The Fantasy Trip Kickstarter: A Good Deal?

After 35 years, Steve Jackson of Steve Jackson Games has finally re-acquired the rights to The Fantasy Trip, the tactical fantasy combat and light roleplaying game he developed in 1977.

The Fantasy Trip is comprised of a number of game books:  Melee, a game of tactical man-to-man combat; Wizard, a game of wizard duels;  Advanced Wizard, additional rules for Wizard characters; In the Labyrinth, role-playing and world building rules; Advanced Melee, expanded man-to-man combat rules;and 11 or so setting and pre-programmed adventure books.

The rights to The Fantasy Trip were owned by Howard Thompson, the President of Metagaming, and when Metagaming folded in 1982, Howard demanded an outrageous price from Jackson for the rights to the game, which Jackson refused to pay.  Thus, the game ceased to be published or officially supported after 1982.

The game retained a cult following, however, and people continued to play and support it.  Dark City Games even developed its own similacrum of The Fantasy Trip, called Legends of the Ancient World, and published numerous additional pre-programmed adventures, including The Dark Vale, which I previously reviewed on this blog.

Jackson recently took advantage of a copyright law that permits a creator to re-aquire the rights to their intellectual property after 35 years.

Steve Jackson Games is currently running a Kickstarter to fund the production and distribution of a revised version of the game.

In considering whether the new Kickstarter for The Fantasy Trip is a good value, I looked at the original price of the various game books, and applied the inflation incurred during the intervening period.  The original publication years, price and the inflation based on the US Consumer Price Index are indicated below.

The basic pledge for The Fantasy Trip is $60, and it included, as of the Kickstarter launch, the material from all five of those publications. Using the above amounts, you are paying less, in today's dollars, than the cost to buy the original five game books when they were published back in the day.

Of course, this price is before shipping, but then you also need to factor in the extras that are being provided with this new printing, including dice (not included in the original game), a box to hold the game in, melee character pads, two sheets of mega-hexes, proper indexes in each book, and Tollenkar's Lair, Death Test, and Death Test 2 pre-programmed adventures (which are an additional $10 each of added value).  All of those extras add $40 of overall value, and more stretch goals are yet to come.

If you have never played The Fantasy Trip before and are interested in the game, or if you have the gamebooks and want a cleaned up version of the game to play again, you should check out the Kickstarter.

Modern Microgames: Dark City Games

If you like the old Metagaming and other microgames, or The Fantasy Trip, you should check out Dark City Games, which produces pre-programmed adventures for a Melee / Wizard / TFT retroclone called Legends of the Ancient World.  I've already purchased seven of the Dark City adventures, and the rest look fantastic.  Here are the adventures I've already purchased.

And the ones below are on my to-buy list.  Check out Dark City Games!

Microgame Collection

I finally got around to unpacking my Microgame collection this evening.  It has been tucked away in three boxes in the basement since our move back in August, and I'd forgotten about several titles that had recently been added to the collection, including "A Fistful Of Turkeys."

There are a few titles left to acquire, but that exercise is not terribly urgent.  One of those has no placeholder at the moment: 20th Maine.  It is not the most expensive one to purchase, but several have sold on eBay without me paying attention to the listings.

Old School Illustrations: In The Labyrinth

Here's the final set of illustrations from The Fantasy Trip core booklets.  These ones are from In The Labyrinth, the setting and game masters booklet.  Robert Phillips once again provides the illustrations.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Old School Illustrations: Advanced Wizard

I recently posted several illustrations from Metagaming's Advanced Melee rulebook. 

There were two other main resource books for The Fantasy Trip game system: Advanced Wizard and In The Labyrinth.  Like the art in Advanced Melee, the Advanced Wizard illustrations were exclusively produced by Robert Phillips. 

Arguably, the illustrations found in Advanced Wizard were the weakest of the three resource books, thematically and otherwise, because there were no illustrations of Wizards (surprising, considering the title of the resource book), nothing connecting the subjects to any identifiable milieu, and a complete absence of hot fantasy chicks.  We are instead treated to battles with sabre-toothed tigers, does that make up for the lack of the former two?

Various humanoid antagonists make appearances in Advanced Wizard, beating their chests, reaching into crevices, and otherwise posing menacingly.

