#RPGaDay Day 3: First RPG I Bought

No, AD&D2e was not the first RPG I ever bought. Though I did wind up with an extensive collection of AD&D2e books for a while, I used my friend Jeremiah's corebooks for a spell before I bought my own. Actually, the first RPG-related purchase I made was not, in fact, an RPG...but a supplement? Why? Because I was in the 7th grade and ordering out of a catalog in a comic book and didn't know the difference. What did I purchase?

What can I say? I was a huge X-Men fan and had no idea, from the catalog, that this was not a standalone game. I started piecing it together once I got into RPGs (I'm sure one of the books in this boxed set says something to that effect, but I confess that I did not read every word, in part due to disappointment once I realized there were no rules for actually playing inside, though I did devour all of the obscure character bios).

Shortly after I discovered my first full-fledged comic and game shop (the now-closed Fantastic's in Tahlequah, OK), I made my second RPG purchase:

Fantasy is nice...superheroes have always been my first love...and, as I have proven on multiple occasions in my supers games (like many others before and after me have), the genre is tailor-made for you to dive right in with all your favorite horror, fantasy, sci-fi, and whatever tropes.

This version of Marvel is no longer my preferred method of supers roleplaying but, unlike AD&D2e, I still own (pretty much) all of my Marvel stuff (some of the cutouts got lost after the boxes basically disintegrated on me).

The games I actually ran with this system were, again, largely horrible...focusing more on who I had fold-up figures of than anything coherent, but I did once develop a sprawling campaign with multiple mini-campaigns that focused on different areas of the Marvel Universe (like Unity X, the young mutant group in Oklahoma mentored by The Beast and The Sideliners, a team of C-List heroes who had ties to the X-Men, The Avengers, The Fantastic Four and SHIELD, and routinely became embroiled in cosmic conflicts way above their pay grade).

Even when I moved on to Marvel SAGA, most of the non-Marvel characters in those games (PC and NPC alike) were originally created in this system and converted. Ask around the gaming community and it's hard to miss the impact this game had on a TON of people.

Make mine Marvel!