Shifting gears slightly, this is The Forest-Lords of Dihad (1982), the first of two products detailing the Land Beyond the Mountains, a setting developed by Gamelords for Metagaming’s Fantasy Trip system. Despite the promise of the material, the deal fell apart when Metagaming closed and Fantasy Trip slipped into copyright limbo. The pair of modules from Gamelords are, to my knowledge, the only third-party material produced for Fantasy Trip during its first incarnation.

I’ve never looked at any of Metagaming’s later adventures, and Tollenkar’s Lair is just a large dungeon, so I can’t really judge Dihad against the mainline content, but I am willing to bet this is pretty different. It’s very much a setting book, comparable with something like Griffin Mountain in terms of the size of the territory and the sort of details the book is interested in (social groups, topography, factions, as opposed to a more encounter-based focus like X1: The Isle of Dread, or even the overland details in Mines of Keridav). It’s…very good. It makes me seriously wonder what Thieves Guild might have developed into had Gamelords had the staying power of Chaosium and RuneQuest.

It is not at all what I expect for Fantasy Trip, which I think of as more of a tactical combat game. In fact, there is very little sense of a system in the text. TFT stuff is there, but it isn’t in the foreground, making this material essentially generic.

Pretty sure that is a Wyman cover, but not one of their best. Wyman, Larry Shade and Wallace Miller are all credited as interior illustrators, and they do a very good job. Really love that gargoyle. Which, gargoyle hunting is a big thing here—their gallbladders are important components for all sorts of arcane doings, and someone one has been over-hunting and stockpiling them, causing a general shortage. This whole plot thread is delightfully odd and worth the price of admission alone (which was about 25 bucks, at least until I posted about it). I wish I had the second volume!