RPGADAY2024 20
AMAZING ADVENTURE.
Let’s combine the Fabled Lands with Tunnels and Trolls, let’s arm the GM with a Gandalf-sized tome of campaign and adventure information and let’s bring in three of his regular roleplaying group to supplement the two con newbies.
So Tunnels and Trolls was a big nostalgic rush, I’d got my parents to get this for me one Christmas when I was 10 or 11. My brother laughed at the “silly-sounding spells” and “stupid maths stuff”! But it felt personal to me, perhaps a bit more approachable, less serious than D&D and that art by Liz Danforth, whoa mama!
So it was, I picked a Grogmeet game featuring Tunnels and Trolls, it would be almost forty years since I had last played it, it was also set in the Fabled Lands gamebook series, written by Dave Morris and Jamie Thomson and the pitch was as follows;
An open-world Tunnels & Trolls game set in the Fabled Lands (from the gamebooks of the same name). Players can go wherever they want and will meet with strange encounters and go on perilous quests. Something always happens in the Fabled Lands.
Now we started off by picking characters and after that it was, “Where do you want to go?” The GM, the excellent Michael Spencelayh presented various choices, we also had a series of his playgroup accost us and encourage us on various quests. It was like being on stage in the middle of a furious improv show. We ate various strange and wonderful meals, we undertook dangerous heists, we travelled to the Wall, that separated civilisation from the barbarian hordes, and we eventually ended up in the lofty mountains, searching for the elusive hermit. All the while various complications and brilliant characterisations were happening around us as Michael and his crew worked their magic.
We finished the scenario on a fitting highlight, still wanting more, but like a travelling troupe, they packed up their things and left town, leaving us open-mouthed in wonder, applauding furiously… and also checking out pockets… it was fine, Michael’s cavalcade are many things but not just simple cutpurses.