Welcome to Day 4 of the #CharacterCreationChallenge. Today I am creating a character for Fantasy Quest, the solo RPG that was presented in the 1982 book, Dicing with Dragons. I reviewed this book last year and discovered that it contained an RPG to help introduce readers to the concept of playing a roleplaying game. From what read, it sounds more like the solo Tunnels and Trolls adventures that were also popular during that time-frame.
I’m not going to go into the statistics of the book itself since that is basically covered by the review. The character creation instructions for Fantasy Quest start on page 16. The character sheet is only one page.
The first thing we are instructed to do is to pick a character name. For this guy I’m going to call him Alric Hinman. The three characteristics that make up Alric are up next. These include Combat, Strength and Fortune. Combat is the character’s attack and defense ability. Strength the physical power of the character but also includes his health. While the Wound Factor isn’t an attribute, there is a section on the sheet for it and it represents how much damage your character can do when a successful attack is made. It starts out as a 1d6 since Alric already has an ordinary sword. Fortune is a luck score basically. All three are determined by rolling 3d6 and adding them together. I did this.
Now we are instructed to equip the character. As mentioned above, Alric already has a sword. The rules state that he already has a normal shield, a backpack and some rations. I’m instructed to roll 3d6 for the number of gold pieces that the character starts out with. As for any other equipment, apparently it is found through the adventure.
So I think I’m done because the next section starts talking about combat. It’s pretty simple, the initiative is listed in the description of the encounter. If you are attacking, roll 3d6 and if you roll matches or beats the Combat Factor (CF) of your opponent, you hit him. You roll the damage of the weapon you are using which is subtracted from their Strength Factor (SF). When a combatant’s SF reaches zero, they are dead. Your character can eat a ration to regain two SF points. Your character can find equipment and magical items along the way. It’s pretty simplistic, but was written to go through the solo adventure “The Eye of the Dragon.” Now that I have a character, I’ll probably attempt this solo adventure after the challenge is done. Here is the scanned completed character sheet.
Afterthoughts:
The system and creation process was pretty simplistic. But I wasn’t expecting much as this was presented as an example of solo roleplaying. I’ll have to go through the adventure and blog about it later.
Additional Notes:
On the TardisCaptain dot Com Discord server I had a reader ask if they could create a starship as a character. My answer was a resounding “Yes!!!” The Enterprise, the Millennium Falcon, the Serenity, the Galactica. They are all characters in the show. I had actually been toying with the idea of doing 31 ships from different RPGs. It would give me a chance to create another ship using the FASA Starship Construction rules. But I still have several different core systems to go through (and keep stumbling across new ones). So one year I’ll do that, but not this year.
Coming Up Next:
I finally get to create a character in Top Secret S.I.
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