TL;DR: The game of madcap dungeon demolition frenzy, for anarchy and imagination. Find the Twisted Tunnels playtest PDF here. Then send feedback to john at beardedbaby dot net.
Twisted Tunnels is a dungeon-crawling RPG, descended from Ken St. Andre’s 1975 Tunnels & Trolls. I’ve been running and playing in that tradition for nearly two decades, and this is the game that grew out of it.
The animating spirit of that tradition is what the game’s own introduction calls “anarchy and imagination.” Not tactical geometry, not narrative scaffolding, not doom aesthetics—the mad, ungovernable thing that happens when desperate, foolish people descend into the dark with nothing but their wits and bad ideas that turn out to be good ones.
That spirit isn’t decoration. It goes all the way through.
The setting gives you an 11-foot pole, a crackerjack kit with a secret prize, and monster treats (“some monsters can be tamed with treats even if you don’t speak their language”). The Pit of Ultimate Darkness—freeform ritual magic for reality-bending ambition—walks you through an elaborate brewing procedure and then shrugs: “That’s it! Why think about the cost or consequences?” The ingredients you brew may include marrow from a jotun’s thighbone, crystals drawn from the void between worlds, and substances that exist in colors your eyes cannot properly see. The price the Unseen Awful Powers may name includes your shadow, the memory of someone you love, your ability to weep, or: Return to us. The spell isn’t finished yet.
Dark material, anarchic voice, mechanical teeth. That combination—not any single layer of it—is what this game is doing.
The Dungeon in Motion
Roughly every ten minutes of real time, the referee picks up a growing pool of dice and rolls it where the whole table can see. The terror pool starts at one die. It grows whenever nothing happens, faster when the party makes trouble: crossing thresholds, sounding alarms, lighting fuses. When it fires, something arrives.
The whole table watches that pool. Players know something is coming, not what or when, and every decision about whether to go quietly or plunge deeper is made under that visible, accumulating pressure. Not simulated tension. Actual tension.
It works with no preparation; the referee improvises what arrives. It works better with material prepared in advance: the book’s “Digging” chapter guides you to build Overlords, Factions, and a living dungeon ecology for the terror pool to draw from and animate. The chapter ends with a section on “Diversions,” which instructs the referee to put something genuinely strange into every dungeon: “Your humor, your obsessions, your fever dreams: make them real. That’s what delvers remember long after the treasure is spent.” The referee’s anarchic imagination is a structural element of dungeon design, not an optional embellishment.
Resources That Shrink the Field
The dice mechanic is aspirational: roll a fistful, keep the two you want. Doubles cascade upward—when the dice catch fire, success spirals. More dice mean more shots at something spectacular.
But spending resources narrows what you can do. Spellcasting runs on Strength, which also governs how much you can carry. Burn enough Strength and your combat effectiveness drops. Burn more and you’re shedding gear mid-dungeon—heavy armor left in a side passage because you can’t carry it anymore.
This produces decisions with real weight. The third casting might work. It might drop you to zero Strength, which is sudden death. The math is visible. The choice belongs to the player.
The Game Makes Room for Losing Control
Going berserk is helter-skelter with a payoff. When the terror pool fires in combat and the total beats your Intelligence, you go berserk. The fury adds the terror pool to your fighting dice and then grows the pool further. Every berserk round is louder than the last. You must attack whoever’s nearby, including allies, until you’re calmed or everyone’s down.
The Pit operates on the same philosophy: designed space for the reckless move. Cut corners on the depth or ingredients, and the terror pool grows (the dungeon and the Unseen Powers are not unrelated). And that’s the good news! Foul Bargains and Calamities abound.
Both mechanics canonize the dangerous choice. The madcap and the genuine danger are made of the same material, which is why neither cancels the other out.
The result is a game that is madcap and sincere in the same breath: desperate people in a hostile world, playing to win, choosing anarchy because that’s what the dungeon deserves.
Most dungeon-crawling games are earnest about dangerous places. Twisted Tunnels is sincerely mad about them. The anarchy and imagination come from this: because you care, not because your character is disposable.
But you still have to name an heir who will inherit your junk if you die.
Free playtest PDF: Download Twisted Tunnels: The Phoenix Apocryphon, Volume III. Maybe it’s for you.
Postscript
When I run Twisted Tunnels for adults, something else happens entirely. We laugh about the zaniness, but the zaniness doesn’t impose itself. The conflicts are grounded and the characters, even if short-lived, feel emotionally authentic.
Maybe the humor disarms us and fosters “psychological safety”. I don’t know why.
But it’s ok with me.
The core mechanic gets slammed down in large type on its own page with a pile of skulls: “2d6 + stat >= 20 / Doubles explode”. Absent philosophical elaboration or hedging, Kaiser lets it speak for itself—with raw meat in its teeth and bloodshot eyes. Next page: “That’s it. That’s the game.”
In classic Tunnels & Trolls, delvers and monsters in melee disappear into a brutal red cloud of frenzied action, with spears, swords, fists, and claws sticking out. Kaiser aptly calls it “the melee blur”. In T&T it represents a strategic failure, unless your side has an overwhelming advantage. Once I got over the initial shock of it, I came to see this as a feature, not a bug.