Steve Jackson Games Forums - View Single Post - December 26, 2017: The Fantasy Trip Returns Home

Chris Rice · 01-02-2018, 01:24 AM

I was going through some stuff today and found an early version of Melee. It may even have been a first edition as it's copyrighted 1977. A lot fewer pages, only 3 armour types, 2 shields, fewer weapons and only about 20 pages. This got me thinking; The Advanced games and ITL didn't come out till 1980 and there were other editions of Melee in between, but we know very little of the development of the system other than snippets in the Spacegamer. Then we have Steve's Designer notes and Errata after the final games were published. But that's it.

Steve, I'm sure I'm not the only one who'd like to know more about what happened 1977-1980. What were the play test sessions like? Did you have an ongoing campaign? Did the characters get to high levels of power? Were the other playtesters running campaigns? Obviously you were designing other games in this period but I'd still be fascinated to hear more about the development of TFT.

01-02-2018, 01:24 AM	#169
Chris Rice Join Date: Dec 2017 Location: London Uk, but originally from Scotland	Re: December 26, 2017: The Fantasy Trip Returns Home I was going through some stuff today and found an early version of Melee. It may even have been a first edition as it's copyrighted 1977. A lot fewer pages, only 3 armour types, 2 shields, fewer weapons and only about 20 pages. This got me thinking; The Advanced games and ITL didn't come out till 1980 and there were other editions of Melee in between, but we know very little of the development of the system other than snippets in the Spacegamer. Then we have Steve's Designer notes and Errata after the final games were published. But that's it. Steve, I'm sure I'm not the only one who'd like to know more about what happened 1977-1980. What were the play test sessions like? Did you have an ongoing campaign? Did the characters get to high levels of power? Were the other playtesters running campaigns? Obviously you were designing other games in this period but I'd still be fascinated to hear more about the development of TFT.