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After all, games like GURPS build player characters and monsters alike with the same point-build system. This seems like a perfectly natural thing today. Monsters! Monsters! took the elements of the Tunnels & Trolls game and reworked them to allow for fifty-two different monster types, all run with the same rules and resolution that was previously the domain of player characters alone.
And though the famed Peters & Mcallister chart opened the way for players to create the now-traditional demi-human player characters of dwarf, elf, leprechaun, faerie, and hobbit extraction, monster fans were left with a few sketchy suggestions on how to scale up man-sized weapons for monster use and also allow your monsters to level up just like the player characters.īut there was more to be done here. The fourth edition of Tunnels & Trolls addressed that by included a chart of sample monsters with their ratings broken out by level. The first edition of the game did not even include any example monsters, just a system for rating them and then running them based off of a single stat: their monster rating. Of course, the simplicity of the game can be a little unnerving. Heck, it was designed from the ground up as an answer to the “excessive complexity” of its chief competitor.
The “Number Two” fantasy role-playing game simply didn’t need a basic version. The fact is, TSR was hustling to catch up to the Phoenix gaming scene, because Tunnels & Trolls was arguably first on both counts. They produced the a “Basic Set” version of the D&D game and a game supplement dedicated entirely to monsters: The AD&D Monster Manual. Monsters! Monsters! was released during America’s bicentennial and notice TSR’s response the next year. This was followed up with the 1975 release of “the poor man’s alternative to D&D”, Tunnels & Trolls. Keep in mind that the publication of role-playing games had only begun two years before. Monsters! Monsters! is a fascinating game.