RThorm – Antherwyck Blog

The most recent Antherwyck House Games adventure, “The Sentinel Chapel,” was written with DragonQuest rules.  But it seemed that it should be easy to convert it for use with other systems.  And now we’ve done just that with conversion notes to use the adventure with Metagaming’s (and now Steve Jackson Games) The Fantasy Trip.  The PDF is now included with the adventure files from DriveThruRPG, and can also be directly downloaded here.

TFT shares a lot with DQ.  Both are based on tactical, single-figure combat rules systems (Arena of Death from SPI, which became the DQ combat system, and the Melee Microgame, which is the TFT combat system). Both are hex-based, as well, and close enough in scale (5 foot hexes for DQ; 1.33 meter hexes for TFT, which are about 4.4 feet, so close enough for interoperability).

Beyond the functional similarities between systems, they are both systems that maintain the relative fragility of human beings.  Unlike heroic RPG systems (D&D et al) where characters level up to absurd levels of power and durability, a starting character is not that much different than an experienced one in either DQ or TFT.  And a seasoned hero can still be felled by a single well-placed blade (unlike characters who need to go through rounds and rounds of hit point attrition to wear them down).

There is also no hierarchy of classes to restrict what any players’ character can or cannot do.  There are instead, lots of talents or skills that any character can obtain, allowing for a much more interesting and unique set of abilities for any individual character to have.

I probably never really dived into the potential cross connections between the two systems, despite the fact that I played in campaigns of both as some of the earliest RPG games I was in decades ago.  Both DQ and TFT are comparatively orphan games, but with TFT making a comeback now that Steve Jackson Games has re-acquired the rights to the game, maybe things will get interesting in the coming year.

Please get in touch if you’re also a TFT player.  Having now dug out my copies of Melee, Wizard, and In the Labyrinth to work on this conversion, I’m really interested in exploring this further, and in getting feedback about this from other, more experienced TFT players.

And, if you’d like to see us issue conversions of our adventures for other game systems, let us know what you would like to see.