Nationality American Occupation Game designer | Name Ken Andre Role Author | |
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Books Deathtrap Equalizer, Tunnels and Trolls, Naked Doom People also search for Michael A. Stackpole, Brian Fargo, Alan Pavlish | ||
The spiel at gencon 2012 ken st andre tunnels trolls
Kenneth Eugene St. Andre (born on April 28, 1947 in Ogden, Utah) is an American fantasy author and game designer, best known for his work with Tunnels & Trolls and Wasteland. He has been an active member of The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America since 1989.
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Game design
Ken St. Andre first saw the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game in April 1975, and after deciding that the rules did not make sense, so designed a simpler game of his own. St. Andre eventually called his game Tunnels & Trolls, and printed 100 copies of the first edition in 1975. He asked Rick Loomis of Flying Buffalo to take 40 copies to Origins that July to sell; when every copy sold, Flying Buffalo picked up the rights to T&T later that year and published a second edition under their own brand in December 1975. In addition to writing the game rules, Ken was one of the creators of solitaire adventures which allowed players to experience the game without a game master or judge. St. Andre has written many modules and stand alone adventures for Tunnels and Trolls.
St. Andre designed Starfaring, published by Flying Buffalo in 1976 as the first-ever science fiction roleplaying game. His third game, Monsters! Monsters!, was published by Metagaming Concepts in 1976, although Flying Buffalo got the rights to print a second edition in 1979. He also wrote the gamebooks Deathtrap Equalizer Dungeon and Naked Doom in 1977 after Loomis's own Buffalo Castle. He designed Chaosium's first licensed role-playing game, Stormbringer, in 1981.
With Liz Danforth and Michael Stackpole, St. Andre designed the computer roleplaying game Wasteland, published by Interplay in 1988. Tunnels & Trolls was published in a new 5.5 edition in 2005 by Flying Buffalo, with new rules, background and variants by St. Andre. Fiery Dragon Productions published a heavily revised seventh edition in 2005, with revisions by St. Andre. St. Andre produced T&T adventures such as Hot Pursuit (2007). St. Andre continued to design T&T adventures for Flying Buffalo, including Khara Kang's Random Rainbow Maze (2010), Deep Delving (2011) and A Traveler's Tale (2011).In 2008, he modified the 7th edition Tunnels and Trolls to bring the game world into modern times and turned it into a superhero RPG called Power Trip.
In 1986, Ken was also the first editor for a fan club newsletter based around the Adventure Construction Set video game, one of the rare cases of a professional designer leading gamer activities for another designer's game.
In 2011, St. Andre and Richard Loomis (president and owner of Flying Buffalo, Inc.) created a Kickstarter project to fund a new edition of Tunnels & Trolls. The project met its funding goals, and was scheduled to be released in February, 2013.
St. Andre was chosen by vote as a "famous game designer" to be featured as the king of spades in Flying Buffalo's 2014 Famous Game Designers Playing Card Deck.
Fiction
St. Andre has written various short stories and novels.
Personal life
Ken St. Andre lives in Phoenix, Arizona. He and his wife Catherine initiated divorce proceedings in 2012. They have two grown children, a daughter named Jillian and son named James. On August 27, 2010, he retired after 36 years of service to the city of Phoenix as a public librarian.