so. The variety in the threads is good. For the most part, you’re kind of stuck in the flow of events, which makes sense being one person on a boat. I like that. It often feels like you’re being pulled to a foretold destiny. Some folks will hate that, but here it feels novel. Most of the variance is down to saving throws. What choices you do have tend to be moral choices on the good/evil binary that remind me an awful lot of a BioWare game, except a little cruder. It’s not bad, though, and definitely interesting.

Ken Macklin’s cover seems a little underwhelming in the context of the whole line, but I really rather like it. It sets a strong tone and gives me Elric, sailor on the seas of fate vibes that feel real good. Interiors are by John Barnes and I love them. Boldly graphical, reminding me of some CYOA illustrations, actually. Good, clean stuff.

Gamesmen of Kasar (1982)

Gamesmen of Kasar (1982) is a gamebook for Tunnels & Trolls. I swear, when I picked these, I was just picking cool covers, I wasn’t like “here, let me pick all the weirdest, most artificial T&T gamebooks I can.” Yet, here we are.

This one is perhaps the strangest T&T gamebook I have delved into. There is a mysterious compound where adventurous sorts can go in and play the Game, sans any equipment (SEE? Always with the taking away of my sweet stuff, what’s the point of having it?). Inside is a gauntlet of deadly challenges. If you survive, you get your weight in gold as a prize. Hooray!

It gets stranger. This is sort of like Fritz Leiber’s "Bazaar of the Bizarre" meets Phantasm. The encounters inside are primarily with automatons. By which I mean robots rather than golems. There is a vague sense of the X-men villain Arcade in the proceedings. The oddest bit is the real reason for the Game. The place is run by aliens. Their civilization runs on a material that is incredibly radioactive, which is most effectively mined by magically animated zombies. However, their moral code prevents them from killing people to make into zombies, so they devised the Game to kill people and provide a steady stream of hearty zombie-ready corpses. Hell of a loophole. Once you get out, the local Duke cuts a deal to send the local prisoner population into the Game. Very civilized.

James Talbot on the cover. I really like it, it feels suitably pulpy and dangerous. Mixed on Douglas Herring’s cartoony interiors. When they hit, they hit! When they miss, they really miss.

Honestly thought I was all good with Robert Holdstock, Mythago Wood seemed a good one to both start and stop on. I think about that book all the time! Surely reading anything more would mean I'd be bound for disappointment. Then I saw the cover of Necromancer and, well...

I'll let you know how it goes. With a title like Necromancer, it isn't likely to go well for the characters, at least.