We were at the House of Books and Games in South Windsor the other day. This is a small store squeezed into non-Euclidean space somehow, only open on the weekends. We love going there whenever we’re in the area; they have a quirky selection of stuff not seen elsewhere. This time, there was a local author just sitting there at the table. We talked for a long time, and of course, I bought his book — Revenants, by B. L. Daniels. It’s also on Kindle Unlimited, so I could have saved the fifteen bucks, but then I couldn’t have gotten it signed.
Anyway, in their old magazine section was someone’s entire old 70s/80s-era Analog SF&F magazine collection. And next to those were a half dozen Tunnels & Trolls solo adventures.
I bought several of each.
I’ve never played Tunnels & Trolls. I’d heard about it, but back in the day, I was all about Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, which was like D&D, except advanced. The publishers, Flying Buffalo Inc, were known mostly, at the time, for their wide variety of Play-By-Mail RPGs, where you would fill out a card with your party’s actions, send it back, they’d run it through a computer with everyone else’s cards, and then they would mail everyone back with a new card, along with a report on what had happened that turn.
I never did do that, but I found the whole concept fascinating. There was a lot of PBM stuff going on back in the 70s and 80s, before the internet. You could buy decks of chess postcards and send those back and forth between you and your opponent. It was a huge deal; all disappeared now, along with Flying Buffalo and its omnipresent founder, Rick Loomis.
Tunnels & Trolls was a tabletop RPG by Ken St. Andre, who had taken a look at Dungeons & Dragons and pronounced it too complicated. He was right, and TSR (and later, WotC) have struggled with that ever since. St. Andre decided to simplify combat by having each side roll all their combat dice at once. The team with the larger total won that round of combat and damaged the other side. The losing side could figure out how to divvy up the damage. There wasn’t a lot of RPing going on during combat, though the magic spells, with names like “Take That, You Fiend!” and “Get Out Of Here!”, could make wizards pretty popular. There were really only two classes; the non-magic-using Warriors and the magic-using Wizards, Rogues, and Wizard-Warriors. (It’s explained in the rules that T&T rogues are more or less rogue wizards, and not quite thieves).
As I played through the first adventure, “Sword for Hire”, I was struggling with turning those heavy, aged, 1980s page, and I thought it would be a lot easier if I could just spend dozens of hours writing a program that could run T&T solo adventures, and then dozens more hours transcribing the adventure into a YAML file.
I’m only giving a thumbnail of the actual adventure text, because I am doing something I have always wanted to do; I am feeding all the information into a LLM and letting it do the making of the words nice. It knows everything about the current state of the game (its context) and can act out all the parts. Turns out that the only thing missing from a solo adventure was a DM.
This becomes problematic once I let other people into the game, as it requires an OpenAI API key to play, at the moment. I will probably preserve the AI-generated descriptions of the situations so that I can just bake them in, but narrating the ebb and flow of combat will be an issue. I really like how the LLM works with that. But, I can’t really see myself releasing a game that would require someone to enter an API key, and I don’t want the world using mine, so I’ll have to remove it at some point.
I’m having a lot of fun with the game so far, but there is so much to do. I need to build in equipping weapons and armor, I need to make being overweight do something, etc etc etc. All sorts of QoL issues. Me, personally, I don’t care, but if I start on adventure #2, “The Blue Frog Tavern”, I’ll want to have all the stuff I got in “Sword for Hire”. Plus, Six Pack can be recruited, for new adventures, so that would be fun. I guess I have to build out a companion system, too…
It’s said that the worst thing about writing a game is that you have to write everything. Last night, I rewrote all the character save/restore to use YAML instead of JSON to fit better as NPCs in the YAML file that contains the adventure. I also save the entire weapon data instead of just the name so that I can add weapons in the adventure itself without having to add it to the master weapon list CSV. And I added a boolean so that I could mark armor and weapons “not for sale”.
With that, I can implement the pages for the magic sword and dagger and probably implement the one-round fight with Six Pack if you choose to attack him and I think that will complete the adventure up until meeting Six Pack and deciding to ally with him.
Weapons now stored as YAML in the rooms where they are picked up. Not armor yet, I’ll get to that. Worked on a few more pathways in the story. All three starter weapon paths are programmed. Well, I think I will do the path where you decide to fight Six Pack. That will be the end of the prologue, which ends with you deciding how much you trust the rock demon.
BTW, I started playing the sequel to this, Blue Frog Tavern, and there is a different rock demon you meet, called Quartz. I think in my adaptation, when I get to it, it will be Six Pack. But first things first. Doing Sword for Hire will force me to code all the things — and once I do that, I still have to implement wizard magic, and that could change how many rooms operate, what with the light spell and the lock/unlock spells especially.
The first room we explore is also a potential wandering monster room, which means they could happen, which means I have to have combat with multiple participants on both sides, since Six Pack will help you fight, and enemies can come in swarms.
At some point, each room will stop forcing me to implement half a dozen new mechanisms.
Last night I got to the first “treasure”. Now I have to implement returning to Mongo with treasure he can split with you. Also, it’s time to make an inventory system that allows the player to equip and unequip items, like shields, torches, weapons and so on.
I always wanted to try a Flying Buffalo PBM game. I think I might have even gotten some kind of starter kit, but I don’t think I ever actually played.
I DID do a lot of Chess PBM back in the day, though. That was fun.
Jeez remember when going to check the mail could be FUN? Now it’s nothing but junk and 1 or 2 bills that for some reason still come in paper form. The city of Raleigh sends me a paper water bill, for example.