Grailquest

[klingor]

My favourite was Grailquest. I loved the idea of the crossroads Inn, and of errant Knights who could appear at (virtually) any time. It also meant that I could play for hours without actually fighting any of the preset locations if I wanted.
There was another game at that time called Barbarian Prince (by Dwarfstar), and I combined elements of these into a complete(ish) campaign so that a party could wander round a whole country. It was like an above-ground auto-dungeon. I found that it was scalable, in that I could relate the number, strengths and abilities of parties that were encountered to my own party and get a challenging encounter each time.
If you get the chance, I would recommend you to have a look at these. I found that the only limit was my own imagination.
Hope this brings back memories.
Colin

[mister frau blucher]

Hello, Klingor, and welcome to the boards!

I loved both of those games. Grailquest was my favorite microquest, as it was so wide open. The second adventure i wrote, The Dark Vale, was a major homage to it.

I borrowed a friend's copy of Barbarian Prince for a weekend and loved it. But for some dumb reason, i never got my own copy. It is actually downloadable now, legitimately so. There is a Dwarfstar website that has most of that range of games from Heritage.

Your mod sounds great! Did you use the combat rules from Barbarian Prince, or did use another set like TFT, or did you make your own up?

Bret

[vladtaltos]

Sounds interesting. I'll have to keep my eyes open for Grailquest on ebay. I've heard of Barbarian Prince, and I want to say I may have played it as a young guy at a friend's house, but the memory is foggy.

[Lord Inar]

Now if you don't want to spoil the map-making process, don't go to this site, but if you're like me and you're going through Grailquest again but don't feel like redoing the map, I made a copy here:
tft.brainiac.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Main.CidriAtlas

WARNING: there are also Death Test and Treasure of the Silver Dragon maps I made there as well, in case you don't want to see them.

[klingor]

Hi,
Re my mods,
Everything tactical was TFT; characters attributes, weapons, armour and skills came from there.
Similarly, the basic map that I used was the Grailquest map, but I superimposed it onto a hex-based grid so that the main roads went through a series of hexes rather than linearly from point A to point B, and I tried to make it so that the no. of days travel between points A and B corresponded to the no. of hexes travelled through.
I then assigned a type to each hex corresponding to the Barbarian Prince terrain types. I went through each terrain-type encounter paragraph for BP and replaced it with a TFT equivalent.

As regards character levels and size and strength of parties met, once I had set up the encounter matrix, I used something similar to the Grailquest Knight generation table, but I modified it so that each type of species and level had its own table for attribute generation, and the party size met (eg a party of orcs) would correspond to some degree to the size of my party and the overall level of the parties would be a fair match.

(TFT back then only used ST+Dex+IQ to assess a character. It didn't have the sophisticated changes in LAW where skills are now much more scalable, tunable and, crucially, independent of an attribute to achieve)
There are several more things that I did when I merged GQ and BP (forgive my shorthand:- it makes me sound like an oil tycoon) into my whole (solo) campaign, but all of it came from TFT (for combat, magic and skills), BP (for terrain types, encounters and party sizes) and GQ (for the underlying map and the rest)
Thank you for your replies and comments.
I hope that what I've written has interested you.
Colin

[klingor]

Further to my last post, two other games that were popular amongst my gaming friends were Runequest (RQ) and Chivalry & Sorcery (C&S).
I never really got involved in these games, but I was interested by some of the ideas these games
used.
Many of the RQ concepts I liked have been incorporated into LAW, so that character development is no longer a question of which attribute do I want to increase. Instead I can add a skill, so that instead of eg increasing my IQ from 19 to 20 (as per TFT-ITL to get a skill), I can add 2 separate skill levels.
C&S gave me the pointer towards the party levels. It had levels from 1-20 for each species that the game supported. Each level had a range of individual attribute points (both min and max) together with appropriate weapon skill levels. It also specified the number, or range of numbers, of individuals within that group eg a clan of one species may have 1 level 20 (Clan chief/King), 1 each of levels 10-19, 5 each of levels 7-9. 10 level 6, 50 level 5, 100 - 200 level 4 etc. Other species would have a different profile.
I used this to assign levels to each of the TFT species, including humans. I could then assess my own party's level and when an encounter took place I could generate an opposing party of approximately equal strength (in principle).
I hope, again, that this has been helpful.
Colin

[mister frau blucher]

This is great stuff, Colin! Thanks for posting it. It is great to see how people played over the years.

Bret

[bizarrojoe]

I just snatched a copy of Grail Quest on ebay for $15 shrinkwrapped! I'm very excited to add this to the DCG adventures in my growing collection.

Here's a question: In another thread there's a discussion of the order one could play fantasy modules in if one were to make them into a campaign. Where do you think Grail Quest could fit in there? Do you think it could mesh in there at all?

[mister frau blucher]

Grailquest was designed for more experienced characters, but did not presume the party of four - rather it was a single knight and his retainers. A maximum of three party members - but it has been a long time and I may be misremembering.

GQ could certainly fit into a LAW campaign, though. The background would need to be adapted a bit. You COULD have a character become a knight of the Round Table under King Arthur, but most LAW campaigns would not develop that way. I'd be more inclined to adapt it as in the service of a baron on the borderlands somewhere. If you had four dudes, they should probably be about 34 to 36 points with six-eight skill levels; three characters, maybe 38-40 and 10 skill levels. As part of a campaign, maybe the third or fourth adventure.

But this is just a guess as it has been a long time since I played through it.

Nice score getting it shrinkwrapped, Joe - and $15 is worth every penny!

