The Deep Six Delver

Twisted Tunnels RPG: The Dungeon Game No One Else Is Making

2026-03-05T02:19:09+00:00

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.

Twisted Tunnels Changelog (2026-03-03)

2026-03-03T17:23:34+00:00

Check out the complete Twisted Tunnels playtest PDF to learn more and try it out.

I published a new draft of Twisted Tunnels last night with 3 surgical changes. 2 of the changes focused on removing unnecessary complexity.

Dexterity and Spellcasting

I dropped the Dexterity requirement for learning more Elder spells.

This game has spells that consume Strength when you cast them, like classic Tunnels & Trolls. One feature of T&T I tried to emulate was the fact that higher level spells required higher levels of Intelligence, and Dexterity (though at a slower rate).

I love the idea of more advanced spells requiring more and more elaborate hand movements and precision coordination, and that’s what T&T offers. In T&T, this parallels the weapon and armor lists, which are also classed so that using the items is gated behind minimum Dexterity and Strength requirements.

But I already removed spell levels from my game, using their raw Strength cost as THE principle differentiator of higher powered spells. Spell levels seemed like an unnecessary vestige of OD&D, serving little purpose compared to casting cost (in D&D, a spell’s level IS its casting cost). I kept Intelligence and Dexterity requirements, but linked them to expanding your repertoire instead of unlocking higher levels of magic; that is, unlocking more powerful classes of spells.

The truth is, having spells gated, one by one, behind both Intelligence AND Dexterity was a detail I have routinely overlooked in play.

The parallel requirements for weapons and armor were already not part of this game, so there was no symmetry to maintain.

Does that make Dexterity irrelevant to spellcasting? No! Many spells require a caster to throw them, which requires a Dexterity Saving Roll. And using a wand as your wizard’s brand allows you to throw even more spells from the list!

Berserk: Going Bananas Has Never Been Simpler

I simplified the procedure for berserk fighting significantly!—by linking it to the terror check and terror pool. I’m eager to playtest this new procedure today.

The gist is, going berserk used to have 4 separate triggers, and now it has 2. Before delvers probably got berserk more than we noticed, because it could be triggered by your dice running hot in combat or by getting wounded.

Now, players can choose to go berserk by spending a style point, or have it happen to them, if a terror check during combat is higher than their INT.

The effect of going berserk is likewise linked to the terror pool. Basically, the player gets to add the terror pool to their combat rolls, but they ADD a die to the pool every time they return dice to the referee. Going berserk creates growing dread!

The Pit of Ultimate Darkness as a Ponzi Scheme

On Saturday, one of our Magic-Users chose to forgo the proletarian work of casting spells with his Strength and instead invoked the Unseen Awful Powers for EVERYTHING! Without gathering ingredients or staging rituals on the appropriate dungeon level.

The resulting shenanigans were epic, and now the character is no longer even kind-of human, and confined eternally to the dungeon. No worries! He has a plan to roll his current troubles into his next petition to the Unseen Awful Powers, using them like a Ponzi scheme.

This is where the malefic referee merely smiles, and says, “Why go right ahead! Be my guest. Help yourself to more! Would you like a drink with that?”

Still, with these petitions requiring nothing more than calling upon the Darkness out loud, a Magic-User might fall into the delusion that they have ample breathing room. And the referee might become reactive and fail to keep up.

The fix is simple: When invoking the Unseen Awful Powers on credit, as it were—that is, without a ritual that meets the requirements—the referee smiles while adding a number of dice to the terror pool equal to the dungeon level required by the ritual.

Sound fun? Download Twisted Tunnels playtest PDF here.

Many Sought Adventure: Go Against the Flow

2026-02-27T15:53:41+00:00

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.

What I Love About Tunnels & Trolls (And What I Did About It)

2026-02-25T05:11:00+00:00

Download the complete Twisted Tunnels playtest PDF to see what Phoenix fantasy is about.

Here’s what makes Tunnels & Trolls feel like Tunnels & Trolls to me—not the brand name, not the publisher, just the actual game:

Ablative abilities.: Your attributes go down through damage, spellcasting, and bad luck. You’re always playing your current numbers. Everything has stakes.

Three classes across a magic gradient.: Warrior (no magic), Rogue (magic by teamwork and/or trickery), Magic-User (full magic, burning Strength to cast). The categories are broad enough that roleplay fills in the rest. An alchemist, a martial artist, a con artist are all the same mechanics and completely different characters.

