Old School Solo Adventures for Old School Essentials

 The Fantasy Trip by Steve Jackson Games has a long tradition of offering solo adventures like Death Test. When Douglas Cole of Gaming Ballistic secured a 3PP license for TFT he and his authors continued that tradition with their own series of adventures.

Now he and his team of authors did the work into making these adventures compatible with Old School Essentials. Given that OSE is a hop and skip from a dozen other classic editions and close clones these adventures can be used by a wide variety of OSR systems. 

He has started a Kickstarter to fund the printing and final work on these adventures.

Old-School Solo Adventures

I was given Til Death do Us Part to try and I found it fun and interesting to play out. Its replayability is good as there are multiple paths with multiple outcomes to explore. I think leveraging the TFT community's experience with solo adventures  is a great idea and will create a fun niche for classic edition hobbyists to play with between sessions and campaigns.

Some Fantasy Trip Goodness

Douglas Cole at Gaming Ballistic has a new kickstarter up called More Perilous Journeys.

It is a collection of five adventures for The Fantasy Trip RPG by SJ Games. Like classic DnD, the Fantasy Trip is a minimalist RPG that focuses on labyrinth i.e. dungeon adventures.

In addition to his work on Dragon Heresy (a DnD 5e variant), and Dungeon Fantasy RPG (GURPS). Douglas also been supporting the Fantasy Trip along by publishing materials from several different authors. He built quite a team putting out great material for TFT coupled with a high production value as you can see from the cover below.

So about The Fantasy Trip

I got my Fantasy Trip Legacy box on Friday. Then the next day I got a email from SJ Games saying it shipped. Looks like they really got this Infinity thing nailed down tight.

So when I opened the box and removed the plastic the above is what I got. All I got to say that is one monster box. I also picked up pocket box version of Melee/Wizard. It thicker than the original but it also nice quality cardboard counters instead of the stiff paper version of the original. I think anybody who want Melee/Wizard for a wargame is going to be pleased with the pocket box version.

I then opened the box.

It nice how they made the inside box lid a function aide in it own right. It can be used as a drop table to generate a random dungeon.

Removing the cover sheet and the contents we get.

As for the packing, note they cleverly put two finger wholes in the The Fantasy Trip Mega Hex lid. This made it super easy to pull out from the bottom. 

As for the rest, you get the paper boxed set of Melee, Wizard, and Death Test. A very sturdy referee screen. A expanding file folder style organizer, two poster maps, In the Labyrinth main rulebook, reference book, and Tollenkar's Lair adventure.  Along with dice, a deck of pregens, and pads of character sheet (two sizes).

It was exciting to open this up and look at each item. Definitely felt like I got my money worth even though I didn't get the "Get it all" level.

The poster maps

The referee's screen along with the map and book for Tollenkar's Lair

The front of the referee's screen

The remaining leaves of the front of the referee's screen.

Finally some of the cards with pregenerated characters,

Overall I think this is a outstanding product for a RPG. Steve Jackson and his team did a great job with this. One of the best part going forward is there are multiple entry points for people to try out the system before deciding to buy into the line.

Wrapping it up.
Right now I am in the midst of preparing Wilderlands of the Magic Realm for publication. Once I get that done, I will setup some of the counters and megahexes and do a run through of the system.

SJ Games opens the door for The Fantasy Trip

In a very interesting bit of news, SJ Games announced they are going to instituted a limited publishing agreement where fans of TFT can publish on Warehouse 23 and earn royalties.

SJ Games is a pioneer in selling games and gaming PDFs on-line. At first through their e23 site and then later through their combined Warehouse 23 store. And both were open to other publishers and their games.

I had the opinion for a long time, that unlike other game companies their existing infrastructure allowed them open out their RPG and give them additional options than just throwing everything into the OGL or into the hands of another company. I am glad they are taking advantage of that for the The Fantasy Trip.

And hopefully if TFT goes well, GURPS is next. Expect a post breaking things down when the Limited Publishing Agreement is posted.

My first Fantasy Trip Aid also useful for GURPS and Dungeon Fantasy

A long time ago I made a set of customized graph paper to use with GURPS after I purchased the Cardboard Heroes: Dungeon Floors.

As you can see from the image below, SJ Games cleverly squashed the hexes to allow them to align with a rectangular grid. I drew up some graph paper so I can easily draw dungeons for my Majestic Wilderlands when I used GURPS as the rules.

After pledging to the The Fantasy Trip kickstarter I found a copy of In the Labyrinth for a reasonable price on eBay and bought it. In there and in the original Wizard which I also have. The Fantasy Trip has the concept of magahexes, a larger hex encompassing seven small hexes. It is used to adjudicate long ranges, area spells and other effects.

So I pulled out the old file and added a layer with Mega Hex border.

You can download it from here.

It is layered with the border, hexes, megahexes, and grid on separate layers. The advantage of this is that you can draw or transpose dungeon laid out on a grid to use with the hex map format of GURPS or The Fantasy Trip.

The Fantasy Trip Kickstarter is live

The Fantasy Trip, Melee, and Wizard are among the first games designed by Steve Jackson of Steve Jackson Games. They fairly rule lite using 3d6 (roll low) to resolve combat and magic. It is also one of the first line of games to straddle the line between RPGs and Wargames. Melee and Wizard are two standalone wargames. Melee focuses on a quick system to resolving melee fights between combatants. While Wizards focuses on magical duels with spells.

Into the Labyrinth combines and extends these wargames into a complete RPG known as the Fantasy Trip using Advanced Melee and Advanced Wizard to handle combat and magic along with additional rules like talents.

It was originally published by Metagaming but went out of print when the company went under in the early 1980s. US copyright laws allows authors after several decades (30+ years in this case) to recover copyright to their work. Steve Jackson took advantage of this provision to acquire the rights to the original rules of the Fantasy Trip along with the right to other parts of the line he wrote like Tollenkar's Lair, and the two Death Test solo adventures.

Now Steve Jackson Games has launched a kickstarter to get all three games including Tollenkar's Lair back in print.