Thursday, April 15, 2021

California Gamin' (Part 2)

 As one might expect, there's a section of Moira Johnston's article in New West that touches on the importance of California in the growing popularity of roleplaying games.

I've touched on the topic of California and its gaming scene before, but I especially like this paragraph for its quotes from Gygax and Stafford. Gygax's comment that "the East was slow at first" intrigues me, since, by the time I'd entered the hobby, it was pretty well entrenched in the region. The Baltimore/DC/Northern Virginia area seemed to be positively crawling with gamers, which makes sense, with its preponderance of universities and military bases, two breeding grounds for the hobby. Still, there's no denying the foundational role that California (and the West Coast more generally) played in not just embracing Dungeons & Dragons but in creating early alternatives to it.   

12 comments:

  1. I do wonder if Alarums & Excursions prompted Gygax's comments about the audience in California "instantly seizing" on D&D. A&E did spread a great deal of innovation very quickly, if only regionally, and I don't think the Wild Hunt took off quite as fast (though I don't really know). Another factor that helped spread RPGs in California is, of course, the SCA.

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    1. Absolutely. The SCA is another, often unsung, element of how and why RPGs (and fantasy more generally) became big in the 1970s.

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    2. It's really striking how many early RPGs were designed by SCA members: Runequest (Steve Perrin and Steve Henderson), Chivalry and Sorcery (Wilf Backhaus), and The Fantasy Trip (Steve Jackson), and perhaps more.

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    3. Worth noting that one of A&E's contributors was Deanna Sue White of Mistigar fame, and whose photo was in the original article alongside several other RPG luminaries.

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  2. :flashback:

    I grew up in NOVA, and started play in late 1977. At that time, it was REALLY difficult to find any D&D materials. The group that introduced me already had the white box, GH, EW, and shortly thereafter the MM, and Holmes rulebooks- I believe sourced via mail order, and siblings in college. There were no magazines or much in the way of clubs. But by the end of 79 and early 1980, game shops were popping up and local bookstores- Crown Books-a DC/Metro area , and others like B Dalton and Waldenbooks were starting to have rather large TSR displays and shelf space. D&D clubs were popping up in all the schools as well as local Libraries.

    Until that time when it really started to explode, we got things through some of the group's college age siblings, bought things mail order, or on a few occasions a game store we happened to find on a family vacation to East Coast beaches: DELMARVA or the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida. I distinctly remember during this time the very first thing I would do upon entering our Hotel room was seeking out the yellow pages in order to look for local game stores just to seek out something I'd been dying to find like Runequest, Tunnels & Trolls, or the Arduin Grimoire. Not too often did I score a new shop.

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  3. I've spent a large part of my life in upstate NY near Albany and we were fortunate enough to have a fairly vibrant gaming community even in the early days, in large part due to a club called the Schenectady Wargamers' Association. In addition to being the closest thing to a "European style" gaming club I've ever encountered in the US, they've run the Council of Five Nations gaming convention locally for well over 40 years, with a brief hiatus back in the 90s where it was replaced by the Albany Gaming Expo under similar but not identical organizers.

    Game stores have been pretty steady over the years, coming and going with some regularity but always at least a couple withing the tri-city area. The current big one has been around for ~15 years now and survived the pandemic without major issues.

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    1. I don't think I ever did any of the Schenectady Wargamers Association stuff while I was at RPI, though I at least heard of Council of Five Nations. But I do remember some cool game stores and when I had a vehicle, regularly went out to Schenectady for shopping. There was also a toy store out that way somewhere that had a ton of gaming stuff in the basement. This was in the 1980s.

      My gaming world expanded when as a high school gamer, I started to trek into MIT. I miss the MITSGS gaming culture of the 70s and 80s. While there were plenty of regular games, there was always enough flow between games that you could come in and offer a new game and have a good chance of getting players. I did end up with a pretty stable AD&D group but later also got a semi-stable "Traveller" (we didn't stick with Traveller for the campaign) group, a couple very regular players and a constellation of other players who would drop in and out. The constellation (or multiverse as they called it) of D&D games also allowed PCs to drift from campaign to campaign.

