Mail Room: The Fantasy Trip "I Want it All Box"

The shipping box is 25" long by 14" wide by 8" deep. It weighs 15 pounds. It is like a miniature coffin being delivered to your door.

The game box is 14x11x5"sized. It took me 30 minutes to unpack, remove the plastic, and sort out all the pieces. You get two boxed games - Melee and Wizard - as the core games, plus the "RPG Rules" called In The Labyrinth that tie them together and give you the traditional RPG and campaign glue.

https://warehouse23.com/collections/the-fantasy-trip/products/the-fantasy-trip-i-want-it-all-box

The above link and image better describe everything you get - including a hard and soft cover of the rules and two nice rubber playmats. Of particular note are the hex tiles you can use to assemble dungeons, caves, or any other location - these can also be used in GURPS and Dungeon Fantasy.

One downside is that the Melee and Wizard games are in small booklets, the size of a Car Wars pocket box rulebook. Get the PDF and print them out if you are visually impaired. Melee's PDF is still free as I write this. They are small for my eyes, so I print the PDFs and put them in a binder. I also would like these in 8.5x11" POD books and the Wizard spell reference booklet - please make them PoD!

The companion is fun; they reprinted the original designer's notes, and Steve goes through how he saw D&D combat as boring, walking up and rolling dice until one side dies. Forty-plus years later, it is still a valid criticism of D&D.

Many record sheets are here; all are printable if you get the PDF. Hex paper. Papers for labyrinths, room record sheets, all types of character sheets, and many other valuable forms. Get the Legacy Edition PDF if you like printing things out, especially if you do binders for rules.

The hexes are large and perfect for showing off figures.

Two of the interior boxes are intended to be reused as storage.

Excellent GM screen.

It has folios for character sheets and other papers, with charts and rules printed. Nice touch.

This is the sort of game that Mordhiem or Advanced Heroquest wanted to be. A complete game with dungeon tiles, markers, dice, and a continuing linked-adventure system with slightly more in-depth character rules for campaign play. Fast playing and tactical. Random treasures. Missions with goals. Random crawls through holes in the ground to explore and clear out baddies harassing the locals. Story missions and modules. Open character progression and advancement. Simple rules.

This isn't a "theater of the mind" game style where you can ship broken rules and character options and hope the referee works it all out. This is based on skirmish wargaming; the rules must work, and the options must all be sound. The game has been played for decades, and all the exploits worked out.

The game works.

There is a clear difference between a classic game that has been out since the late 1970s and today's flavor of the week Kickstarter game that ships broken and takes 2 to 3 versions to work out the problems.

Bring your figures to make the game flashy and look fantastic.

I am looking forward to playing this one.

The Fantasy Trip: GURPS Dual-Use

One of the best things about investing in Fantasy Trip is that the maps, counters, and hex geo-morphs are all 100% compatible with GURPS and Dungeon Fantasy. If you need to throw together a hex dungeon or cave, just pull them out of the box and play with any of the three games. The blank, white hexes could be anything from a dungeon to the interior of a space station.

You can use counters or figures. These are highly useful game pieces by themselves.

The rules are a simplified "origin source" cousin to GURPS, so they are different but familiar - but highly simplified.  There is a companion RPG called Into the Labyrinth, which provides simplified roleplaying, exploration, and expanded talents for combat. So, this game is a full-fledged RPG in its own right. Where GURPS has 5, 10, and 15-point abilities, TFT has 1, 2, and 3-point ones. They are comparable but a subset of the ones you would find in a generic game and more suited for a "hex-based dungeon skirmish" world.

I like this game; it is a skirmish-focused RPG, with card-based character sheets, simple characters, and fast combats, which I feel is underserved in our hobby. The last great one was the tabletop RPG Mordheim by Games Workshop. Like that game, TFT can be deadly and brutal, so you need to be a careful dungeon crawler to survive.

There is also a considerable amount of random tables and solo RPG support, so if you want to randomly generate a campaign or dungeon and stock the place with monsters and loot, nothing stops you.

This is close to being a perfect game for me. I will have something I can randomly create dungeons with, keep characters on simple 3x5 cards, set up on a table, use figures with, and crawl through the halls searching for treasure and glory.

Does it matter there are only two character types, melee and mage? Not really, since the talent system lets you personalize, and in most games, there are mainly those two archetypes. It keeps it simple.

