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| TSR's minigames |
I do not own all of these games, nor am I planning to hunt them all down. My FLGS has a few of them but I have other things on my list to find and buy first. That being said having them all would be kind of fun.
There were eight total games and I own the first four, the same four that appeared in the 1981 Gateway to Adventure catalog. The links below take you to their Board Game Geek pages.
Vampyre, my first one. This is for 2-6 players. Players hunt the minions of Dracula in an attempt to find and destroy his coffins. There is a "wilderness" map and a map of Castle Dracula. Designed by Philip A. Shreffler. Art by Erol Otus.
Revolt on Antares. This game is for 2-4 players and is a "Sword and Planet" style adventure with three modes of play. Typical this boils down to the Terran Empire being the antagonists, protagonists, or neutral. Designed by Tom Moldvay and art by Bill Willingham and Erol Otus. Black Dougal makes an appearance here as well. Also listed for art are Jeff Dee (cover), David LaForce, and Jim Roslof
They've Invaded Pleasantville. For 2 players, a "Town" player and an "Alien" player. Aliens have invaded Pleasantville as part of their global takeover plan. The town player must either stop or kill the alien sub-commander "Zebu-Lon" (wait a minute...) or get more than half of the townsfolk back to normal. Designed by Michael Price with art by Erol Otus, Jeff Dee, David LaForce, Jim Roslof, and Bill Willingham.
SAGA. For 2-6 players. Players amass treasure, lands, and glory. The one that has the most glory at the end of 20 rounds wins. Designed by Steve Marsh with art by Erol Otus, Jeff Dee, David LaForce, Jim Roslof, and Bill Willingham. Willingham's cover is one of the best and this also features some great Erol Otus art.
Other minigames include Attack Force, Icebergs, Remember the Alamo and Viking Gods. I don't own these games, but their production values seem a touch higher than the first four.
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| Minigames, the Gateway to Adventure! |
All the games feature a 16-page booklet with black and white art and a fold-out map. Sometimes full color (Saga, Pleasantville, Antares) or two-color (Vampyre). Vampyre is also the only one with the maps printed on both sides. Each game also came with counters and two d6s.
They are all certainly playable and fun on their own. I had a lot of fun with Vampyre back in the day. But that is not why we are here today. No today I am going to dip a toe a little bit into my Traveller Envy and mix these with my current D&D games. Let me start out with my old favorite and one I have used as an adventure in the past.
Minigames as B/X Adventures
There is a lot to love about these little games. The Souvenir font really hits that nostalgia button hard for fans of the Moldvay/Cook Basic and Expert sets. Not to mention some of the best-looking Erol Otus art. This troll not only belongs in D&D, but he is BEGGING to be in D&D.
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| Erol Otus Troll from SAGA |
Maybe it is the font, maybe it is the art but when I got these games the first thing I wanted to do was play them as part of my D&D games. Of course, back then that meant Basic and Expert D&D. Some of it also came from the desire to get the most out of my purchase with my limited paper route money.
Vampyre
My first minigame. Now I am a HUGE Dracula and vampire fan so when I got the Cook/Marsh Expert Set and saw that there were vampires in it my first thoughts went to vampire hunts. My first character was a cleric for this very reason. The game Vampyre is set during the events of the novel Dracula with the same (or rather similar) characters. So set in the 1890s. Since Ravenloft Masque of the Red Death was still a decade and a half away, I converted this to a simple Expert D&D monster hunt. If I were to redo it I'd up the threat of Dracula. In Expert, I made him a Greater Vampire.
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| Vampire chic, circa 1981 |
The dual map, a "wilderness" and a "dungeon" again BEG to be used in the Expert game. The parallels between this game and the Ravenloft adventure. No surprise since both draw from the exact same source materials. The trick the next time I use this is to make it less like Ravenloft.
SAGA
This is the next piece of "low hanging fruit." Like Dungeon! the connections to D&D are obvious here. SAGA has heroes fighting monsters, exploring, gaining treasure. Sounds D&D like to me! There is a nice little Risk-like map of the Viking world. This includes all of England, Denmark, and some of Sweden, Norway, and Ireland. The map also had "Thule" about in the place where Iceland would be expected (and to the map's odd scale). The map is also just great to look at.
Outside of the troll featured above the monsters include Dragons, Drow (not just dark elves), Ghosts, Giants, and Witches! I am happy to see that witches are the next more dangerous creature after dragons. The game has some fun spells and magical runes with simple effects and some named magical swords.
While there are no dungeons in this game it is full of ideas.
This got me thinking about how Vampyre and SAGA could work together. In SAGA you travel from mainland Europe to England for treasure and glory. In Dracula, the last act is the heroes traveling from England back to mainland Europe to hunt the monster. Maybe with something like Draugr & Draculas as the connective tissue the mini-campaign can be changed from one of just glory to one of monster hunting across the continent to stop the master vampire. Call it Vampyre Saga. Hmm. That sounds a little bit like a supernatural teen show on the CW. I'll play with it a bit.
The next two are a little hard to fit in.
They Invaded Pleasantville
The premise of this game is great and recalls 50s alien invasion movies. But as Carl Sagan pointed out in The Demon-Haunted World today's alien abductions were yesteryear's demon possessions. So swap out the aliens for demons and now this sleepy Midwestern town is a village in the Realms where demons are running rampant. Stop the Alien Sub-CommanderDemonic Lord.
Revolt on Antares
This game is a fun Sword & Planet game, but remove it from it's setting it is a fairly generic "Us vs. Them" game of rebellion and oppressors. Sure there are a lot of ways I could use this, but it gets it further and further away from its basic premise. Maybe it would make for a good Star Frontiers game.
In any case, there is a lot more fun to be had here.
4 comments:
I just looked on Ebay to see if I could grab the ones I am missing. They have gone way up in price since I had to replace my copy of Saga after a flood. Oh well. I was mainly interested in the maps anyway, for D&D purposes, now that you have piqued my interest here.
I fondly remember the ads for these (i might have seen them in Dragon but I definitely remember them from the Gateway to Adventure catalog in my Moldvay Basic Set), but I only ever had one game, Saga, a gift from my mom back in the day after I'd discovered D&D. I used it mainly for settings/countries and names for my campaign world.
You can read more about my thoughts and a semi in-depth review on my blog here:
Daddy Rolled a 1: Memories: Saga Minigame
@The Great Kahn, I know what you mean. These have really gone up in price.
@Martin, that is a great post. SAGA was the game I knew the least about but was most interested in back then.
FWIW, there's some potential in the other four, albeit maybe no so much for fantasy.
Attack Force could be the finale of a Star Wars inspired RPG campaign, maybe using Star Frontiers/Knight Hawks.
Remember the Alamo could be a good Boot Hill one-shot, assuming pre-generated PCs that aren't expected to survive (although I won that game by breaking the Mexican army almost half the time, so maybe survival isn't as hard as you'd think?).
Viking Gods could similarly be a one-shot, maybe even playing a deity, or maybe the afterlife adventures of a bunch of Viking-themed PCs. Or something weirder where your party is just messing about the fringes of the myth - or derailing it outright, Samurai Cat style.
Icebergs - Well, I got nothing. Inspiration for a Deep One-centric Cthulhu adventure? Or maybe mash it up with Vampyre somehow? Drac liked putting his deadboxes on boats, maybe he's decided to conquer Alaska first this time around.
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