 

Many of the best main sourcebook TFT illustrations appeared in the gamemaster's resource, In The Labyrinth.  But it seems odd that for a gamebook, wholly devoted to the development of Wizards, there are no images of Wizards.  Instead we are provided with  illustrations better suited to Advanced Melee and In The Labyrinth, like Conan-esque characters battling Lizardmen and Archers facing off against Giant Lizards.

Robert Phillips' illustrations tend towards minimal environment connecting the subject of the piece to the scene.  Take for example the two illustrations below, one of an adventurer discovering an exit from the labyrinth, and another of a guard protecting the entrance to one.  There's nothing in the background to connect the adventurer or guard to anything more than a generic fantasy world.

And there's nothing in the text of Advanced Wizard to tie any of these illustrations to the purpose of the resource book.  Though the illustrations fit into the broader Fantasy Trip aesthetic, I have to wonder how the editor and publisher justified the inclusion of this particular artwork in this gamebook.

The Fantasy Trip Video Review

Microquests: Death Test 2

Every 1970's game design house was strongly affected by the success of TSR's Dungeons and Dragons game.

If you look at the history of such established chit-and-hex firms as SPI and Avalon Hill, you see mad scrambles to catch up to the phenomenal growth curve of TSR, and capture some of the role-playing game market.

Then there were upstarts, like Metagaming, that came onto the scene just as TSR was finding its legs. But, despite being contemporaries, and settling (initially) into discrete niches, you still find them trying to horn in on the success of D&D.

Like SPI and Avalon Hill, Metagaming desperately wanted to penetrate the roleplaying game market. Their unique business model was microgames; small format chit-and-hex games that could be carried anywhere, and played anytime.

But after Metagaming's success with the Steve Jackson-designed Melee microgame, and subsequent further success of the spellcaster-based follow-up, Wizard, Metagaming poured significant energy into expanding those two games, creating what they hoped would be a full-fledged RPG competitor to D&D. That expansion led to the creation of "The Fantasy Trip", being Advanced Melee, Advanced Wizard and In The Labyrinth.

With the departure of Steve Jackson from Metagaming, TFT would subsequently become GURPS.

One of the Metagaming Melee and Wizard supporting lines was a series of Microquest boxed supplements. These were small format boxed adventures, that provided everything you needed to run a pre-programmed game, in either solo or game-mastered mode. Those microquests were not terribly sophisticated, as they were typical hack-and-slash fare.


But they included the most wonderful cardboard counters!

The above counters are from Death Test 2, a maze and set of arenas below Thorz' palace, intended to test the character's mettle, in anticipation of eventual employment in Thorz' mercenary army. As I observed earlier, the combination of skeletons, weapon-wielding octopuses, and other assorted denizens, was welcome inspiration for our middle-school imaginations.

Melee And Magic Realm Counters

It should come as little surprise that I like Magic Realm. It includes all sorts of features that I like in a game. A fast, diceless, player-skill combat system. A mysterious and unrevealed backstory. Player agency, with clear and deadly consequences for bad decision-making. A wealth of opportunities for both player cooperation and competition. A circumscribed game length of only one month (28 days), which turns victory into a race against the clock.

And most importantly? Counters. Lots and lots of counters.

Magic Realm is notorious for its fiddly bits and long set-up times. You can easily spend 45 minutes to an hour setting up Magic Realm. That may not seem like a long time, for those of you who enjoy spending hours, as they say in the modern D&D parlance, "building your character", but it does become a barrier to casual gameplay, when other boardgame setups take only minutes.

But those other boardgames don't have cool counters like Magic Realm does. And since i'm also a big fan of Melee and other chit-and-hex microgames, I really dig counters with artwork.

Here are a few Melee counters, juxtaposed with some comparable Magic Realm counters. Metagaming missed the boat with their counters, as they could have easily printed some of the monster and npc stats on the counters included with their various death test adventures.

Microgame Investment Opportunities

Instead of putting my money in Google shares, I should have bought a container of Metagaming's Invasion Of The Air-Eaters microgames.

In 1979, Air-Eaters retailed for $2.95. According to this top-rated eBay seller, the game is now worth $39.00.

That's a 9% average annual rate of return.

How's your RPG portfolio doing?