If I want more detailed characters with nuance and maximum customization, I have Dungeon Fantasy.

Ordered: The Fantasy Trip

I have always seen The Fantasy Trip as the Car Wars' answer to D&D. This is the game Steve Jackson lost control of and the one that made him create GURPS to replace it. Now he owns the rights again, and we are seeing a resurgence of popularity after this game's Kickstarter.

The game is 25 pounds in a huge box, with the "I Want it All" box at 35! You get a lot here for your money. I love these "big box, infinite play" games, and there is a magic to them I can't describe. It is like owning a treasure chest containing infinite fun.

As I hear, there are two archetypes, fighter and mage, and you customize them with talents in the advanced game. You can mix magic and fighting, but buying those abilities will cost you more XP. I don't mind a game with only two archetypes, as in recent years, the "specialism" of needing dozens of character classes to simulate every possible occupation has gotten tiresome.

I picked a "dockworker" as my character class! Oh yeah, I picked "cargo handler!" I want to be a "harbor master!" Me? A "salty dog" for sure! You get this strange mix of professions, positions of importance, slang terms, oranges that do not relate to apples, and nothing makes sense. Scurvy lad? Matey? Swabbie? Freebooter? Pirate? Corsair?

Game designers only embarrass themselves when given a thesaurus.

TFT focuses on two types of play, melee combat, and spellcasting, presenting tight tactical challenges. The tactical combat is better than D&D 4E, with every turn and move making a difference. Weapon and armor choice matter (and this is like subclassing when you mix talents in there). Party composition matters. Turn order matters.

This is also a game that solo plays well, as I am told. I have been looking for a light-roleplay, heavy skirmish, rules-light game. This game will fit my needs perfectly. It reminds me of the old Advanced Hero Quest games, with the WHFRP rules cut down for dungeon-skirmish play and a heavy focus on scenarios and building your figure's power through advancement.

When solo-figure gaming was popular in the 1990s as an AD&D alternative hobby, this was an excellent pastime. The DM laid out a dungeon with tiles, and the rules were clear and straightforward. There was no "theater of the mind" play, which also reminds me of what they tried with D&D 4E (but failed). You had a hero, a character card with simple abilities, and you went to the hobby shop to play a few 'dungeon skirmish' adventures and get rewards to use next time. The characters were simple, so validation and "loot tracking" could be done before play and kept as records. If my dwarf got a magic axe, that was added to my card, and the GM put that in their notes so I could use it next time.

4E tried to do this so hard by making every power, item, and magic item a card. The game tried merging with Magic: the Gathering - which was an exciting idea, but how they went about doing it was a dumpster fire. First of all, no cards. A 4E adventure should have come with cards for the treasures you find in there so you can hand them out to players. But, no! This is where your legacy holds you back, and another game steps in and does it better.

They tried to do that concept in Gamma World 4E, but by then, it was too late, and the 5E team was already trying to fix the mistakes of 4E by rushing back into the cave and banking on nostalgia hard. It was a smart move, but I already had 3.5E (and Pathfinder 1e) for that.

This is also a GURPS-like 3d6 system but without the GURPS. The complexity has been cleared out and eliminated. This is like a GURPS 5th Edition beta that removes all the fiddly parts and messy point builds and keeps the game's heart - the combat.

The relation to Dungeon Fantasy is strange, as this game is pure GURPS, and The Fantasy Trip is pre-GURPS. Dungeon Fantasy is what to play if you love GURPS and its infinite layers of detail and customization. The Fantasy Trip you play because you don't care for any of that and just want the tight tactical game. But even Dungeon Fantasy pares a lot of GURPS and focuses the engine on the fantasy gaming part.

I like DF, and my fantasy gaming is slowly moving back into this area because of the excellent solo play. The fewer heroes you have, the better the game gets. There is a point where a game is so easy and the characters so pigeonholed in a class role that you feel you have no options other than to grind XP and "level up how they want you to." With GURPS, 5-15 points in one place can change how a character plays and puts them in a new role.

SJG is succeeding in stripping down the excellent 3d6 and GURPS engines and focusing them on experiences. This is a winning formula.

You can get the Fantasy Trip: Melee in PDF for free right now - so the first melee-focused game is free to try yourself.

I am looking forward to this one.