I want to talk about the competition a fellow traveler.

Kabuki Kaiser beat me to market last month with a classic Tunnels & Trolls homage, and it’s really good. I’ve been evangelizing it anyway.

Many Sought Adventure (MSA henceforth) is Kabuki Kaiser’s T&T × B/X retroclone mashup: 5th edition T&T stripped to the chassis, given an almost MÖRK BORG treatment with economy of expression and load-bearing art direction. Legend has it, Ken St. Andre gave it his blessing, and I can see why. The pitch is scoundrels, sellswords, and rogue wizards gathered in a back-alley tavern past midnight, dungeon maps spread on greasy planks, a knife driven through them. Clever Cugel. The Gray Mouser. “Bilbo pretending he isn’t out of his depth.” “This is no guild and no honourable company.”

Yeah. That’s the game!

Here’s what Kabuki Kaiser said recently about the forthcoming “New T&T” from Rebellion Unplugged:

“This New T&T is to Tunnels & Trolls what Daggerheart would be to B/X Dungeons & Dragons. Vaguely related in a distant memory kind of way, sprinkled with Story Games mechanics over a post-modern sleek resolution, doesn’t really know what it’s trying to be past the buzz and the name. I went sooo far in the opposite direction…”

Yeah. Me too.

What MSA does that I love

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.

The deadly peril of even a FAIR fight is such a disincentive to jumping into the crowd without any plan other than swinging your axe, that my players became incredibly crafty at engineering situations in their favor. So when they did have to dice off against monsters in melee, the odds were stacked heavily in their favor!

The way melee combat works in classic T&T is incredibly instructive for a player, and the lessons amplify strategic thinking, daring, creative fictional positioning, and exploiting tactical infinity.

Kaiser gets it. In MSA, the melee combat section ends with a warning in display type: “You don’t want the melee blur.” The very next page is called “What you want instead.” It tells you the default will kill you, then shows you an annotated dungeon map full of things to try. It’s spartan and effective at show-don’t-tell. The whole book works that way.

The d66 background tables build your character’s history, personality, and starting kit in two rolls. An entry like “sanatorium fugitive” comes with gauze, a straitjacket, and a knife. Character creation doesn’t tell you what you can do. It tells you who you were, and what you have to show for it. This is great to jumpstart role-playing, an asset seen in many OSR/NSR games these days, and something I’m not especially good at creating.

Overall MSA compares favorably with MÖRK BORG, and it’s easier to read. The simplicity of the mechanics, not belabored, juxtaposed with the skull-stomping layout and art direction communicates to another lobe of the brain. And other viscera!

How It’s Different from Twisted Tunnels

MSA is a one-shot engine, a convention pickup game, a putative “Rosetta Stone”: it tells you how to run B/X, AD&D, 5E, and classic T&T modules without converting them. Everyone is a Rogue Wizard. Fast table, light prep, rulings, lethal stakes.

Twisted Tunnels goes a bit deeper, and studying MSA helped me see where I was already headed.

The biggest difference is numbers: MSA retains the big numbers of 1979’s 5th edition T&T: Weapons range from 2d6 to 7d6, vs. 1d–3d in Twisted Tunnels. Delvers will typically have 4½-9 times the combat Adds. Monster Ratings are double. So are the target numbers for Saving Rolls. Combat tallies in the MSA could plausibly go into the hundreds. This difference isn’t because Kaiser deviated from the tradition, it’s because I worked to systematically keep the numbers smaller in my game for more rapid and frantic action resolution.

Both games use the same trigger for monster havoc: when the referee rolls sixes on monster fighting dice, something dreadful happens regardless of who wins the round. MSA calls it “wicked damage”. Twisted Tunnels calls them “terrors”. Same structure, different texture.

On the player side, Twisted Tunnels has the 3 original Types: Warrior, Magic-User, and Rogue (yes! it’s the same Rogue Wizard that works overtime in MSA). They all get style points, where every 6 on a player’s combat roll may be spent immediately for special effects. Players and referee are both watching the dice for sixes, wanting them and dreading them in equal measure.

The other big divergence is pacing. MSA uses resource attrition—torches, hunger, CON—as its pressure pump. Twisted Tunnels has all that, plus the Terror Check: roughly every ten minutes of real time, the referee picks up a growing pool of dice and rolls it where everyone can see. Nothing yet? The pool gets bigger. A 6 means something is coming. The players watch that pool accumulate and know the bill is due. The dungeon has a heartbeat, and it’s getting louder.

Spells in MSA cost Constitution (your hit points) instead of Strength, and the entries are one-line effects. It takes a Saving Roll to cast, following the 7th edition T&T practice, and falling can trigger a randomly generated calamity, akin to wizardry in Dungeon Crawl Classics. Spells in Twisted Tunnels are slightly more meaty and cost Strength, like in classic T&T. Magic-Users have the option to use a ritual dagger to power spells beyond their Strength limit using their own blood (or someone else’s, if they have a helpless volunteer). Other magical devices—wizard’s brands—grant different special effects.

Where Twisted Tunnels does the “awesome power with a twisted price” thing that MSA does with every spell is with the Pit of Ultimate Darkness rules: a Magic-User can speech the Pit with any request, and the Unseen Awful Powers are guaranteed to respond!

A strength of MSA versus Twisted Tunnels is its content tables, as previously noted.

In short, these are genuinely different games chasing the same ghost. MSA is the lean, atmospheric paperback you run tonight with strangers. Keep going with dead-simple rules as long as you want. Twisted Tunnels is the game you’re still playing three months later, discovering new subtleties and interactions, while dreading the Terror Check.

If you want the stripped-down, skull-stomping version of T&T that fits in your jacket pocket: go get Many Sought Adventure. It’s badass and it does exactly what it says.

Then come back here and download Twisted Tunnels when you want to see what happens in the Pit of Ultimate Darkness.

Be careful though: It’s not a competition.

We don’t want the melee blur.