I never played Steve Jackson's The Fantasy Trip, which eventually evolved into GURPS. But I did spend many hours with its predecessors, Metagaming's Melee and Wizard fantasy tactical combat games. In addition to man-to-man arena combat, the game series featured extended solo adventures such as Death Test, in which player-characters battled their way through a dangerous environment. Dark City Games has endeavored to recreate Metagaming's simple and long out of print pleasures in a trio of free-to-download PDF games: Legends of the Ancient World (a faithful retro-clone of the Melee/Wizard experience), Legends of Time and Space (a science fiction take on the rules), and Legends of the Untamed West (ditto for the Western genre). Based on my memories of 20 years ago, they've succeeded admirably.
If you’re looking for a rich, detailed setting or crunchy rules for gear and vehicles, forget it. Legends of Time and Space is not Traveller. But that’s not what the old Metagaming adventure modules were about, anyway. If you’re ready to dive headlong into action with blaster blazing after a minimum of preparation, Legends of Time of Space is for you. The game consists of character creation rules, a combat system, and a character advancement system. It all fits on four pages (more on that later). Simple guidelines for spaceship creation and combat are included separately in the sample adventure module Repel Boarders Starboard.
Player-characters are built on 32-points, divided among Strength, Dexterity, and Intelligence stats and a small selection of skills. Strength determines how much damage a character does with melee weapons and how much damage he can take. Dexterity determines how well a character shoots, how easy he is to hit, and how far he can move. Intelligence affects how well a character employs his skills in a role-playing situation. Skills add a small bonus to specific types of tasks. To resolve a situation, a character rolls under his stat to succeed. To shoot an opponent, he’d roll under his DX score. To make a brilliant deduction he’d roll under his IQ score, or his IQ plus his Investigator skill rating. Combat takes place on a hexagonal grid map (not provided with the basic rules) that helps players determine where they stand in relation to each other and to opponents.
Additional adventure modules available for purchase at Dark City Games’ web site provide game maps, character counters, and NPC stats. The site also provides a sample space station map download. Legends of Time and Space is a complete game as-is, but I found the fantasy character guidelines and sample modules available for Legends of the Ancient World useful for providing critters and ideas for creating alien races.
Legends of Time and Space is a concise, clear, easy to read document laid out in a two-column format. The margins are narrow but the print is large and bold. I noticed no typos. The rules are presented in a sparse, no-frills style which gets the job done but lacks color. At four pages, it’s a considerably shorter document than the booklets I remember for Melee and Wizard, even if you removed the art. Retro-clone games typically have to employ pretty generic language to avoid copyright problems. But Metagaming never did a sci-fi version of Melee or Wizard. Surely Dark City could have included an opening blurb and an atmospheric character creation example or two to help players get into the space opera mood without getting themselves into legal trouble.
Repel Boarders Starboard is a 13-page PDF that includes the contents of the Legends PDF plus brief starship creation and combat rules, a numbered-paragraph solo adventure, and a one-page color hex map intended for use both with man-to-man battles and outer space ship-to-ship action.
Dark City Games has successfully captured the fun of early, inexpensive role-playing games and made it accessible to a new generation of gamers. Legends of Time and Space isn’t the fanciest science fiction RPG available for download online, but its time-tested rules are presented coherently and it is quick to play. It would make a good introductory game for new players and is useful for one-shot and pick-up adventures.
