Solo RPG's: You Never Forget Your First Game

Steve Jackson.

The Man.

The Myth.

The Legend.

Steve--freakin'--Jackson!

You most likely know him from this rather lucrative game series:

Although his credits go back to the early days of gaming, starting with this:

And if I mention Steve Jackson and role-playing games, 

you probably think I'm going to talk about this:

But you'd be wrong.

Let's go back further, to the 70's, the era that spawned D&D and Star Wars. In the 1970's, a twenty-something Steve Jackson was designing for a company called Metagaming.

Their forte was producing inexpensive wargames. Rulebooks were a few pages of 8.5 x 11" paper, folded and stapled, while game-boards were a similar size of folded cardstock. The whole thing was sold in a transparent plastic bag.


<   $2.95?!?

The games Jackson designed for Metagaming were big hits, starting with Ogre (a wargame about a miles-long cybernetic tank vs. a horde of smaller units) and G.E.V. (an expansion to Ogre.) Ironically, he was also one of the crew that worked on Monsters! Monsters! a sequel/expansion of Tunnels & Trolls that flipped the dungeon-crawling paradigm on its head.

Jackson, like everyone else at the time, shared the same love/hate reaction to D&D: he thought that a role-playing game about high fantasy heroes was a great concept, D&D just implemented it very poorly. Being of a more strategically-minded bent, Jackson wanted to create something with cleaner wargame-like mechanics that brought in some of his experiences with "actual" sword-play from his time in the Society for Creative Anachronism (the organization that spawned a million Renaissance festivals.)

And so he created Melee, a game of man-to-man gladiatorial combat. Characters had just two attributes: Strength (which also dictated how many points of damage you could take) and Dexterity. Combat was similarly bare-bones: you roll three dice, and try and get under your Dexterity score. And, other than adding in some typical wargame-like structure (such as a hex grid for movement), that was literally it. Clean, concise, simple. Melee was a big hit, so it was quickly followed up by Wizard, which added a third attribute, IQ, and rules for magic.

A third product, "In The Labyrinth," added skills and turned the two smaller games into a larger, fully-fledged RPG called "The Fantasy Trip." (In my mind, NOT naming both the system and the book "The Fantasy Trip" seems like a marketing blunder, but I digress.) Metagaming (like Tunnels & Trolls) saw that there was a market for solo play, and so they jumped onto the bandwagon, using their small, inexpensive model of producing games.

Like the Tunnels & Trolls and "Choose Your Own Adventure" books, the Fantasy Trip solos used numbered paragraphs to direct players through the storyline. But unlike Tunnels & Trolls, these were closer in tone to the serious, straightforward adventure modules of D&D. Each was set in a specific world (for example, Arthurian England for "Grail Quest," or post-apocalyptic fantasy  for "Security Station.") Games were also balanced so that players who worked through them rationally could succeed--no surprise "there's a Balrog in the next room, just because it's fun."

They did, however, employ a unique marketing gimmick on two of their adventures, where clues in the text led to a prize hidden in the real world: a silver dragon in one adventure and a gold unicorn in another. But, for the most part, these were solidly-constructed, entertaining adventures with a high replay value.

The Fantasy Trip could have turned out to be "The Next Big RPG," but unfortunately Jackson had a falling-out with Metagaming, and after the split, the company retained the rights to the game. Only a few years later, Metagaming went belly-up.

Jackson tried to purchase The Fantasy Trip, but in those pre-Munchkin days, the asking price higher than what he could afford. And so he went on to create another  RPG, the very successful. GURPS (the Generic Universal Role-Playing system.) Comparing the two, it's obvious that GURPS shares a huge portion of its DNA with The Fantasy Trip. (The differences are significant, and maybe worthy of a discussion for another day.) And, looking at the success of GURPS--which spawned a library's worth of follow-on books--you'd think that Jackson would be content to let The Fantasy Trip go.

But you never forget your first game, and for Jackson that was all the work he'd done for Metagaming. As the decades passed, he re-acquired the rights to all of his old games, one by one: Ogre, GEV, and eventually, The Fantasy Trip.

Now, it's been rebooted through an INSANELY successful Kickstarter, and is now available in gorgeous new editions, with revived versions of solo games and many add-on products. 

People looking for a simple, straightforward solo RPG experience couldn't go wrong by choosing The Fantasy Trip. Highly recommended. My personal favorites are Grail Quest and Security Station. The latter shared The Fantasy Trip's default 's setting of Cidri, a "high fantasy world" that evolves from the ruins of a technological world (a post-post apocalyptic?) similar to the "Shannara" book series or the Ralph Bakshi movie "Wizards." A unique take on standard fantasy tropes.

You can find The Fantasy Trip here.

So, what parts of The Fantasy Trip does the FAST RPG share? Well, early on, our designers wanted FAST  to work with as few attributes as possible, which was a key ingredient of Melee and Wizard. Simple, clean, consistent mechanics and a point-buy method for constructing characters is also something that both games share. Like The Fantasy Trip and Tunnels & Trolls, FAST eschews polyhedral dice, and uses d6's. And finally, thinking about TFT's hex-grid based movement, we here at FAST are about to embark on a new project, one that uses the hex grid, but in a new way.

That's a story for another time--like the story of how I pissed off Steve Jackson at a convention. In the meantime...

Game on!

Falstaffe