Faeries, leprechauns, trolls.: A setting with genuine strangeness and no apologies for it.

Side-versus-side combat.: A whole brawl can collapse into a single dice-off. Each side rolls, totals their best dice, and the entire losing side takes the difference as damage. Brutal by default—which is exactly why you try everything else first.

Tactical infinity.: No skill trees, no locked gates, no prerequisites between a clever player and the play they imagine. S. John Ross called this “anarchy.” Ken St. Andre built it in from day one. Your attributes ARE your skills; that’s why they increase when you level up.

Spellcasting burns Strength.: Not a slot, not a pool. The same physical fortitude keeping you on your feet in a fight is what you wager to reshape reality.

Monster Ratings.: Assign a single number from 1 to 99. Done. Fictional positioning does the rest.

Whimsy.: An irreducible tone—impish, dangerous, ridiculous, sincere. If the game isn’t laughing with you, it isn’t T&T.

That’s the recipe. What you do with it is your business.

Classic T&T is magnificent and it can also be improved. Here’s what I’d change:

TL;DR: Smaller numbers and simpler computations, mostly.

Scale weapons to 1, 2, or 3 dice—no weapon Adds.: This was the way in First Edition. Ability scores already generate Adds. The division is intuitive: more dice, more power. But the buckets of dice and weapon Adds in later editions inflate the numbers without improving the game.

Adds = ability ÷ 5, rounded down.: Consistent, clean, no subtraction.

Magic-Users can use any weapon: —at 1 die, no Adds. Meaningful choice, not arbitrary exclusion.

Monster dice = Monster Rating ÷ 5, rounded down.: This means a monster with MR 1-4 rolls zero fighting dice—defenseless. Which means they can be subdued, captured, tamed. That’s First Edition T&T and it’s beautiful.

No spell levels.: Intelligence and Strength requirements are enough.

Lean on the fiction-first loop.: Players say what they think, say, and do. Referee says what happens. Dice enter only when the outcome is genuinely uncertain and something real is at stake.

That’s the game I built. Twisted Tunnels: The Phoenix Apocryphon, Volume III—the public playtest PDF is out now.

The goal was to do everything that First Edition T&T does, with smaller numbers and simpler math, while doubling down on the madcap pulp fantasy frenzy of it all.

The weapons table runs Light (1d), Martial (2d), Buster (3d). Adds come from ability ÷ 5, period. Combat stays fast because the numbers stay small.

Magic-Users start with all Apprentice spells and burn Strength to cast. Rogues can learn any spell—but only from a Magic-User in the party, or by watching someone cast and making an Intelligence roll to snatch the secret. Warriors get none of it but get a signature weapon and double their armor protection instead.

Monsters get a rating from 1-99. It’s not a number that makes them terrifying, but their appetites for chaos or calculated terror. Dice equal that number divided by 5, rounded down. Below MR 5, they’re defenseless. Gotta catch ‘em all.

Spells are named Cooking With Evil Gas, Bearded Babyface, Luigi Board, The Perfectly Cromulent Word. The Monsters chapter opens: “Rival adventurers? Monsters. If you want non-player characters, go find a game for ninnies and literature professors.”

The box is open again.

You can get a copy of the Twisted Tunnels playtest PDF here. Download it. Play it. Make it yours.

Twisted Tunnels: Making a Character (2026)

2026-02-25T01:29:02+00:00

A transcript from the Twisted Tunnels design lab, featuring LetsDrawRyoko (Natalie) and John St. Gaptooth

Download the complete Twisted Tunnels playtest PDF to make your own characters for madcap dungeon demolition.

John: Hi, I’m John.

Natalie: And I’m Natalie.

John: Here we are in the Twisted Tunnels design lab where the tunnels get twisted. We’re here to make a Twisted Tunnels character, and let’s get down to business.

Step 1: Roll Your Abilities

John: First things first, Natalie is going to roll her abilities.

Roll 3d6 for each of the six abilities: Charisma, Constitution, Dexterity, Intelligence, Luck, and Strength. Add all three dice together and assign the total to one ability. If all three dice show the same number—triples—mark that ability with an asterisk. Human characters can then add another 3d6 to any asterisked ability, repeating as long as triples keep coming.

John: Five, five, and one.

