# Ken St. Andre - Maker: Game designer - Date: b. 1947 - Houses: Flying Buffalo - Canonical: https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/ken-st-andre/ > The Phoenix librarian who read the D&D rules in 1975, decided they made no sense, and wrote Tunnels & Trolls, the second roleplaying game ever published and the first built for solo play. **Why it matters:** Tunnels & Trolls proved that D&D was a form, not a single product: anyone could write their own roleplaying game. Its simple six-sided dice, humor and solo adventures opened the hobby to players who never met a wargamer, and St. Andre went on to help design the landmark computer RPG Wasteland. ## Quick answers **Who is Ken St. Andre?** The Phoenix librarian who read the D&D rules in 1975, decided they made no sense, and wrote Tunnels & Trolls, the second roleplaying game ever published and the first built for solo play. **When was Ken St. Andre born?** Ken St. Andre was born in 1947 in Ogden, Utah. **What is Ken St. Andre known for?** Ken St. Andre is best known for Tunnels & Trolls. **Why does Ken St. Andre matter to fantasy and games?** Tunnels & Trolls proved that D&D was a form, not a single product: anyone could write their own roleplaying game. Its simple six-sided dice, humor and solo adventures opened the hobby to players who never met a wargamer, and St. Andre went on to help design the landmark computer RPG Wasteland. ## 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](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/original-dungeons-and-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](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/chainmail/), for combat. Rather than puzzle them out, he wrote his own. By April 1975 he had a playable game, [Tunnels & Trolls](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/tunnels-and-trolls/), and he printed 100 copies himself. Rick Loomis of [Flying Buffalo](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/flying-buffalo/), a Scottsdale company then best known for [Play-by-Mail Games](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/play-by-mail/) 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](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/gamebook/) boom of the 1980s, including [Fighting Fantasy](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/fighting-fantasy/), and they sit at the root of the [Solo & Journaling RPGs](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/solo-rpg/) 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](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/chaosium/) he designed *Stormbringer* (1981), a game of [Michael Moorcock](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/michael-moorcock/)'s [Elric](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/elric-of-melnibone/) 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](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/interplay/)'s post-apocalyptic RPG *Wasteland* (1988), produced by [Brian Fargo](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/brian-fargo/), whose party-based design and reactive world were a milestone for the [Western Computer RPGs (CRPG)](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/computer-rpg/). ## 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. ## Facts - St. Andre was born on April 28, 1947, in Ogden, Utah, and worked as a public librarian in Phoenix, Arizona, for 36 years, retiring in 2010. - He printed 100 copies of the first edition of [Tunnels & Trolls](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/tunnels-and-trolls/) in 1975; [Flying Buffalo](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/flying-buffalo/) took 40 of them to the Origins convention that July and sold out. - Tunnels & Trolls uses only ordinary six-sided dice, at a time when D&D required unusual [Polyhedral dice](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/polyhedral-dice/). - T&T spells carry joke names such as "Take That You Fiend!" - His *Starfaring* (1976) is often cited as the first published science-fiction roleplaying game. - He was inducted into the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts & Design Hall of Fame in June 2018. ## Sources and further reading - [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_St._Andre) - [Wikipedia: Tunnels & Trolls](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnels_%26_Trolls) --- From The Lantern Hall (https://www.lanternhall.org/), a museum of fantasy literature and roleplaying games.