Day 3: First RPG Purchased
I imagine these first three questions yield more varied answers from people who started with groups rather than self-starters.
So as to not say the FF RPG book again, I will step back to why I got it. I had already started in on the Fighting Fantasy books - not sure which one I started with, but I definitely remember getting City Of Thieves from my cousin Lesley (eldest of the five) and the straightforward adventure story, nicely detailed horrible setting and Iain McCaig artwork really helped hook me.
I wrote about Bad Cities like Gotham, Lankhmar and Port Blacksand recently. Nice to adventure in but I wouldn’t want to live there...
By that point, the books had already included Starship Traveller, a Star Trek style space opera (which I couldn’t actually solve, but never mind) and were starting to show what RPGs could do in their format. Other gamebooks started to appear, notably the Lone Wolf series (those attending Dragonmeet 2013 got to see me geek out about meeting author Joe Dever) and experimental versions like the 2000AD game-comics Dice Man and historical educational gamebooks, as well as magazines - Warlock for FF and Proteus for a gamebook in one.
It was a bit of a golden age for geeky kids with a couple quid pocket money, and helped bring me and quite a few of my generation into the hobby, to pick up miniatures stocked next to them, to grab a copy of White Dwarf when it was still about RPGs...
This is why we miss RPG magazines on shelves even if the age of the net has smashed magazines - a visible presence people can stumble on without looking for it can make all the difference.
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