RPG Publisher Spotlight: Trollhalla Press

Last month, Geek Native’s patrons voted Trollhalla Press into the RPG Publisher Spotlight.

Usually, I’ll try hard to line up a Q&A with someone at the company, nagging over social media, chasing over email and otherwise making a pest of myself in the name of trying to write a more helpful article. After all, the point of the RPG Publisher Spotlight is to help the publisher out by getting readers interested in them.

I do have founder Ken St Andre’s email address, and I’ve emailed, but I’m not going to nag. St Andre gets a pass.

Why? Ken invented the second traditional tabletop RPG that the world ever saw, Tunnels & Trolls, and Wikipedia (and other sites) remind us Ken was born 28th April 1947.

You do not nag a 73-year-old gaming icon. You email once, wait a respectful amount of time and then get on with it. At least, that’s what I’m doing here. I probably went straight to the spam folder, anyway.

Ken St. Andre and Trollhalla

Ashley Park of IdeateTV has a lovely interview with St. Andre, it’s not even 8 minutes long and yet you’ll get both personality and a history of Tunnels & Trolls.

In this video, Ken mentions Flying Buffalo. After writing Tunnels & Trolls in 1975, Ken St Andre asked Rick Loomis to take some copies to Origins and try and sell them. Loomis did precisely that and sold every one. A year later he entered into a handshake partnership, securing permission to publish T&T material, sell it and pay royalties back to St Andre.

Rick Loomis is no longer with us, but Flying Buffalo is, and they continue to publish Tunnels & Trolls material.

Ken St Andre uses Trollhalla Press to publish his own content for Tunnels & Trolls, but also the 2nd edition of Monsters! Monsters! which came out in May 2020.

The original Monsters! Monsters! was published in 1976, a year after Tunnels & Trolls, using the same rules. The catch? In Monsters! Monsters! the player characters are monsters.

Trollhalla and others

Trollhalla Press has 35 products listed at DriveThruRPG, and Ken St Andre is on most of them, but I thought it would be nice to look at who else has helped out.

Trollhalla authors

• Steve Crompton
• Charlie Fleming
• Gilead
• David Ullery
• Stuart Lloyd
• Jon Hancock
• Stefan Jones

Trollhalla artists

• David Ullery x 18
• Steve Crompton x 8
• Gilead x 6
• Nicole Bresner x 5
• Robin Stacey x 4
• Phil Longmeirer x 3
• Darrenn Canton x 2
• Gustav Dore x 2
• Salvatore Valente x 2
• Chad Thorson
• J. C. Lambert
• Jeff Freels
• Norikata Makino
• Simon Lee Tranter

The latest Trollhalla products

• Monsters! Monsters! GM Screen published July 2020.
• The Game of Skrumm aka Trollworld Chess published July 2020.
• Champion of Stormgaard published June 2020.
• Ten days in the Arena of Khazan published June 2020.
• Toughest Dungeon in the World – solo adventure published June 2020.

Trollhalla on Social Media

Trollhalla doesn’t have a vast social media footprint. In our one exchange, Ken encouraged me to use the DriveThruRPG Trollhalla Press page as the closest thing to a website.

However, there is an official Trollhalla Facebook page. It describes itself like this;

Trollhalla is actually a place for all lovers of high, low, and heroic fantasy. If you also play Tunnels and Trolls, it’s even better.

There are various Tunnels & Trolls pages on Facebook well.

In addition, Ken is active on Twitter as @Trollgodfather.

You can also find the Tunnels & Trolls Adventures app on iOS and Google Play.

Update: 16th August – Article previously said “Rick Loomis … purchased the rights to Tunnels & Trolls” and now uses the phrase “handshake partnership, securing permission to publish T&T material”.