Once the fun and innocent pleasure of Fighting Fantasy began to wear off, my gaming diet went slim, until I spotted a new kid in class, Thomas Ransom, reading what I later found out was the rules for the Fifth Edition of the Tunnels and Trolls role-playing game, in all its beautiful yellow, odd-sized splendor. I asked him what he was reading, and he told me all about Tunnels and Trolls. He did his best to describe to me what a proper role-playing game was all about. I find it funny to think back to it now, and how revolutionary the concept seemed to me, the game was almost limitless and frightening in its permutations. Thomas compared Fighting Fantasy gamebooks to role-playing games in the following way;
“Imagine a room occupied by several orcs with a closed treasure chest in the centre. If this was a regular game book it would give you just two options, open the treasure chest, or fight the orcs. But in a proper role-playing game you could choose other options not listed, such as deciding to talk to the orcs, negotiate with them or try to run away. In short, whatever you wanted to do, you could do it.”
He didn't mention the role of a dungeon master at that point. I was intrigued so he showed me the rulebook, which I thumbed through quickly. The rules had beautiful black and white artwork on the front and throughout by Liz Danforth. Instead of a simple few pages detailed how to roll for combat, here was huge sections dedicated to combat, magic, equipment and character creation. The few sections I initially read I found the writing clever and funny, for instance, how many other role-playing game had spells called “TTYF - Take That You Fiend”. What was different about this game was the rules were more extensive, you had far more statistics, you had a choice of a greater variety of weapons, magic spells and character races and classes. With Fighting Fantasy, you just had a single type of sword, but with Tunnels and Trolls you had many more options to choose. Instead of choosing to fight with just a sword, you got to decide between a bastard sword or a two-handed great sword, a scimitar or falchion. The options were yours to play with, you also decided what armour and shield to use. There was even more statistics that just Strength, Stamina and Luck. Now this was a book I did want to buy. It had illustrations of all the weapons and armour and monsters and spells. It fired my imagination just at the right moment. It had rules, but it didn't have any adventures. It seemed to have that maturity I was looking for and was the perfect game to make the next step up from Fighting Fantasy.I went round Tom’s house one Saturday afternoon to learn more about this Tunnels and Trolls game and we started playing a couple of the solo books. Although Tunnels and Trolls was a proper role-playing game designed to be run with a group of players and a dungeon master, it worked very well as a solo game too. I'm sure the writers of Tunnels and Trolls never envisaged when they wrote the game that it would become better known as the best set of rules for solo role-playing. In fact, the preface to the very first solo game that Flying Buffalo wrote, Dungeon of the Bear, was a little story about how and why the first solo game came about. Players don't always have the luxury of a regular game group. It was ironic that despite wanting to move away from solo game books, Tunnels and Trolls threw me back into the world of solo gaming. But at least I got to keep my character this time and got to watch him grow in power, levels and wealth. With help from Tom I began to quickly understand the rules better. One thing I did notice about these solo books was the number of paragraphs was considerably smaller than the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, but then the Tunnels and Trolls stories were tighter, more focused, and you accomplished a lot more on each paragraph. It also had a lot less fluff too. The reason for this was because each paragraph had more to do before you moved onto the next paragraph, whereas the Fighting Fantasy books would sometimes have you read several paragraphs before giving you a choice. Thomas himself had only ever played solo adventures and never tried a full role-playing game himself.
Later that Saturday, Thomas took me to a small shop hidden away in Ipswich that I'd never heard of before called War and Peace and showed me where I could buy both the rules and solo adventures for Tunnels and Trolls.
I couldn't afford the rules at first, but did have enough pocket money to buy my first solo adventure all for a pound. I remembered the very first Tunnels and Trolls solo adventure I bought, The Abyss. It had very few numbered paragraphs perhaps thirty or so, which was very small compared to the four hundred which was in an average Fighting Fantasy book, but it was my first adventure and Thomas helped me create my first character. In The Abyss, you played an escaped prisoner being chased by hounds across the country-side. I don't remember the specifics but I knew you were trying to outrun demonic hounds, and that death was behind every wrong choice. I must have gone through quite a few characters before one finally survived, and I played him through several of the solo adventures that Thomas owned.
I was lent at a previous school a ton of Conan novels, and slowly was reading them. It was natural then that I named my first surviving Tunnels and Trolls hero Conan. I had several other characters, but Conan was the character I put through the adventure once I knew what I would face. Solo adventures after all were deadly. The next week I went back to War and Peace and bought the full rules myself. I later found out that Penguin Books published Tunnels and Trolls and most of the major solo books in the United Kingdom. But I wanted to know more. I wanted my own rules and my own adventures. While Tunnels and Trolls was a full role-playing game, I never knew anyone who played it as a proper role-playing game with a Dungeon Master and a group of players. By the time I had gotten a little bored with the Tunnels and Trolls rules, I had pretty much played every one of the thirty or so of these solo books that had been released, from short adventures to big city campaigns. I bought both the original Flying Buffalo editions and some of the United Kingdom reprints which usually contained two adventures in one book as the Tunnels and Trolls solo books tended to have more content but less paragraphs. One memorable solo adventure was CityBook, which simulated an entire city for you to explore and have adventures and encounters. I was very dangerous, ambitious and very rewarding. It had many powerful artifacts and life-changing upgrades, for example one of your hands became a crystal which could fire bolts of magic, whilst the other hand could become a bears claw for massive combat damage.
