December 26, 2017: The Fantasy Trip Returns Home

[Carnifex]

It is probably going to be a while before we see any products come from this, how about in the mean time we get an issue of the Pyramid dedicated to The Fantasy Trip, you know something to wet our appetites with.

[pyratejohn]

That's an excelsior idea! I'd plunk down money today on a TFT Pyramid!

I put in a leave request to have the day off tomorrow. The wife will be back at work. The kids back at school. Hmm... I wonder what I should do with that free time? :)

[JLV]

Originally Posted by Carnifex

It is probably going to be a while before we see any products come from this, how about in the mean time we get an issue of the Pyramid dedicated to The Fantasy Trip, you know something to wet our appetites with.

I'll certainly second that motion, though I suspect they probably don't have any articles on TFT sitting around in the bullpen. Anybody up for writing some?

[stefanj]

Originally Posted by JLV

Anybody up for writing some?

Yes. That would be fun.

TFT came out before I got a computer, so I have no "trunk manuscripts," but it would be fun coming up with some monsters and scenarios.

[Carnifex]

Things i would like to see in a dedicated issue of the Pyrmid;

• Brief (or not) reintroduction to the game
• An adventure
• Scenario or two for Melee/Wizard (include map and counters)
• Retrospective of the game
• Background piece on Cidri
• Alternate rules

[Steve Jackson]

Originally Posted by stefanj

TFT came out before I got a computer

This. We are definitely R'ing the OS, here.

[dar]

Is it too early to ask for a tft section in the forums?

[JLV]

Ah, the good old days -- when a Trash-80 or a C-64 cost a couple of grand, and no one I knew did more than dream about someday being able to afford a computer! ;-)

Two years after ITL was published, I was running punch cards at the University of Texas at El Paso to digitize earthquake records for the UTEP Geophysics lab...which was the closest I got to a computer until I joined the USAF a year after that!

[Chris Rice]

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.

[pyratejohn]

Originally Posted by Chris Rice

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.

My recollection is that the first '77 edition had a non-glossy cover like the first edition of Ogre, and it had the Liz Danforth art. The second '77 edition had the glossy paper cover with the Bradley art. If memory serves, my friend who introduced me to gaming had the Liz Danforth cover edition. By the time I scraped up money or saved up some from cutting grass the new version had hit the shelves.