The Fantasy Trip - Random Drawbacks

Gustave Doré, illustration from Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, 1877.

After paging through my copy of The Fantasy Trip Companion, I started noodling around with creating a table to randomly generate “Drawbacks” for beginning TFT characters. It’s hard now to appreciate just how innovative character disadvantages were in 1982, but I remember being bowled over by the concept when I first read The Space Gamer article where they were introduced. Of course, I was then a scrawny kid who’d only been in the RPG hobby for a couple years, so it wasn’t especially hard to knock me down.

But character disadvantages were then a tangible game changer.

I’ve lost quite a few artifacts from my gaming youth, most of them in a basement flood in the 90s. I managed, though, to hold on to several issues of The Space Gamer, including TSG 51.

I’ve taken my preferred TFT character disadvantages from TSG 51, TSG 57, and from John Leising’s website, Imaginaerie Media and created my own random table and applicable house rules for generating one of forty-eight possible “Drawback” options for new TFT PCs so that players can purchase additional Talents and Spells for their characters using the framework provided by the Legacy Edition of the rules. As far as I know, “drawback” is Lesing’s nomenclature. I prefer it to the “handicap” term used in TSG 51 & 57.

This table won’t be of much practical use for those without either the original magazines or without The Fantasy Trip Companion that was available through the Kickstarter, but perhaps Steve Jackson Games will make the Companion available down the road. There were enough backers of the TFT Legacy Edition that I thought I might as well throw it up here for others as I’d gone to the trouble for my own use.