Set the Controls for the Back Wall of Waldenbooks (Hobby Origins, Continued...)

 Alternate Title: The TSR Mail Order Hobby Shop Catalog: A Gaming Rosetta Stone

As related last post, even as a primary schooler I rarely was without a book in my hand. Despite the plethora of free books available from the school and public libraries, Waldenbooks was my favorite mall store.

Similar to their feelings regarding the local public library, my parents must've considered Waldenbooks a fairly safe space, because I recall browsing alone while my dad looked for the latest Louis L'Amour novel in another part of the store.  While dad perused the cheesy Westerns, eight- to ten-year-old me navigated to the back wall of Waldenbooks.  I'm not sure if the upper management standardized the layout of all their stores, but the back wall, the back right specifically, of our particular Waldenbooks held all the RPGs.

Wait a second?!  RPGs?  The timeline of my last post saw me as a middle-schooler, still reading Choose Your Own Adventure and Endless Quest books and yet to fully grasp roleplaying or wargames.  True, but all those comic book ads I mentioned inserted, if subconsciously, the images of boxed games into my awareness.  I knew if I saw a box, wrapped in plastic and illustrated with lovely, glossy paintings, then I beheld one of the "real" games the big-kids played.  One seminal moment crystallized this association, so I'll detour from the mall back to the school playground briefly.

Sometime during fourth or fifth grade, a classmate who recognized my nerdiness offered me the Summer/Fall 1986 version of TSR's The Mail Order Hobby Shop Catalog, handed down to him from an older sibling.  I'm not sure exactly when TSR released this, but I assume it was actually in late spring, and I was still in fourth grade.  Funny how I've forgotten entire semesters of college classes, yet I can remember exactly where (but not when) I was, just outside the art building at recess, when this catalog entered my grasp.

Regardless of the vagaries of memory, this catalog showed me that the mythical "D&D" that we'd heard about in hushed tones (the Satanic Panic was in full swing), and that my first grade friend had futilely tried to show us years before, was far more than Endless Quest books.  Pictures filled the TSR catalog, showing the "real deal" Dungeons & Dragons boxed sets, and introducing me to the slew of competitor publishers.  I saw familiar, and by that time already beloved, properties such as Star Wars and Star Trek, as well as unpronounceable strangeness like the baffling but awesome looking "Call of Cthulhu".  The miniatures at the back of the catalog, especially those weird Grenadier sculpts for CoC, captured my imagination over everything else.  That however, is a tale for another day.

I poured over that catalog, dreaming about buying (or asking for Christmas) nearly everything in there.  Most of the games and accessories were unfamiliar, but a few I recognized not only from the aforementioned comic book ads but from the mall bookstore. 

The Rosetta Stone that was The Mail Order Hobby Shop Catalog transformed my Waldenbooks visits.  Previously, I had traveled to the right-side back wall of my local to search for Endless Quest and similar game books, as well as genre-specific guidebooks, such as Rovin's The Encyclopedia of Super-Villains.  The boxed sets in shrink-wrap and orange-spined AD&D manuals now became my focus, finally recognized for what they were.

The sensationalized accounts of D&D leading young kids astray influenced my parents, and although we were not a particularly religious household, I could always sense their apprehension when they came to gather me from the Waldenbooks back wall.      

Luckily, I set my heart not on the red-boxed D&D Basic Set, but the purple-pink box next to it that said "Star Frontiers Knight Hawks" on the side.  Although I recognized the Star Frontiers logo from my comics, it was the front cover illustration of battling spaceships that sucked me in.  My beloved Terran Trade Authority books disappeared from the local library a few years prior; now, here in Waldenbooks was something that not only featured TTA-adjacent art on the cover, but offered repeated fun beyond reading in the form of a game.  I had to have it. 

Initially, my folks thought otherwise.  "Too expensive" they said.  I had a plan however (and this is how I can isolate this purchase to the Summer of '86).  Our annual family summer vacation was approaching, and I knew that mom and dad's spending became a little more liberal on holiday.  Somehow (maybe I suggested it?) during our roadtrip through California we ended up at a mall and lucky for me that mall had a Waldenbooks. Even luckier, that Waldenbooks had a copy of Star Frontiers Knight Hawks and with a little strategically placed pressure (whining), I convinced my folks to buy it. 

I had no idea that Knight Hawks was actually an expansion to the original Star Frontiers boxed set; I didn't even understand the concept of RPGs, let alone that they could be expanded.  The multi-hour drive back to our home state gave me ample time to digest the box contents.  I puzzled over the "Campaign Book Expansion Rules", lacking the frame of reference from the base RPG.  The box back indicated that the smaller, gray-colored manual contained rules for a game that could "be played as a beginning or advanced game when played separately", and that's what I wanted to do.

