Rebellion Unplugged vows to make Tunnels & Trolls: A New Age more approachable than ever

The second tabletop RPG that has ever been published (or third, if you consider the obscure Rules to the Game of Dungeon) is making a return — as the long-promised reimagining of the original Tunnel & Trolls. Designed by Rebellion Unplugged, whose parent company and video game developer, Rebellion, acquired it in 2023, Tunnels & Trolls: A New Age is more than just flourishing the classic game with a new, glossy veneer. The reboot will also feature an updated ruleset that, according to a press release by Rebellion Unplugged, is designed to be easy enough for new players to pick up, while also evolving elements of the original RPG that will appeal to veteran fans.

First published in 1975, the original Tunnels & Trolls was crafted in response to Dungeons & Dragons’ rule books, colloquially known as the White Box edition. Back then, creator Ken St. Andre thought that TSR’s system was too confusing, and decided to design Tunnels & Trolls around ease of play, approachability, and immediacy. Rebellion Unplugged sought to keep this principle in mind as they crafted the game’s newest iteration. “We kept coming back to this core idea: when the game was first conceptualized by Ken St. Andre in 1975, it was explicitly in response to the entire roleplaying games scene at the time. It’s just that that scene was exactly one game,” said RPG editor Filip Hartelius to Rascal via email. 

Unlike the numerous polyhedral dice that D&D required of its players, Tunnels & Trolls deployed a streamlined system that only required standard d6 dice to play, which were much easier to find than other dice variants. “Now, half a century later, we’ve tried to replicate that approach, but for a roleplaying games scene that is far, far larger than just one game,” said Hartelius. While drawing on Tunnels & Trolls’ roots in fantasy literature like Lord of the Rings and Conan the Barbarian, he mentioned that A New Age’s inspirations reach beyond just tabletop games, including mediums like video games and television series; Breath of the Wild, Tales from the Loop, and Fable have been cited as some of the game’s touchstones. “The world has changed in the last fifty years, and so must Tunnels & Trolls,” said Hartelius. 

At Rebellion Unplugged, Hartelius is helming A New Age alongside authors Scott Malthouse and Chris Bissette to execute on that lens of modern RPGs. It’s a cadre of experienced designers they’ve garnered. Before Rebellion Unplugged, Hartelius also served as senior games developer at Osprey Games, having worked on titles like Merv, The King is Dead: Second Edition, Romance of the Perilous Land, Imperium, and Undaunted. Bissette is also best known for The Wretched and the ENNIE-nominated blog Loot the Room, while Malthouse has crafted Quill, In Darkest Warrens, and Unbelievably Simple Roleplaying system. A New Age is also Rebellion Unplugged’s first major RPG release — one that can potentially steer the studio’s reputation away from being a vehicle for merely adapting Rebellion’s existing licenses to board games.

Rebellion has amassed a catalogue of games that archive manager Charlene Taylor told Rascal dates all the way back to 1868, and it leverages this collection as a development asset. “Rebellion established a dedicated in-house archive spanning board games, film and TV, fiction, and hundreds of comic book titles, including 2000 AD, featuring the iconic Judge Dredd,” Taylor told Rascal via email. “Rebellion occupies a distinctive position as one of the very few commercial studios to employ a team of professionally qualified archivists working on the active preservation of its collections. This reflects a core belief that comics, games, and genre publishing are not disposable entertainment, but vital parts of Britain’s creative heritage — worthy of professional care, long-term investment, and serious preservation.” The archivists have taken the same approach with Tunnels & Trolls, with its archive housing early production copies, draft sketches, unpublished submissions, original artwork, correspondence, and merchandise. Rebellion Unplugged delved into these resources during the creation of A New Age, with the catalogue being a “fully searchable resource that will support future creative development”.

A New Age departs from the classic Tunnels & Trolls in several key ways. For instance, rather than the original eight character attributes, the reboot now features six: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Wits, Intelligence, and Charisma. At the same time, three auxillary stats — Luck, Stamina, and Mana — are also included, although they are not part of the core attributes. “Wizardry as a stat that generated your mana stayed in principle, but we wanted to broaden it to something you’d roll not just for purely magic reasons,” said Hartelius. “In the alpha quickstart, this was Willpower, but it turned out to be a little hard for players to internalize what this meant, [so] Wits became a catch-all for anything mental that wasn’t clearly intelligence.” Another difference is that the original classes of wizard, warrior, and rogue have been eliminated and replaced by a “more freeflow system of six talent paths”, according to Hartelius, ranging from the path of shadow to the path of wizardry. “[This] lets you specialize as, say, a warrior, but lets you dabble in other fields,” he added. 

Some of these changes, however, have not been warmly received by some Tunnel & Trolls fans, many of whom suggested that this is far from the classic experience they fell in love with. Such resistance is not unexpected, especially with a beloved, decades-old RPG, and Hartelius said that the new design is simply about taking classic Tunnels & Trolls ideas to its logical conclusion.

“For example, the basic task resolution mechanic in the heritage game had you rolling two dice and adding the value of your attribute, while combat had you rolling tens or sometimes hundreds of dice and adding the values. While the arithmetic wasn’t difficult, it was on occasion a bit tedious,” he said. “We’ve moved away from adding dice values, to counting dice that are hits (usually a 4+), and limiting the number of dice you have to roll at the same time.” At the same time, the emphasis on dice rolling — as well as the prevalence of d6 — in Tunnels & Trolls is also retained in A New Age. Hartelius believed that the very activity of throwing dice should also be a source of drama and excitement, and the RPG should focus attention on each pivotal moment. “It should be immediately obvious if what’s been rolled is good or bad: high values are good, doubles are rolled again so they’re double good.” Most aspects of the game defer to this principle, which is why the team has also limited attributes in A New Age to six. “We’ve very intentionally made everything in the game something that could be rolled on a d6, 2d6, or d66 table (again, the d6 is king),” Hartelius said.