Natalie: Bruh. We’re going to add the 3d6s together, right?

John: Yes.

Natalie: Oh, okay. So that’s 11.; I’m going to put my 11 in Intelligence.

John: All right. Now we roll again. Okay—6, 3, and 1 is 10.

Natalie: 10. I’m going to put that in my Dexterity.

John: All right. Okay—6, 4, and 3—yeah, 13.

Natalie: 13. Oh, that goes in my Strength.

John: You already have an idea of what you’re going to play?

Natalie: Yes. A wizard!

John: All right.

Natalie: I’m sorry. Wizards are really cool.

John: All right. 3, 3, and 2.

Natalie: 8. Oh, I’m going to put that in my Luck stat.… There you go.

John: All right. Okay, you have 1, 4, and 5.

Natalie: That’s 11.

John: What?

Natalie: That’s—wait, no. No, it’s not 11. That’s 10.; That’s gonna go in my Charisma.

John: All right. One left.

Natalie: And one more. All right—1, 1, and 5: 7.; 7 is going to go in Constitution.

Figure Adds

John: All right. So now we figure the Adds for each attribute, which is equal to the ability divided by five, rounded down. So for 10 ÷ 5 is 2 for your Charisma Adds.

Natalie: 2.

John: For 7 [Constitution] that would be 1 [Adds].

Natalie: 2 [for Dexterity Adds].

John: And then for ~~Luck~~—or Intelligence Adds, that would be 2. Luck [Adds] would be 1, and Strength [Adds] would be 2.; Your Adds are what you [add to] your rolls when your abilities are tested.

Sudden death: Should any ability ever drop to zero during play, you face sudden death. See Casual Mode for a gentler alternative.

Languages

Select languages equal to your INT Adds — that’s 2 for Natalie. Your native language comes first. Spoken and literate are separate picks. It’s fine to save undefined slots and discover them during play.

Step 2: Pick a Type

John: Now, let’s go ahead and pick a specialty [skill]. Go ahead and roll two dice on this table and you’ll get to pick what order they go in.

Natalie: All right. [Rolls.] Yeet!

John: So you got a 2 and 2. So 2 and 2 is “Danger Sense”. Go ahead and write down “Danger Sense” under your specialty skill.

Specialty skills are an optional rule. They give you +1d on related Saving Rolls, and they also give you contacts, resources, rivals, and debts related to your background.

Natalie: All right.

John: And now you said you’re going to play a Magic-User?

Natalie: M’hm.

John: All right. So I’m going to go ahead and show what a Magic-User gets. The Magic-User survives by wits and magic in their bones. Trained by the mysterious Guild in spellcraft, Magic-Users can learn any spell just by paying the Guild. They start with all Apprentice spells. When you cast a spell while holding a wizard’s brand, subtract your level from the casting cost — that’s a minimum cost of 1. And you can use Light weapons with no penalty. You get only one die when using any other weapon, and no Adds.

The other Types are the Warrior — who can use any weapon without penalty, doubles armor protection, gets a named signature weapon, and gets +1d against any creature that has wounded them. And the Rogue, a jack-of-all-trades who can use any weapon and learn spells, but only from a Magic-User in the party, or by making an Intelligence Saving Roll when observing a spell being cast. Rogues can’t advance past level 7 unless they choose another path.

Step 3: Gear Up

John: The next step is selecting your gear. Here’s the gear. You get one Rare item, two Uncommon items, and three Common items.

You also get a backpack, traveling clothes, 1d6 torches, and 1d6 rations — all for free.

Natalie: I’m going to choose a wizard’s brand and it’s going to be an hourglass.

John: Okay. The hourglass allows you to sustain your spells for longer.; All right, that’s your Rare item. Then you can pick two Uncommon items.

A wizard’s brand is what lets Magic-Users subtract their level from casting costs. Other brand options include an orb, ritual dagger, scroll, staff, or wand.

Natalie: Uncommon. I’m going to pick a disguise kit, and a silk rope.

John: And then you can pick any three Common items. For your Common items, don’t pick a backpack or traveling clothes because you get those for free.

Natalie: Chomp Dog!

John: The Chomp Dog has a Monster Rating of 15. It has a specialty in fighting and [is an] outstanding scent tracker — but it may go berserk whenever it smells a monster. So a Chomp Dog is not something you want to bring on a stealth mission.

Natalie: Uh-uh!; A big onion.