It took little to convince my middle-school best friend, a fellow nerd who shared my love of comic books and M.U.S.C.L.E. figures, to try Knight Hawks.  Our young age meant we probably got a lot of the rules wrong, and I remember the cardboard tokens fought a losing battle against the Atari 2600.

We enjoyed Knight Hawks though, which I can definitively say was my first "proper" non-gamebook game, and first wargame.  All thanks to Waldenbooks.        

Last two pics courtesy of RPGGeek.

Scholastic Book Clubs and Terran Trade Authorities (Hobby Origins, Continued...)

Preschool exposure to Star Wars and comic books started me on the path to nerdom.  Public school, particularly the school library, showed me I didn't walk this path alone.

Yes, nearly every little boy in the USA of 1982-83 had a few Kenner Star Wars figures in the toy box, but it was easy to spot those of us who were a lot more "into" the fantastical.  My best school chum Zack later became my favorite GM, and now is a published author of multiple horror novels.  Although we met at the bus stop on the first day of Kindergarten, I first marked him as a kindred geek spirit when he grabbed the Tusken Raider jigsaw puzzle during 1st Grade arts and crafts time.

A brilliant young boy named Colin shared Mrs. P.'s 1st Grade class with us, and he stood out for more than just his nerd interests.  Colin could already read.  Time may distort my memories, but I recall that while the rest of us struggled with our basic vocabulary, Colin got to sit quietly reading alone.  Not only that, he could bring and read the material of his choosing; that meant comic books!

Of course I was drawn to Colin's comics like a moth to flame, and he graciously shared his mags.  Colin inspired my lifelong preference for Iron Man (before he was cool!) over all other superheroes, except maybe ROM; the armored Avenger was Colin's favorite and hence the books he most frequently brought.

It was Colin who first pointed out the ad for Star Frontiers in one of these comics, and he who explained "it's a game."  I was blown away: a game you say?  He pointed out the blurb "from the makers of Dungeons and Dragons" gracing the same ad, offering "yeah, a game like D&D."  Later he brought in an example of this mysterious "D&D", probably a module, but only this wunderkind could understand this slim volume packed with text and esoteric diagrams.  Or maybe I misremember, and he only described it.  Regardless, it was beyond the comprehension of anyone but Colin.  We were only 1st Graders after all.        

Sadly I lost touch with Colin over the years but he taught me that far more worlds than just George Lucas' approved licenses exist, and that while glossy images drew us in, the written word held the key to accessing these worlds.

The school library quickly became a favorite place, where I discovered my first (quasi-) games in the Choose Your Own Adventure books and inspiration in the folklore and paranormal books that seemed to saturate school libraries in the early 80s.  Remember the Scholastic Book Club, and the order forms you could take home to show your folks?  My parents frequently denied me toys "you have too many already", but rarely said no to Book Order requests.  It didn't matter that I always picked the bullshit books about UFOs, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, Ghosts, or even some CYOA nonsense.  Reading was educational!

Soon I discovered the public library in my rural hometown held an even wider array of CYOA books in the juvenile section, including the imitators like Which-Way and even better the TSR  Endless Quest books which claimed some sort of direct connection to those unfathomable games Colin tried to show us.

My parents reasoned no place in town was safer than the public library, so I found myself there many days after school, lost among the books.  The "grown up" library had many of the same colorfully illustrated books on weird subjects, and others in even larger format.  It was here I discovered probably the most influential works on my hobby aesthetic: Stewart Cowley's Terran Trade Authority books.

I checked out the TTA books repeatedly, marveling at the illustrations through 1st and 2nd grade,   later absorbing the narrative of the Proxima Wars and other Great Space Battles as my reading skills increased.  The books (just the first two in Cowley's series) disappeared, obviously stolen, sometime in my early elementary school days.  Searching through the stacks, hoping the TTA handbooks had simply been misplaced, I discovered many new fantastic books, such as the Target Doctor Who novelizations, and the Usborne World Of... series.

A sympathetic librarian aided my mission to find the TTA books, teaching me to use the microfiche records of neighboring libraries' collections (pre-internet kids!).  Inter-library loan requests reunited me with the first two TTA books, and finally allowed me to read SpaceWreck (I would not see Starliners until buying it in college).

The TTA handbooks shaped my ideas of spaceflight more than any other influence, and were doubtless among the most important books of my childhood, an importance felt even in their absence.  The disappearance of the TTA handbooks left me yearning for spaceship imagery, a yearning that had me recall those ads from Colin's comic books… but that’s the next chapter in my self-indulgent story.     

