by sdonohue

The Fantasy Trip Quick Quest 5: Black Top Hill is a 2022 release from Steve Jackson Games for The Fantasy Trip. It was written by Stefan Jones and features art by Rick Hershey. It is part of their Quick Quest.

Presentation
This is available as a pdf and as a z-fold brochure. The PDF comes in two formats; one shows each of the six panels as a page and the other shows the complete document as two pages as if it wasn't folded. The brochure version is 8.5 x 5.5" portrait with a two-column layout. The cover illustration is color, but the rest of it is black & white.

Content
This adventure is intended for 4-5 adventurers of moderate experience, 34-36 points.

It starts out as a simple mission: the party is contacted by the wizard's guild which would like them to guide one of their members to Black Top Hill. They believe he will be able to use his artifact to gain knowledge of the cosmos there. The pay is decent and the mission seems easy. Unbeknownst to any of them, the young wizard has blabbed about his plans and a pair of cultists believe they can unleash their dark god if they're there and have his artifact.

The party may not notice the cultists following them as it is a busy road and the cultists will join the caravan. They'd like to steal the artifact for their own ends. The party will get several chances to encounter them. Finally, they'll end up on Black Top Hill, a place the locals avoid. At the hill, as a storm rages, the earth will crack open and release a huge beast covered in tentacles. If they're alive the cultists believe it is their god and will try to feed the party to it. Either way, it's quite a fight to deal with this creature and potentially the cultists at the same time.

The end of the module provides for several different outcomes from what happens if the creature is fed to how the party is perceived based on the outcome of the adventure and the life or death of the scholar.

Evaluation
I really like this adventure. Sure, it starts out with a pretty standard quest-giver situation, but the NPCs are interesting and provide lots of role-play opportunities. For example, the scholar is healthy, but he doesn't camp or travel much and so complains a lot and is stiff in the morning. The cultists each have distinct personalities (and character sheets) and are also fun. There are many different outcomes possible and they are addressed in the adventure. There are also a couple of mysteries in this adventure which could lead to subsequent adventures. As a module, there's no read aloud and the encounters are explained in sufficient detail to make them easy to run.

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by leroy43

Relatively hot on the heels of the successful Kickstarter campaign for The Fantasy Trip: Legacy Edition came this expansion box of goodies that contained:

• Player's Pack – A set of 13 combat option cards (perfect for new players), one blank fighter card, one blank wizard card, one dry erase marker, and one character journal which serves as an expanded character sheet where you can record both game stats and campaign information.
• Rumors & Treasures – 60 rumour cards and a Rumors journal where the GM can record card usage . . . plus 100 treasure cards and a Treasures journal.
• Adversaries – 24 orc fighter cards, 9 octopus fighter cards, 25 skill cards (use to turn any fighter card into a talented character), 24 double-sized wizard cards including nonhumans, and 70 double-sized creature cards.
• Labyrinths – 62 hex-shaped cards to quickly build labyrinths, and a Labyrinth journal where you can pre-plan adventures . . . or record your histories.
• Megahex Tiles – 13 new sheets of double-sided, dry-erase megahex tiles. Blank on one side, illustrated on the reverse side. And a storage box!
• A new drop table printed on the inside lid of the box. Quickly stock your labyrinths with opponents, treasures, and surprises!
• 12 character sheet bookmarks.
• 6 more blank dry-erase character cards - three for Melee, three for Wizard.
• 12 extra character and rumour cards courtesy of the backers of Four Five Perilous Journeys by Gaming Ballistic”

Back in 2018 when I started my TFT campaign with my Thursday Night Crew, I relied on strictly the digital products because the print versions were en route, and then we all know what happened in 2020. We went strictly virtual after that, and one of my crew built a small (private for our use only) website to digitally manage our characters. This diminished the utility of this specific product for me as a GM in those early years, noting here that there had been a multi-decade gap since I'd played the original In The Labyrinth.

However, the cards have a lot of utility even in a non-analog setting.

There are multiple decks of cards, and Steve Jackson Games (SJG) included tuck boxes to hold the different decks. This makes it easy to store in a drawer or small box or your gaming bag.

