3 - When were you first introduced to RPGs?
I came to RPGs through the gamebook boom of the mid 1980s, Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf and many others. I was 11 or 12.
And I was that kind of kid - I heard about Lone Wolf through an advert in 2000 A.D. for example, the first film I remember seeing was Star Wars, and my mother read Lord Of The Rings to us.
And I had done a bit of improvisational gamebook-inspired GMing with a friend over school lunch breaks already.
I started with Fighting Fantasy: The Introductory Role-playing Game and was GMing by my second session - so that introduction worked for me!
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| Steve Jackson has since signed my copy. |
And FF got me into miniatures as they were sold nearby along with some RPG books in the toy department at John Menzies on Princes Street, one of the biggest department stores in Edinburgh at the time (and the one they run out of at the start of Trainspotting).
Then this introduction got me to White Dwarf - starting with issue 67 when I was newly 13, which had an adventure for Golden Heroes and Champions and an article on ghosts for Call of Cthulhu and adverts for other games and companies - at a magazine rack. (I ran that adventure, and decades later I realised I was sitting in a convention bar with writer Phil Masters and Golden Heroes creator Simon Burley, which was a very starstruck-y moment.)
That then led me to my first dedicated game shop, Gamesmaster on Forrest Road. (The location is now a Japanese street food place.)
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| I never saw the Glasgow shop. |
Which is probably why I think of GM as gamesmaster rather than gamemaster to this day.
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