  

Laser Swords and Spider Women (Hobby Origins, the Beginning...)

Not the name of a new tabletop game but rather my earliest recollections of the fantastical.

I don't remember a time when I wasn't interested in fantasy and sci-fi subjects.  The original Star Wars film debuted while I was still in diapers, with cheap imitations saturating the media landscape while I took my first steps.  Kenner Star Wars toys and their knock-offs were ubiquitous and my toddler eyes no doubt saw them in the bedrooms of older cousins.

My first concrete memory of anything fantastical is watching The Empire Strikes Back upon its theater release in 1980.  I clearly remember the Imperial Walker battle scene and the lightsaber duel but little else, and I think I slept through most of that first showing.  

Star Wars toys featured prominently at that 1980 Christmas, and I was hooked.  My rural hometown routinely brought back popular movies (maybe this was normal back then?) and either the following summer in '81, or a year later in '82 I saw ESB in the theater again, this time soaking it all in.  Knowing the general thrust of the story (ice planet fight, swamp planet stuff, cloud planet stuff) but then being amazed at the Vader-as-Luke's-Father revelation (SPOILER ALERT!) stands as a very clear memory.  

The few readers of this blog know that comic books are my one true love.  Despite stupidly selling my collection decades ago, my earliest comics survived the purge due to their extremely poor and therefore unmarketable conditions.  Armed with these actual copies and the unparalleled Mike's Amazing World of Comics database (R.I.P. Mike), I reordered my jumbled memories.

My first comic?  Spider-Woman #34.  Curious choice for a young boy but then I remember economics and not my preferences played the primary role in my earliest, preschool, comic book acquisitions.  The spinner rack resided at the liquor store* and perhaps in early 1981 I spied a Star Wars comic, or maybe recognized Spider-Man from the old '60s cartoon that was in syndication.  The memory is fuzzy but I remember being told "no", only to have the gruff salesman intervene and offer my dad a discounted comic to placate me.  This happened a number of times, with the shop owner selling my folks comics that either were damaged or poor sellers about to be discarded to make room for the next month's editions.  I believe Spider-Woman #34 fell into the latter category.  None of that mattered to me... the bright colors, slam-bang action, and over-the-top characters were more than my pre-kindergarten brain could ask for.  Remember Hammer and Anvil, two escaped convicts connected at the wrists by an alien super-chain?  As I type this, my nearly 50 year-old brain realizes what a wonderfully wacky supervillain concept this was; there was no chance a child could understand.  But I was enthralled.  I think that my inability to comprehend the comic's plot (I couldn't read yet), coupled with the intense visual imagery (violence, Kirby-crackle, Spider-Woman's curves, etc.) suggested to me that comics were for "big-kids".  I felt like I was being let into a secret world.  And I was hooked for life.

*Note: this is not as seedy as it sounds.  Where I'm from in the western USA, "liquor store" was (in the 80s at least) a term for a general convenience store.  Dad was typically stopping in there to just grab the paper, a half-gallon of milk, maybe some chewing tobacco, or get some fishing tackle.  And yes, some beer.  As evidenced by the spinner rack right at the front door though, it was a kid-friendly place and the foundation of my comic book collection.      

(Pictures copyright original owners, used without permission but at resolutions intended for educational purposes only.  Buy Marvel Comics).

 

Bitten by a Radioactive Space Marine Miniature (Hobby Origins: Intro)

Recently I returned from visiting my parents out west for the holidays, an eight day trip by car with only my dog for company.  The USA is a damn big place.  

Despite the monotony of road, binging a handful of good podcasts made the miles fly by.  All the podcasts I consumed focused on gaming, naturally, with the biggest standouts being The Bedroom Battlefields Tabletop Miniature Hobby Podcast and The Crown of Command Podcast.

I noticed that I particularly enjoyed the episodes where guests recounted their "origin stories", telling how they first started into the tabletop hobby.  All that driving gave me time to reflect on why those episodes appealed to me, and I think the key factor is the commonality of experiences.

Of course, hearing all those stories about the adolescent glory days of hobby time in the 80s and 90s made me think about my own origin story.  How did it all begin?  When did it all begin?  As it turns out, questions harder to answer than anticipated.

The older I get, the fuzzier the memories get, with events getting transposed and intermingled.  Some hobby memories are burned into my soul, never to be forgotten.  Others are only vague suggestions.  I've therefore decided to start a number of short posts here to recount my hobby origin.

I don't anticipate anyone will read them (except the bots from Singapore), but really only I am the intended audience.  I hope that by writing down my journey into the tabletop gaming hobby I can not only experience that warm glow of nostalgia, but recover some lost memories and maybe even correct some false ones.