Jungle of Lost Souls
The Toughest Dungeon in the World
This adventure is designed for the Tunnels and Trolls role-playing system. It is literally an adventure involving Trolls in Tunnels. In order to play you will need pencil, paper, a 20-sided die, several six-sided dice, and the 5th edition of the Tunnels & Trolls rules.
Most adventures are designed for the "good guys", those brave adventurers who invade subterranean lairs in search of loot and thrills. This one, on the contrary, tries to get you to look at things from the "monster's" point of view. After playing a Troll for a while, you will begin to realize that the delvers are the true monsters of the story.
How can I call this The Toughest Dungeon in the World? It may well be that there are other solitaire adventures with more fiendish traps, bigger monsters, more labyrinthine passages. Certainly a solitaire adventure can never really replace a good face-to-face encounter with a skilled Judge. However, I would like to point out some of the factors that make this particular adventure so hard to win.
Other solitaire adventures tend to last from 10 to 30 minutes, and you will have either won or died. This one will be that short only if your player character dies quickly. The goal of accumulating 10,000 Gold Pieces worth of treasure will turn this into a carefully calculated campaign game for the player who dares hope to win.
Another difficulty is that your opposition (the delvers and other monsters in the caverns) are designed to get stronger and stronger. (This means some bookkeeping work for you as a player, but the vast numbers of characters you create for combat in this adventure can be recycled as cannon fodder, and other miscellaneous citizens in other T & T games.) Arena of Khazan suggested that opposition get continually tougher, but the challenge was partially alleviated by the random selection of foes. Foe selection is random here, too, but, you can depend on it being worse than the last thing you faced.
I don't expect you to win. I tried every unfair dodge I could think of to kill you, like giving your opponents magic while not allowing you any. They may also have enchanted weapons which you are unlikely to duplicate, unless you are smart and strong enough to win their enchantments away from them.
Last but not least, this dungeon is so tough that it contains an ultimate source of evil. If you're lucky, you'll never find it.
Originally published by Judges Guild.
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