I found it fitting to start this blog with the beginnings of my hobby life in the mid 80ies in a little town in eastern Bavaria, Germany. I am no psychologist but it seems to me that my envolvement in the fantasy and games hobby had great influence on many aspects of my later life. The hobby is still important to me and many precious friendships originated from it and last until today.
Talisman
I was about 12 years old as a good friend of mine brought the fabulous "Talisman" board game from a schooltrip to Berlin. We and two other kids from our street met at my room in the flat of my parents (my father was a simple construction worker and I shared a room with my sister at that time) and played some games. The artwork and the flair of the game incited a spark in me and I took every opportunity from then on to get more into fantasy gaming and books.
DSA
"Das Schwarze Auge" (engl. "The Black Eye") was something like the german incarnation of D&D and hit the shelves in 1982, existing until today. A fellow pupil got the basic game as a birthday present and invited me and two friends to play. I was hooked from the beginning and so was one of the other guys named Wolfgang. I couldn`t wait for the next session but we played only two games and the owner of the game lost interest. My parents would buy me the game for christmas, but that was half a year away!
So I wrote down some simple rules from memory and gamemastered a few short adventures for the kids in my neighbourhood - luckily they had no other experiences to compare ;-). I remember we darkened the room completey in midsummer. It was a lot of fun and the beginning of a a long enjoyment of roleplaying games. At christmas I finally got the DSA basic game and an adventure book and gamemastered a 5-year-campaign from then. DSA was the only roleplaying game widely available in german toy- and bookstores, D & D was translated into German a few years later.
(sadly I don't have pictures from the game or of the guys with whom I played at that time)
RPGs and the Dragoncircle
In the meantime I found out that apart from our small group there were several other rpg groups in our little town (10.000 inhabitants). It was a great time and I played in several of these groups, sometimes 2 or 3 times a week. In high school I met a guy named Christian, who had moved from Cologne to the countryside because his father was a soldier. He would lend me some books, among them Warhammer Fantasy RPG and Rifts RPG from Palladium. We played a few games WHFRPG, Runequest, Middleearth RPG, Shadowrun, Ars Magica and some others but mostly more DSA and another german fantasy RPG named "Midgard". We also had much fun with Call of Cthulhu and Paranoia.
Our groups had grown to a number of 25 people and we united under the name "Drachenzirkel" (engl. "Dragoncircle"). We put our money together to buy expensive board games and we met in a separate room of a local pub. We even had a big report in the local newspaper and we had club T-Shirts and a fanzine for our members.
At that time (late 80ies) internet was insignificant and everything was much slower than now. We only had contact by phone and over blackboards in shops. A few of us had the opportunity to visit these stores in Munich, Regensburg and Nuremberg. We heard and participated from a great Convention in Hamburg, the greatest in Germany at the time. It was called "STARD" (Convention of all roleplayers of Germany). The guys from the "Aladin" shop in Nuremberg organized a bus and about 50 players travelled to Hamburg and spent the days walking around at the site and the nights playing games at our overnight location.
There were a lot of games to see, especially tabletop games and we began relationships to some other guys from Nuremberg and an another club named "RPGmaniacs" which was in a little town abouth 50 km from my home.
Warhammer Fantasy Battles
Inspired from these event and also the "Demoncon" in Nuremberg one player bought the rulebook of "Warhammer Fantasy Battles" (3rd edition) and also "Warhammer armies". We used this books to play a small league, but most players had nor access to miniatures nor money to buy them. We used cardboard counters to play our 3000 points armies which was a really big mess!
Myself only owned a handful of Skaven and a Dragon Ogre (maybe there will be a separate entry for this one, he is still in my possession).
Only two of my fellow players, which already began to work as policemen, had enough money for real lead armies. One of them had an impressive Tzeentch force and the other a disgusting Nurgle army. These armies impressed me and were the inspiration for the biggest part of my collection now: An army of the Realms of Chaos!
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