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.

The Perfect Storm

So the complications are stacking up in my friend Dwayne's Middle Earth campaign using his 3d6 house system.

At one particularly dramatic moment a NPC received shocking information from a PC. I quipped "You should roll percentile and if a 1 come up the guy has a heart attack".

Dwayne rolled a 1.

The NPC died of a massive heart attack right then and there.

GURPS Dungeon Fantasy and the Hall of Judgment

The latest from Douglas Code is a kickstarter for an adventure for GURPS Dungeon Fantasy called the Hall of Judgment. It is an adaptation and revision of his earlier adventure Lost Hall of Tyr for the GURPS system. It is noteworthy because in part it is an experiment by SJ Games to see how 3rd party publisher support will be received by the fans of GURPS and how it will work out in the long run.

So far the kickstarter has been a success and it is now in it's last 24 hours. If you are a fan of GURPS and fantasy I recommend checking it out. Doug has a passion for Viking myth and legend and it shows in his previous works giving them a distinct feel. He knows GURPS inside and out and the mechanics side of the adventure will be solid. Finally he mastered the tricky art of making full color layouts and his books are a treat to read.

It goes where? An idea seed for a science fiction campaign.

In the late 21st century, humanity has a tentative foothold within the solar system. There are thousands of humans living off planet scattered throughout the Earth-Moon system and a few transitory outposts on Mars and various near earth asteroids.

On July 6th 2089, observatories and astronomical satellites start tracking a high energy source inbound into the Solar system. Within 5 years it was clear that it was decelerating and would soon enter solar orbit. Over a dozen probes were developed and launched. Finally in 2098, the object entered into a solar orbit between Neptune and Uranus and ceased emitting energy. What remained was a small localized area where gravity was distorted. Barely detectable as stars and planets moved behind the object and then suddenly shifted back to their normal position once they emerged from behind.

The first probes reached the object in May of 2101, what they detected amazed everybody, it was a mechanism of alien manufacture creating an opening to a stable Rosen-Einstein bridge or wormhole several hundred meters in diameter. Upon further investigation the first transit was attempted and when the probe return and its data was analyzed the results were electrifying. It was not just a bridge through space but time as well.

The other end of the wormhole was in the orbit around Earth, Earth of 65 million years ago.

Recommendations for the original Wilderlands of High Fantasy

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The OSR is what you want it to be!

Just keep in mind when you read about what the OSR ought to be or ought to be doing that the widespread use of open content under the OGL means that the OSR is always what YOU think it is. Not what me or anybody else thinks.

 That the tools are there for you to show how the rest of us are doing it wrong (in a good way). Coupled with the low barriers enabled by digital technology, you can share as little or as much as you want in the matter you think best. Whether it is a comment, a text file, a full color hardback or god help you a boxed set.