John: Big onion? It’s pretty much mandatory at this point. The big onion is good for your breath, or instant tears. And may have some nutritional value.

Natalie: I’m going to bring ritual candles.

John: Ritual candles. All right, you get 20. Are you planning any rituals in the dungeon?

Natalie: M’hm. [something something] Kesh.

John: All right. Okay, so you’re getting revenge for the last time.

John starts to move on to heirs, then catches himself:

John: Next up is, after gear, you choose an heir or _heiress_—oh wait.; You did not pick a weapon. So, you don’t want to be armed?

Natalie: Uh, I guess I’ll choose a sword. Wait, can I choose a sword?

John: You can choose [one]. Yes.; So all the Light weapons, Light ranged, martial weapons, and martial reach weapons are Common.; Heavy ranged weapons and Heavy reach weapons are Uncommon,; and Buster weapons are Rare.

Natalie: Oh! I’m going to choose a Common weapon. I already got my hourglass.; I’m going to use a war hammer!

John: Okay, so the war hammer is under martial weapons, so it gets two dice in combat.†; But now you have to sacrifice one of your Common items because you only pick three.

†As a Magic-User, Natalie’s character can’t benefit from 2d weapons! We noticed this right after the video ended, and she chose a bagh naka instead.

Natalie: I’m sacrificing the onion.

John: Oh man. So you don’t want to go into the dungeon with fresh breath.

Torches, Rations & Personal Items

John: All right. Then you also get 2 personal items.; Wait, before that: you also get 1d6 torches, 1d6 rations…

Natalie: *Torches*—oh, I get 6!

John: All right.

Natalie: And then, how many rations am I getting? I get 2 rations.

John: Two rations?

Natalie: Going to starve.

John: Then, you also get a backpack and your traveling clothes. These items alone do not count towards weight.

Natalie: Okay.

John: And you get 2 personal items.; You get one Common item from your homeland and one mundane item found in the Twisted Tunnels on a previous failed expedition. They’re not valuable or magical, but they’re special to you.

Tell us why they matter—maybe your grandmother’s wooden spoon saved your life, or that bent copper coin reminds you never to trust a goblin’s smile.

Natalie: Um, magic amulet, and…

John: Was that a mundane personal item, or a mundane item from the Twisted Tunnels?

Natalie: A mundane item from the Twisted Tunnels.

Natalie: And then a mundane item [from my homeland] is going to be an alcohol mug.

John: Okay. All right. Like a flagon?

Natalie: Mhm.

John: Okay.

Natalie: A flagon, and the magical—I did say magical amulet, right?

John: Yeah. What does it look like?

Natalie: It’s round, and like this. It’s got a little stopwatch on top, and it’s got a ring around the stopwatch, and then it’s got a thing that goes around the neck.

John: Okay. Does it have anything on the face?

Natalie: Oh, it’s got a family heirloom crest on it. So it’s going to be a lion on the front.

John: Okay. Okay. All right! So, like your coat of arms—or somebody’s coat of arms [since] you said you found this in the Twisted Tunnels?

Natalie: Yeah.

John: Okay. All right.

Roll 3d6—that’s how many silver groats you start with. Gold gilders and copper farthings also circulate, but conversion varies by location (suggested: 1 gold = 50 silver, 1 silver = 10 copper). We skipped this by accident!

Loadout

Count your items—that’s your Load. Your Load Limit is the sum of your Constitution, Dexterity, and Strength Adds (1 + 2 + 2 = 5 for Natalie’s character). Under your limit you’re Nimble; between your limit and double it you’re Steady; over double you’re Clumsy. You can only carry Heavy items up to your STR Adds — that’s 2 for Natalie.

Step 4: Name Your Heir

John: And then the final thing is, you pick an heir or heiress, who will inherit all your junk if you die.

Natalie: My dog.

John: Your dog?

Natalie: Droolius Caesar.

John: If you leave it to your dog, then whoever owns your dog will pick it up.

Natalie: Yes.

John: All right. Okay. All right.

We shot some more after this clip, including Natalie naming her character “Sabrina”, and swapping out her war hammer for bagh naka hooks. We even shot the beginning of a combat scene, but we decided to save that for another time!

Thanks for tuning in!

Download the complete Twisted Tunnels playtest PDF here.

See Natalie’s art at letsdrawryoko.com, will ya?