The player's pack is a set of cards for each player so that they can select their action for the combat round, and the rules are on the card. Once you've played a lot and internalized the rules, the cards are perhaps unneeded, but simply having the deck in hand does actually make it easier to think about what you want to do next. In addition, if you're a new player, or if you're a GM running a new group through Death Test (2nd Edition), it can speed things up over having people look it up on pages 102-103 of the core rule book.

The player pack is made up of standard cards.

In contrast, the foes decks are in two sizes. The mages are on 4x6 cards, which is in keeping with future publications from SJG and Gaming Ballistic both. SJG's The Fantasy Trip Bestiary came with 4x6 cards for each beast, and the supplemental cards for a variety of TFT licensed products from Gaming Ballistic LLC were also on 4x6 cards.

The colour coding on the cards is helpful for the GM to keep track of things at a glance. The different form factors is however unfortunate because they are stored in different sizes tuck boxes. If, like me, you buy a 4x6 photo storage box to hold the cards, it's awkward that some are a different size.

The affiliated skill cards are convenient add-on to just spontaneously boost or flesh out one of the character or foe cards. However, these cards are of mixed value if you're doing it randomly. These are definitely more for selecting for a specific scenario. They could be fun in a card draft for a pre-tournament style labyrinth crawl.

From a usability perspective though, they're just fine. Easy to read, and you can just pick them up to get the details. "Most cards are dry-erase so you can modify them temporarily" says the Kickstarter. The character and monster cards are obvious places you'll need to track things, like hits, but I have a plethora of tokens or other methods I prefer to keep track. Nevertheless, it's good to know, yeah?

The rumour and treasure cards are in yet another form factor, square cards about the size of the power plants in Power Grid. The treasure cards are great for helping you fill a random labyrinth or random encounter with loot, and the rumours are handy plot hooks or deceptions.

Candidly, here I would have preferred standard playing card sized cards like the player pack. For one, I know what to do with standard cards (no, not sleeve them), and they're easier to store. Also, I have a lot of decks of cards from DrivethruRPG and elsewhere and for the sake of convenience it would have been nice for them to be kept together.

The random labyrinth tiles are a lot of fun though. They are hex shaped, which does make them tricky to shuffle, but it does allow the GM to build out the layout on their table by connecting the various cards. If you have the TFT Megahexes tile sets you can even lay out the actual labyrinth ready to go for your session.

Note that a few of the hex tiles have additional instructions to help you use them, including random rolls to potentially include doors, stairs, shafts, or even if the chamber is occupied or not. Pragmatic tools!

The megahex tiles are great for building out a labyrinth. They're a fine add on, but I personally prefer the pre-printed neoprene mats, using my wet-erase hex mat, or supplements like the Rose Labyrinth.

The character bookmarks are nice... they're also a gimmick. But they're handy placeholders in the various rulebooks.

Overall, the visual design prioritizes utility over artistry. Using a clean black-and-white palette, the artwork is strictly functional. While it may not provide a high-sensory experience, it is exceptionally readable and possesses a reliable, workmanlike clarity.

The octopus on the cover though? Now that's high art. There's a 500 piece jigsaw puzzle version available from SJG.

Recommended? Yes, if you're mostly playing live in person, teaching new players, or hosting live tournaments. If you're all online all the time or even most of the time, it has lower net utility.

by Rachel

Not much headway on Mr. Beast's Puzzle Hunt, though I did get a bit further on the Uncooperative Spirits campaign for Unlucky Spirits, Revised Edition. Contest playtesting/feedback will be (finally!) posted tomorrow (only 1 day before the disqualification deadline :whistle:- better late than never, I guess.) Additionally, I made actual, visible progress on getting some of my games onto The Game Crafter, LLC :D. I've got a much better handle on the components available to me and how everything works. I've also managed to build out 13 games (including 3 entirely new special projects). The manufacturing cost is higher than I'd like for some games, but, all-in-all, I think this is a good move for me and I'm looking forward to day my little shop on The Game Crafter, LLC goes live!

In the meantime:

My ever-growing list of needed art assets and files...

Also, Elder Sign is currently ON the table and Under Falling Skies is on deck! Squee!

Game Over On borrowed time...

Happy Tuesday and happy playing!
-Rachel

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