Tunnels & Trolls play report — A King Reborn
5 min readAug 28, 2024
The who
- Lorna, LV3 werebear warrior, +14 personal adds; seeking a cure
- Ergot, LV1 human wizard; hubris incarnate
- Moe, LV1 gremlin warrior, +2 personal adds; adventuring to catch his crush’s eye
- Hengrist, LV3 dwarf warrior, +14 personal adds; failed miner turned adventurer
The what
- A train was intercepted yesterday and its cargo was stolen. Their employer was cagey about explaining what was being carried and kept upping the fee each time the party looked suspicious. Eventually a fee of 500ŋ each was settled upon.
- The party arrive at the banditry site — the locomotive was stopped by a solid anvil of a thing pushed onto the tracks right when the train was taking a turn. A large metal container — clearly once refrigerated — was rent open.
- The party weren’t the only ones present: four hyenas (MR30 ea.) had been scavenging on some present carrion. Hengrist threw a miner’s flashbang to drive one of them off; Lorna intimidated another away; Ergot cast oh go away! at a third; then the fourth was minced by Lorna and Hengrist. Meanwhile Moe investigated the carriage, revelling in the destruction. Scraps of rotted reptilian flesh remained and sheafs of torn up paper — Moe repaired the paper to read the manifest, then tore it into smaller shreds still.
This carriage had been transporting the bog-preserved corpse of a tyrannosaurus rex.
- The group followed the trail of gore from the carriage to a metal cube in the shrublands, hiding from the heat under a miniature raincloud Ergot had elementarily summoned. Upon arrival, it looks like the t.rex had been unloaded just before the back gate, though where to was unclear.
- The group sneak in the back and Moe hears that there was some noise through into a different room, but that it had stopped immediately as the group entered the cube. This room was a locker room for maybe three dozen people and didn’t seem to have been used for a long time. Moe and Lorna explored through a door to the room where he’d heard some noise and Hengrist and Ergot climbed the spiral staircase to the floor above.
- Upstairs, there was a lot of desks and levers and buttons. A real Enterprise’s-bridge of a room. At its centre, a huge perspex window overlooking a pit, which Hengrist couldn’t help but investigate:
Within, the t.rex was walking!
- Awake, though not very much so, and with a strange octopus looking thing plastered across its left eye socket and a golden crest embedded in the back of its skull.
- Downstairs, Lorna and Moe discover three desiccated scientists sat at a coffee table. Lorna investigates with her axe, but when Hengrist’s sound of shock upstairs breaks the silence, the scientists (gouls, MR60 ea.) attack! Luckily Moe’s paranoid prevents this being a full surprise attack, though he is paralysed by their nerve-dowsing.
- The rest of the party arrives and a frantic assault takes place, with Lorna and Hengrist taking deep wounds
- Lorna pushes the table in the way of two of the gouls and the entire group now manage to take down the remaining, and when the other two climb over the table, Ergot makes its surface an ice-slick and the two slide off, and out the door Moe opened in preparation. The party make quick work barricading the doors from this room and in the locker room they entered through.
- Moe heard there were buttons upstairs though, and goes up to check — and wreak havoc on the technology. Hengrist is present to work out more of what’s going on with the dinosaur, and sees that the facility has started to go into emergency mode with the destruction Moe’s causing! The ceiling opens James Bond style and the central pit within the perspex rises — the t.rex will reach the roof in but a few moments!
- Before they can attempt to fix this, the two are surprised by horrid undead scientists (bodaks, MR100) whose very gaze boils away at their souls. Moe tries to draw their focus, hoping to take advantage of his ability to slip notice just at the last point, but it turns out going eye-to-eye with a bodak has only one end. His soul is boiled away entire.
- Luckily the others are able to use the moment to corner one of the bodaks, but even the bearform of Lorna and the ax of Hengrist only manage to make a moderate blow. Rather than face the two of them together, Hengrist pulls a chunk of broken desk between the pair and Lorna hurls the trapped bodak down the spiral staircase. The two make short work of the remaining scientist with the assistance of Ergot’s take that you fiend! but in its final moments, the creature turns its horrid gaze on everyone —
- Ergot dies instantly. Hengrist is permanently reduced to CON 1. Lorna hardly notices.
- By the time they get downstairs, the t.rex has leapt from the roof and loped off into the distance. The remaining scientist and his goul assistants chase after it, and Lorna and Hengrist let them go …
The how
Bonus commentary
- To speed up chargen, I created a list of basic loadouts for which they could choose based on their prime attributes. We had the skirmisher package — light bow 3D6, dagger 2D6, wool coat 1hits; the soldier package — shortsword 3D6, shield 3hits, leather 3hits; and the beserker package — big ax 7D6.
- When players explained their characters backstory and why they were adventuring, I improvised some bonus items for each — Hengrist had miner’s flashbangs, Moe a locket of his love, Ergot had a fancy wizardine tool, and Lorna had some belladonna (a failed cure for her ursanthropy). Half of these items were used in play
- I used Weird Writer’s HD-2-MR conversion rules when statting the monsters
- You can also get the DT&T pdf here
