Secondly, I've been on a bit of a The Fantasy Trip "Quest" of sorts recently. It's one of the rare, fairly popular for the time, early RPGs that I never bought back in my younger days.
Sure, TFT spawned Man to Man (and Orcslayer) and GURPS for Steve Jackson (I have them all), but I never got a change to play with the original.
Still don't have the originals, but I'm looking at Legends, which is kind of a TFT retroclone. More precisely, I'm looking at Emerald Twilight, which is a programed / solo adventure which assumes a party of four.
I'm going to have to run this next week when I'm on vacation. I'm not so sure about using the combat map or tokens, but I suspect they are an assumed part of the system, so I'll give them a proper workout.
All of which leaves me to wonder - is there enough here to run a short campaign, or even a short story arc?
See, damn me! The historian in me wanted to see how this actually plays out and it it stands the test of time. Can a 9 page ruleset compare to the hundreds of pages the current edition of GURPS needs? Should it need to?
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| I needed these tokens when I ran Attack of the Frawgs! |
The Legends rules are available for free here. They also came with Emerald Twilight.
I just published my own TFT inspired game Heroes & Other Worlds. Dark City Games is supporting it and let me include on of their programmed sample adventures in it. You can check a review on RPG geek.
ReplyDeleteIf you would like to try out the originals, then there are links to versions posted in HTML. Follow the links from David Miller's Melee & Wizard page (http://www.meleewizards.com/) under the Rules section. Or, you can go there directly from here:
ReplyDeletehttp://bluwiki.com/go/Tft-melee
http://bluwiki.com/go/Tft-wizard
These games (although not without some problems) are great little micro games, and should serve pretty well for the Dark City Games adventures.
Oops - one more thing - there is a great "redesign" of the original Melee available over at Board Game Geek - really nicely done components (map and counters) as well as reorganized rules.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.boardgamegeek.com/filepage/50323/kwanchais-melee-redesign
The Fantasy Trip is to Gurps what OD&D is to Pathfinder.
ReplyDeleteAnd these products from Dark Quest are really nice, all things considered. Self produced, but very well done.
I have enjoyed playing Raid on Cygnosa with my age 9 son. The combat seems reminiscent to what I recall of Ultima III. The tactical magic system seems very strong to me-- pure undiluted Steve Jackson... and therefore epic.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Jeremy, though. I play far more B/X than anything else. For just relaxing and playing some games, these older simpler games are wonderful. I can't wait until Christmas day when I will get to see what @Fenway5 has done to further develop this thread of gaming awesomeness.
Fenway5 - Oops, I hadn't picked up on the fact that you had published a TFT retroclone, Heroes & Other Worlds. It looks great, and I am getting ready to order a paperback version from Lulu. I hope you didn't take my posting links to online versions of the original TFT rules as dismissing your effort - I can't wait to get my hands on your book!
ReplyDeleteGreat tokens! You're not lying about those being perfect for Frawgs. :)
ReplyDeleteLegends of the Ancient World makes some great programmed adventures, but their version of the TFT rules is missing a lot of detail and careful explicit rules writing present in the original TFT rules. I think if a player who doesn't know the TFT rules tries to start with the LAW rules, they may get a substantially different experience from using the TFT rules.
ReplyDelete