A Fantasy Trip Down Memory Lane

The Second Saturday Scrum Club had recently been discussing Steve Jackson's current Kickstarter, which he launched to republish his seminal Fantasy Trip game line.  As some older grognards may know, Melee (1977) and Wizard (1978) were originally published as separate companion installments in the MicroGame series (#3 and #6, respectively, with the series' first installment being the more enduring futuristic tank battle game, O.G.R.E., also designed by Jackson). When Jackson left the company Metagaming Concepts in 1980 to start his own game publishing venture, he relinquished the rights to the Fantasy Trip series, its programmed MicroQuest adventure supplements, and the fledgling role playing game system, In the Labyrinth, being built atop the Melee/Wizard nexus.

For the historical minded among us, it's worth noting that the Fantasy Trip contains the genetic code for the subsequently more successful role playing game, GURPS (Generic Universal Role Playing System), released though his own Steve Jackson Games. In my personal gaming pursuits, GURPS was doomed by its horrible name...who wants to play a game with "Generic" right there in the title?!? At least that's how my teenage sensibility dismissed the system at the time.

Leap ahead 35 years, and Jackson has recently re-acquired the publishing rights to his Fantasy Trip series as a result of a nifty provision in copyright law that allows for licensing rights of this sort to revert back to the author. (As an aside, I have a fascination for copyright law, and if you do too, you can read the specific provision at Cornell's site.)

I picked up quite a number of the Metagaming Concepts' MicroGames second hand back in the late 1980s when I worked in a game shop in Huber Heights, Ohio, but parted with them and so much more in the Great Game Purge of 2007 when my first marriage definitively ended and I went through a soul searching exercise that led to the shedding of games and sundry stuff that I struggled to imagine a place for in life's next chapter (especially since almost none of it had been dusted off in the 20 or so odd years since acquiring them in my late teens).

As I've alluded to elsewhere on this blog, gaming had occupied little of my time or attention for most of my adult life (essentially 1990 onward) until my gaming renaissance started two or three years ago when I found a couple of boxes of miniatures in my basement that had escaped the Great Game Purge a decade earlier. When I pulled off the brittle, yellowed tape sealing the box flaps and slowly removed one carefully wrapped-in-toilet-paper miniature after another, unseen since the twilight of my gaming days, a longing was rekindled. That longing led me to investigate how hard it would be to reacquire Melee and Wizard and push these old soldiers and beasts into battle once more.

I scoured eBay, and before long replaced my copies of Melee and Wizard as well as acquired a few of the solo-playable MicroQuests to go with them, in case I couldn't find anybody interested in taking that nostalgic detour with me.  In fact, Melee/Wizard figured so prominently in my original plans a couple of years ago that when I had my first few dozen miniatures painted up, I made it a point to put them all on hex bases to accommodate that system's mechanics, a decision that seemed sensible as I discovered that there was quite a persistent fan base online for these long out-of-print games, with loads of house rules and home-brew adventures, and even a couple of folks who published retro-clone rules based explicitly on Jackson's original system.

I pulled these out for a bit of show-and-tell with the fellas on Saturday evening.

One of the retro-clone rule books I picked up as I groped around for ways to put my old miniatures to new use in late 2015.

Ultimately, I skipped right over the Fantasy Trip rules and got hooked by Advanced Song of Blades and Heroes followed shortly thereafter by an avalanche of other skirmish rule sets (Strange Aeons, Pulp Alley, Congo, Dragon Rampant, etc.). In fact, it wasn't until this past weekend that I finally made good on my plan to play some Melee and Wizard.

Game Night

So when the Scrummers were deliberating amongst ourselves about jumping in on Jackson's new  Kickstarter, Steve B. offered to run us through one of the original MicroQuests at our next meeting. He pulled together sections of material from Melee, Wizard, and the more advanced mechanics from In the Labyrinth, and off we went! In addition to Steve as game master, Francesco, Rich, and I rolled up some characters (I chose mostly thieving talents for mine, and a bow as her primary weapon).

As Steve observed, we were small in number, but large in spirit!

My character sheet at the end of the night. Unlike my comrades, I managed to escape with my health intact!

I won't recount blow-by-blow our evening's adventure, but suffice to say that in the nearby mountains we stumbled upon a mysterious underground structure built according to a logic alien to us and filled with bizarre contraptions unlike any we had encountered before.

Walking down the first corridor, us wary band of three.
Steve used old Heroscape tiles instead of hex paper, which definitely made the evening's adventure more evocative than plain ol' hex paper..

Rich's wizard knocked unconscious by malevolent mushroom spores. We quickly dragged his limp body back to safety.

We met some fellow fortune hunters who didn't take kindly to our presence...

They should have fled...

We skewered some six-legged rats and battled a humanoid foe in what we concluded was some sort of large trap-filled file storage facility for...who knows!

When we came across this giant with his back to us, I should have followed Francesco's advice and started peppering him with arrows. Instead I tried to have a nice chat. The giant wasn't much of a conversationalist, alas.

"I say there, good sir...what brings you to these parts?"
"Grrrr....me smash!"

Not surprisingly, this was the toughest battle of the night, and both Rich's wizard and Francesco's warrior were nearly undone.

An encounter with a humanoid race we had not seen before.

I hope this wasn't the last of their kind...oh, well.

My thief finally found herself in undeniable jeopardy when this strange Roper-like fiend managed to get a tentacle around her, pulling her into its maw. Fortunately, my compatriots put it down before I became dinner.

Parting Shots and Closing Thoughts

I wasn't sure what to expect with a system developed so close to the dawn of the role playing hobby, but I had a surprisingly good time. The mechanics still hold up pretty well, though like others I've read online, I would be tempted to house rule some sort of mechanic so that it isn't necessary for wizards to draw down their strength stat to cast spells, putting them in constant jeopardy of the smallest wound killing them outright (I personally like the variations I've seen that involve a "mana" pool of some sort that gets drawn down first by spellcasting). Rich, however, who played the wizard, didn't mind the push and pull of the spellcasting mechanic as it was, so that suggests it's not necessarily broken as such, but perhaps simply more a matter of taste.

I also liked the mechanics for building a character, especially using the IQ stat to select a variety of talents from a pretty neat list of options. I would go so far as to say that the system is actually elegant in this regard, and leaves itself open to some interesting character-building opportunities over the course of  multi-adventure campaign play.

Ultimately, while I might not want to use these rules for every skirmish game I play going forward, I would happily play this again. We're already talking about circling back to finish up this unconcluded adventure sometime in the future. As for the re-release via Kickstarter, I'm a sucker for this sort of thing, even if I have already gone to the effort and expense to re-acquire the original MicroGame sets. I've already pledged for the full boxed edition, which contains In the Labyrinth (which I don't own), and it'll be fun to see how everything gets updated, production-wise.

Addendum: Rich did his own fun recap of the evening's game over at his newly revived blog, the Circle of Dar Janix.

Future Fun

A really enjoyable online friendship I've developed over the past couple of years has led to me agreeing to play test a game that looks quite promising (it's good enough, in fact, to already have a contract with one of the major wargame publishers). My friend sent me a draft of the rules and gifted me with some lovely miniatures that match the period and setting. I'm looking forward to getting these on the table with the Scrum Club in the coming weeks. (Check out some of my friend's own play tests as well as his always fun-looking game sessions with his group.)

But wait!

Next, however, Scrum Club member Walt has called dibs on running a game of Mad Maxmillian 1934 for the group in September, when we next meet around my dining room table for friendly fights and high adventure! Look for a full report shortly thereafter...