[jlv61560]

An update on this -- Barbarian Prince can be downloaded for free from the Dwarfstar Games website.

Likewise, you can acquire a copy of Grailquest for $11.95 at Noble Knight Games right now.  This one was, for years, easily and cheaply acquired via Excalibur Games (which was affiliated with Decision Games) but has recently dropped off the market since apparently Excalibur is planning on officially starting their own game company.  The guy in charge still sells copies of the various Microgames (including, among others, WarpWar) on BGG if you care to go and look for them there.  The prices are excellent in all cases.

[rockprairie]

Barbarian Prince was a great game that I never survived!

[jlv61560]

I'll update my earlier post by noting that Excalibre Games' new website no longer includes Grailquest as a title you can purchase.  The only Metagaming titles I see on their most current catalog are Ramspeed, Fire When Ready, Rommel's Panzers, Stalin's Tanks, Rivets, Trailblazer, WarpWar, and Lords of the Underearth.

Barbarian Prince may still be acquired from the Dwarfstar Games website as a free download.  (Just do a google search on "Dwarfstar Games.")  While it's a PDF, it is print quality, so you could "print and play" Barbarian Prince if you wanted to, and someone has provided a variant map which is much fancier than the original included in the game.

Really, Barbarian Prince is a near perfect example of how to structure a "solo hexcrawl" if you wanted to.  All you have to do is take a typical hexcrawl write-up, such as the Wilderlands of High Fantasy, or more recently, something like Blackmarsh by Rob Conley, and convert the monsters to either TFT or LAW and you're all set.  in fact, if you choose to use the Blackmarsh setting, you can buy a version of it from LuLu (search LuLu for "Heroes and Other Worlds"), and you'll find a version basically already converted to TFT/LAW -- you may have to do a little adjusting, but not a lot, and the monsters should require none at all.  To make it work like Barbarian Prince, all you have to do is add in the movement and River Crossing rules from that game and fudge around with the encounter tables a bit (maybe even not that, depending on how you want to play it), and you're good to go. 

Adding in "Crossroads Inns" might require an additional encounter table (for the Inn itself), and would probably require you to adjust the existing encounter tables to allow for the possibility of actually finding such an inn, but really the work has mostly already been done in Barbarian Prince, and all you'd be doing is adjusting things a bit.  Of course, you could go absolutely crazy with Encounter Tables and increase them to D100 tables (thus giving you lots of different possibilities, and simultaneously converting them to exact percentages, but again, that's up to you!  Either way, you could have a "solo" hexcrawl that could literally last years if you did this with the old Judges Guild Wilderlands stuff (or the newer version called Wilderlands of High Fantasy that I mentioned above)!  Of note, the way Judges Guild did their hexcrawl is pretty standard these days, and you can find very similar maps in everything from Barbarians of Lemuria to Rob Conley's Points of Light books, his Blackmarsh, JG's The First Fantasy Campaign (if you want to adventure in Blackmoor), and a ton of other hexcrawl products.  ;-)

[jonathan1971]

Feb 24, 2019 23:08:05 GMT -5 jlv61560 said:

I'll update my earlier post by noting that Excalibre Games' new website no longer includes Grailquest as a title you can purchase.  The only Metagaming titles I see on their most current catalog are Ramspeed, Fire When Ready, Rommel's Panzers, Stalin's Tanks, Rivets, Trailblazer, WarpWar, and Lords of the Underearth.

Barbarian Prince may still be acquired from the Dwarfstar Games website as a free download.  (Just do a google search on "Dwarfstar Games.")  While it's a PDF, it is print quality, so you could "print and play" Barbarian Prince if you wanted to, and someone has provided a variant map which is much fancier than the original included in the game.

Really, Barbarian Prince is a near perfect example of how to structure a "solo hexcrawl" if you wanted to.  All you have to do is take a typical hexcrawl write-up, such as the Wilderlands of High Fantasy, or more recently, something like Blackmarsh by Rob Conley, and convert the monsters to either TFT or LAW and you're all set.  in fact, if you choose to use the Blackmarsh setting, you can buy a version of it from LuLu (search LuLu for "Heroes and Other Worlds"), and you'll find a version basically already converted to TFT/LAW -- you may have to do a little adjusting, but not a lot, and the monsters should require none at all.  To make it work like Barbarian Prince, all you have to do is add in the movement and River Crossing rules from that game and fudge around with the encounter tables a bit (maybe even not that, depending on how you want to play it), and you're good to go. 

Adding in "Crossroads Inns" might require an additional encounter table (for the Inn itself), and would probably require you to adjust the existing encounter tables to allow for the possibility of actually finding such an inn, but really the work has mostly already been done in Barbarian Prince, and all you'd be doing is adjusting things a bit.  Of course, you could go absolutely crazy with Encounter Tables and increase them to D100 tables (thus giving you lots of different possibilities, and simultaneously converting them to exact percentages, but again, that's up to you!  Either way, you could have a "solo" hexcrawl that could literally last years if you did this with the old Judges Guild Wilderlands stuff (or the newer version called Wilderlands of High Fantasy that I mentioned above)!  Of note, the way Judges Guild did their hexcrawl is pretty standard these days, and you can find very similar maps in everything from Barbarians of Lemuria to Rob Conley's Points of Light books, his Blackmarsh, JG's The First Fantasy Campaign (if you want to adventure in Blackmoor), and a ton of other hexcrawl products.  ;-)

Thanks for the info....in your travels have you come a cross a low magic setting that mainly humans, something I could use for a conan type setting?