Series - The Fantasy Trip (original release)

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Language:	English
Publisher:	Metagaming Concepts -- United States
Categories:	Format : Paperback Genre : Fantasy

In 2019, this role-playing game was re-released featuring both revised and new material; see The Fantasy Trip (re-release).

Solitaire Adventures

1. Death Test
2. Death Test 2
3. Grail Quest
4. Treasure of the Silver Dragon
5. Security Station
6. Treasure of Unicorn Gold
7. Master of the Amulets
8. Orb Quest

Bibliography of Items About "The Fantasy Trip (original release)"

Articles

You Against the System: The SF Expansion and Solitaire Gaming

Mini-Adventures

Oldcastle Inn
Troll's Lair
Turkeyquest
Vagabond Thief

User Comments

The Fantasy Trip was an "evolution" of Metagaming's Melee and Wizard, both of which were authored by Steve Jackson.

Melee was a set of rules for gaming out hand-to-hand combat. They were very simple, very clean and very tactical; fights were played out on a hex-map and players had to be conscious of the "facing" of their characters lest someone sneak in a shot at their back.

Wizard was a stand-alone game which grafted easily with Melee, providing rules on how to create magic using characters which could then be used in fights against each other. Like Melee, the rules were simple, clean and tactical.

Character generation was extremely simple, which was a good thing since these were basically man-to-man combat wargames rather than full fledged role-playing systems. The Fantasy Trip merged these two games together and provided extra rules to develop them from pseudo-RPG wargames to a full-fledged RPG.

A series of solitaire adventures were published for Melee/Wizard/The Fantasy Trip. You didn't really need the rules for The Fantasy Trip to play, just Melee or Melee and Wizard were called for, since the RPG was subsumed by the paragraph system used in the solitaire adventures. Since they were for pseudo-RPG wargames, the adventures emphasized a lot of combat although at least one (Grail Quest), strived to capture the "feel" of its setting (King Arthur's England) and make the game more than just hack 'n slash.

For a time, The Fantasy Trip stood as a solid contender against the powerhouse that was TSR's Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. However, all that came to an end with the untimely demise of Metagaming. Despite the fact that the system is out of print, there remain some gaming groups who continue to use the rules for their campaigns because of the clear, concise and logical way in which they were written, as well as for the more tactical nature of combat compared to other more abstract systems.

--castiglione