Days 10 & 11: A Joker and a No-Show [D&D 40th Anniversary Blog Hop]

Sometimes these questions really put me back in time. So much stuff I haven't thought about for years. Turns out my answers are not so much about D&D this time, but about my earliest experiences as a gamer. Some very early impressions, if you will. And some more German gamer paraphernalia.

First bought gaming magazine?

&

First splat book I begged my DM to allow?

At first I thought I had nothing to say about this question. I asked myself what a magazine is supposed to do. Inform, support, inspire, stuff like that. I couldn't think of a gaming magazine that ever did something like this for me. Or could I?

Before I really was into role playing games, me and my brother had owned an Amiga 500. We had loved that machine, of course. We had played a lot of games back in the day. And now that I was sitting here, thinking what my first gaming magazine had been, I wandered back to that time when the fourth official Indiana Jones installment had been a computer game.

And yes, I remember those journeys to the next newsdealer, eager to get the newest issue as soon as it was published and reading like a holy text. Right there it was, the first gaming magazine I've ever purchased: the Amiga Joker (the following examples are from this archive):

March 1992! Where is all the time gone ...

Monkey Island 1 & 2, Lemmings, Worms, The Chaos Engine, Eye of the Beholder, all those beautiful games and memories. But there was more than just computer games. The Amiga Joker had been one of the few magazines that had a two page column about board games and (wait for it ...) role playing games! They'd called it Stromausfall (Eng.: power outage). Look:

A board game about neanderthals ...

... and a pen & paper role playing game about teddy bears.

It was fascinating, opening new worlds for me every time. Most of those games landed on my wish list. Most of them would stay there, too. But I that's the way it had been, knowing and dreaming about those games had been more important to me than owning and playing them.

So one of my early sources for ideas and information about role playing games was the Amiga Joker, a German computer magazine. Now I have to revisit that archive. A trip down memory lane is in order ...

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Not so much luck with the splat books, unfortunately. I'm really a DM most of the time so I never was in that position and my players are not invested enough to buy stuff and argue about using it after the fact. Not even during our 3E buying frenzies.

 

So no, never happened.

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Those questions really do it for me. Gumball machines, old gaming magazines and grand schemes about games, that's my youth right there!