Tunnels & Trolls’ rules light system, and its focus on player creativity — one that a player described on Reddit as being so abstract that it’s “almost a state of mind” — is another element of the original that Rebellion Unplugged wants to bring back for A New Age. “When someone wants to do something cool, the default response shouldn’t be ‘No, you can’t do that’. That kills player creativity. But it also shouldn’t be arduous to figure out how to adjudicate the players’ hijinks and fit them into the system, which can grind games to a halt or put an excessive burden on the game master. Instead, the game should make this type of improvisation as smooth as can be, and actively encouraged,” said Hartelius. 

Then there’s the good ol’ fashioned sense of immediacy in Tunnels & Trolls that Rebellion Unplugged also wants to preserve. For Hartelius, this means eliminating modifiers — and the need to “math” things out — to help new players to the game and hobby better engage with the mechanics. “So what do you roll in A New Age? The same number of dice as your stat. What does an armour of value 2 do? Reduce damage by 2. Simple.”

The RPG scene has evolved tremendously over the 50 years since it was introduced to Tunnels & Trolls; it’s no longer made up of, as Hartelius pointed out, just one game. D&D may still be the dominant choice in most parts of the tabletop community, but there are also more RPGs than ever, and this is another way Rebellion Unplugged wants to update A New Age for players. “There are a few places where we’ve tried to move closer to where the rest of the RPG scene is at,” he said. For instance, classic Tunnels & Trolls is about having every side of a conflict pool and roll all their dice and modifiers, with the side garnering the highest total inflicting the difference as damage. This means that players will be attacking simultaneously, rather than individually. While this is an approach that the studio saw as elegant, it still has its drawbacks. “The aforementioned arithmetic [is one concern], and as an aside, the Japanese box set of the game included a solar-powered calculator, but it also limited space for individual player agency without house ruling,” said Hartelius. “But, importantly, this is so far removed from what modern RPGers expect as to be obtuse. Our mechanics try to maintain the snappiness of the heritage game, while offering more possibility space and meeting the players closer to their expectation.”

Hartelius also told us that the team has attempted to differentiate A New Age from other high fantasy games by adding subtle elements of low fantasy and realism genres — and grounding the reboot in human history. This approach has guided how the team fleshed out the world building and art direction. “In the lore, trolls have ravaged the world in centuries past, in a catastrophic event called the Eclipse. This is not completely dissimilar to the Black Death, and like the plague, the Eclipse brought on profound social upheaval. In Medieval Europe, this precipitated the rise of the middle class and the decline of feudalism. In our Trollmark, this has led to the birth of a new social class: the adventurer,” he said.

"When someone wants to do something cool, the default response shouldn’t be ‘No, you can’t do that’. That kills player creativity."

In the end, the notion of tackling a classic RPG — and bringing it to a new and skeptical audience — can feel overwhelming. “I mean, it’s a challenging project! How do you stay true to the spirit of a game while not just replicating it? How do you make an old IP approachable to a new audience? How do you make another fantasy RPG that stands out in a crowded landscape?” Hartelius said. One of the largest specific challenges is toeing the fine line between resolving problems through mechanics, versus offering players and game masters more flexibility to work through these conflicts. Take one-page RPGs, for instance; Hartelius believed that such games aren’t technically easier to play, but that they offload more of the game design work to the game master. At the same time, the team wanted to maintain the fluidity of the reboot’s mechanics. 

“Many early iterations of the rules oscillated from extremely loose to heavily mechanized back-and-forth, a process that often honed down what needed to be there as rules, and what needed to be there as guidance and resources,” said Hartelius. And then there’s the timing of the reboot, and why Rebellion Unplugged believes a new, updated Tunnels & Trolls game is  now more relevant than before. With the growing popularity of RPGs, Hartelius thought that new players need a system that is less intimidating than the current crop of popular RPGs like D&D and Pathfinder, which are undeniably enjoyable, but can be intimidating and complex. In a way, it’s similar to the conundrum that Andre faced decades ago when he read the first edition of D&D: there’s always room for an easier and more accessible RPG. “The most satisfying playtests I’ve done of A New Age has been with players who’ve sat down and admitted to never playing an RPG, only to be laughing and causing antics fifteen minutes later,” said Hartelius.

That said, it’s a pity that none of the original Tunnels & Trolls team is involved in the development of A New Age, although Hartelius said that Liz Danforth, a key member of the original Tunnels & Trolls team, as well as a long-time illustrator, editor and writer for the original and its various editions over the years, has been incredibly supportive of the project. And while aware of the reboot, Andre has instead chosen to focus his efforts on Monsters! Monsters!, a sister game to Tunnels & Trolls where you play as the very monsters who prey upon the adventurers. 

Rebellion Unplugged will be launching the game’s crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter on March 17. The full edition will also include rules for solo play — by now a hallmark of Tunnels & Trolls, given that it was the first RPG that introduced the concept when it was released. Rebellion Unplugged also plans to make solo play that can be integrated into the multiplayer campaigns; Hartelius compared this to going on sidequests between adventures. For now, you can take a peek at the beta quickstart rules for A New Age. The game may appear more polished than its predecessors, but it’s also a product of a long lineage of RPGs and passion for the hobby. The team seem to understand this position: A New Age is simultaneously the beneficiary of, and a contributor to, a creative legacy of deeply engaging RPGs that can always find its players, be they new or veterans.