Thornguard for Tunnels and Trolls RPG Review

I recently bought Thornguard for Tunnels and Trolls and I thought I would do a little review. It's a solo adventure by The Trollish Delver that takes place in the city of Thornguard. This solo adventure allows you to choose what you want to do making it unique to adventures I've played before.


The way Thornguard is played is just like Choose Your Own Adventure books. The adventure starts off with you coming out of your room at the inn and a merchant asks you to help him set up his stand and he would give you 10% of his take for the day. The adventure then gives you the choice of what to do, usually helping someone that opens up more choices for you. Helping the right people allows you access to the quest board which has many different jobs available on it.

You are also given the choice of joining the Thieves Guild, City Guard and Merchants Guild which will then allow you to do jobs on those boards. If you seek a different path you can attempt to join the Initiate of the Red Sun and then acquire the special stuff they have for sale.

One unique aspect of this adventure is the use of Keywords. I haven't come across this before so it was new to me. This is how it works, for example, if you complete a job for someone you may be given a keyword. Then later on someone you talk to may act differently to you if you have that keyword, giving you more or fewer options depending upon the situation. It is a very simple system that I thought worked very good.

This solo adventure is only 18 pages and it doesn't have a lot of depth to it, but that's the way of a solo RPG adventure. Despite only 18 pages, it has a lot of replayability due to the way it works. Most solo adventures put you on a set course and once you get to the end that's it. Thornguard allows you to work for all the different Guilds I listed above, giving you unique missions for all of them. Eventually, you could play them all but there is a decent amount for those 18 pages.

Conclusion:

I liked this solo adventure, it gives you the freedom that you usually don't get in a solo RPG adventure. I also liked the keyword system that worked very well and at least to me was a unique feature. You can buy Thornguard from Drive Thru RPG for only $2.00 as of this writing, and I think it's worth it. I give Thornguard a 7 out of 10.