In The Labyrinth is the point at which Melee and Wizard grow into a role-playing game. If you’ve been following my delve into The Fantasy Trip, this is where the game transcends the battlefield.

This book covers roleplaying, character creation and experience, and advanced magic and combat rules…

I’ve been reading through it for a couple of days and it packs a lot of old-school dungeon loveliness into a neat 176-pages inclusive of the index. As I move towards delivering on my pact to run a TFT open table megadungeon at the school club for 6 weekly sessions, the next step for me is to look more closely at how character creation works.

Because an Open Table needs quick character creation, I need to test The Fantasy Trip‘s process and time the outcomes. The target time, according to The Alexandrian, is no more than 15-20 minutes.

First time out, I ran a stopwatch and built Xeno (from Part I) using the The Fantasy Trip creation rules in the main Labyrinth book. This took 8 minutes and 17 seconds, utilising the notes from before and the weapon, equipment, and armour reference sheets.

Admittedly, I did not spend the 1000 silver that is the standard starting money. I just grabbed the weapons and armour he had in Melee, added a Labyrinth Kit, and some other bits.

I think at the Open Table, you just want to say, “Grab a dagger, two weapons, and armour. Let’s play!” I might add a quick choice of three equipment packs.

Doing it in 8 minutes means that a dithering newbie with no idea could be talked through the process in 15-20 minutes. The steps are simple, if we assume humans as default and base it on the core rules:

• Choose: Hero or Wizard?
• ST, DX, and IQ all start at 8; divide 8 more points between them.
• Choose either Talents or Spells up to your IQ limit.
• Choose weapons and armour.
• Choose an equipment pack.

I think that the full Character Record Sheet is a little overwhelming, so it’s better to use the smaller version(s) that I have pads of from the main boxed set ,and which are on page 9 of the Character and Reference Booklet you get in the .PDF set.

The slow part will be choosing Talents and Spells. There are some great reference sheets to help with this. Given that most Hero characters will likely have a low IQ, and the choices are limited by only the lists that match your IQ or lower, this will be ok.

With Xeno, I had to choose from IQ 7 and IQ 8 only. In reality, I knew he needed Bow (2) and Sword (2). I gave him Knife (1) and Brawling (1) because they seemed obvious choices (even though I made a mistake because having Knife means Sword only costs 1). Horsemanship (1) and Swimming (1) were suggested because of his Horse Bow and likelihood of entering a swamp. In retrospect, I could give him Boating or Literacy for that spare 1 point.

If we reverse the steps above to choose weapons and armour before Talents, then some points get auto-spent because having (say) a Horse Bow and Shortsword without the talents means I have to roll 4 dice to use them, instead of the usual 3 dice… so I’ll buy those. Simple.

All of which is to say, I am a lot more confident about using the Character Creation rules at the Open Table. Now to overcome my greatest fear of all: to design and prepare the Labyrinth itself ready for play next week.

Game on!