      While I had actually met Glen Blacow before coming to MIT, it was at MITSGS that I really got the chance to play in some of his sessions and he joined some of my sessions.

      The RPI games club was nice, but pretty much restricted to students or former students. Also not quite as much shuffling around.

      Post college, I moved to Raleigh NC and quickly hooked up with the NC State club but most everyone there was in fixed games that didn't really have room, so it was hard to get into a game or start a new one.

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    2. Hmmm, 1980s. Armadillo Games was going strong at that point, although they bounced between three different locations over the years. Noteworthy for being one of the first stores to stock the full Games Workshop line, back when GW was small enough to care about every US stockist. The big toy store was Duane's Toyland, which is where I bought my first miniatures and quite a lot of board and roleplaying games - as well as my collection of Tom Swift Junior books when I was somewhat younger.

      Both are sadly long gone now. Armadillo's big sign on the Eerie Blvd didn't get painted over until about ten years ago, though - it was quite the sad bit of nostalgia every time I drove by.

      Never played with the RPI group although I knew it existed.
      I was too young for the college crowd in the early 80s and went out to PA for college. The SWA was meeting in the Studio of Bridge and Games back in the day, which is also sadly gone now.

      These days the big local shop is Zombie Planet in Colonie, although the pandemic's still got in-store gaming on hold. Hopefully that ends soon.

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    3. Ah, yup, Armadillo Games, Duane's Toyland and Studio of Bridge and Games were my main sources of RPGs other than shopping back home in the Boston area. There was also a model railroad hobby shop near Studio of Bridge and Games I liked (across the interstate, I think on Hamburg St.). In the later 1980s there was actually a decent board wargame store in Troy. It seems like there was another store or two, but the three you named were definitely the main ones. Oh, I think there was also a craft/hobby store in one of the malls (Hungates?).

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    4. Mohawk Valley Railroad on Hamburg, great place for all sorts of model kits and supplies and tools. Still going strong pre-pandemic, but I haven't been there since then. Hopefully they (and their slowly increasing collection of store felines) survived. Armadillo's final location change took them to about a half-mile away from them, which was convenient for the couple of years it lasted.

      There were a couple of mall stores over the years. A small chain toy store whose name eludes me in Colonie Center that had a huge selection of boardgames including some stuff I've never seen anywhere else, but I think they were gone by 1980. AG Bike & Hobby across the street in Northway Mall, which stocked a lot of boxed games and Ral Partha minis - bought most of my Yaquinto games from them, and Champions 1st ed. I don't know a Hungate, but there is a Crossgates Mall (built 1984) and a Westgate Mall (really a plaza, been around forever). Crossgates had a railroad/modeling hobby shop for a few years, long gone now.

      The Troy store's unfamiliar to me, I might just have missed it altogether. I was away at college for a lot of the later 80s, and then gaming in Colonie at Imagination Games & Comics when I got back, before their bankruptcy and forced stock selloff. There's a Flipside Games in Troy these days, but they definitely weren't around in the 80s. Also a board game cafe if yelp is to be believed. Haven't been to that one.

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    5. Cool that Mohawk Valley Railroad is still in business. I have no idea if any of the hobby stores I grew up with in the Boston area are still in business. I know my favorite game store went down in bankruptcy but the proprietor's son somehow revived the business.

      Hungates may be a name I'm remembering from the Raleigh NC area...

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    6. Bankrupt game stores are distressingly common IME. Even the big FLGS, Zombie Planet, is a "second try" by the former owner of Imagination Games & Comics after it went bankrupt and had its stock forcibly auctioned off by NYS tax & finance. He spent some time out in California working for various publishers, then opened ZP when he returned to the Albany area where he'd been raised.

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