Ken St. Andre

Life

Kenneth Eugene St. Andre was born on April 28, 1947, in Ogden, Utah, and made his life in Arizona. A reader of science fiction and fantasy, he spent his working career not in games but in libraries: 36 years as a public librarian for the city of Phoenix, retiring in 2010. Game design was, for most of that time, what he did in the evenings. He lives in Sun City, Arizona.

Work

In the spring of 1975 St. Andre got a look at the original Dungeons & Dragons booklets. He was taken with the idea (a fantasy adventure game in which each player ran a single hero) but found the rules confusing and, to his mind, illogical; they also leaned on a separate wargame, Chainmail, for combat. Rather than puzzle them out, he wrote his own. By April 1975 he had a playable game, Tunnels & Trolls, and he printed 100 copies himself.

Rick Loomis of Flying Buffalo, a Scottsdale company then best known for Play-by-Mail Games games, agreed to take 40 copies to the Origins convention in July 1975. They sold out, and Flying Buffalo published a second edition that December. That made Tunnels & Trolls the second roleplaying game to reach print, a matter of months after D&D.

The game's design is a deliberate simplification. Characters have attributes such as Strength, Luck and Charisma rolled on three six-sided dice; combat is resolved by each side rolling a handful of ordinary dice and comparing totals; and a single mechanic, the saving roll, handles almost any risky action. Its magic is famous for jokey spell names: "Take That You Fiend!" for a basic attack spell, "Hellbomb Bursts" for a devastating one. The tone is lighter and more irreverent than D&D's, which made it welcoming to players outside the wargaming world.

Tunnels & Trolls also became the home of the solo adventure. From 1976 Flying Buffalo published programmed adventures, beginning with Rick Loomis's Buffalo Castle, in which a single player reads numbered paragraphs and makes choices, with no referee required. Those booklets anticipated the Gamebooks & Interactive Books boom of the 1980s, including Fighting Fantasy, and they sit at the root of the Solo & Journaling RPGs tradition.

He was prolific in other directions too. Monsters! Monsters! (1976) let players take the roles of the creatures that usually wait at the bottom of the dungeon, and Starfaring (1976) is generally counted as the first published science-fiction RPG. For Chaosium he designed Stormbringer (1981), a game of Michael Moorcock's Elric stories built on the company's percentile-based system. And he crossed into computer games as one of the designers, with Liz Danforth and Michael Stackpole, of Interplay Productions's post-apocalyptic RPG Wasteland (1988), produced by Brian Fargo, whose party-based design and reactive world were a milestone for the Western Computer RPGs (CRPG).

Legacy

St. Andre's importance is partly symbolic. By writing a rival game within months of D&D, he demonstrated that the roleplaying game was a genre open to anyone, not a proprietary product, and he did it as a fan rather than a wargamer. Tunnels & Trolls has never matched D&D's scale, but it has stayed in print through many editions for half a century and received a deluxe edition in the 2010s.

Its influence reached further than its sales. The solo adventure proved that a roleplaying experience could be packaged for one reader, and Wasteland carried St. Andre's instincts into a computer RPG whose spiritual successor, Fallout, reshaped the genre in the late 1990s. In 2018 the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts & Design inducted him into its Hall of Fame.