To kick things off...

OP: “Hello, I’m ZDL and I’m a long-time player of FGU games.”

Group: “Hi, ZDL.”

OP: “So, my first exposure to FGU was stumbling over this weird game called Chivalry & Sorcery …”

Group: [sympathetic noises]

OK, AA style aside, I’ve been playing FGU games since I first encountered C&S in 1983. The 2nd edition had just been published, this big boxed set, and my FLGS had two boxes: one opened (near the cash register) for people to explore and one sealed. I explored the opened one, flipping through the books and decided that this was the game I’d been waiting for since it had an actual society (and rules for interacting with it) instead of just dungeon crawling. (I came to RPGs from the drama flake side of things, not the wargame nerd side, see.) So I bought the sealed one and took it home.

Little did I know that this marked the beginning of a phase where a single company would inform about 80% of my role-playing game choices for a decade or more. From that point onward I picked up, in rapid succession, Space Opera, Bushido, Flashing Blades, Wild West, Daredevils, Psi World, and Starships & Spacemen (in roughly that order). Most of these games have some of my strongest, fondest memories of RPGs attached to them, one of them I still play now (though Chivalry & Sorcery dramatically changed systems beginning with 3rd edition), and one of them is still numbered among my all-time favourite RPGs (Psi World).

I know I can’t be entirely alone in having had my gaming shaped by this weird publisher, so I’m hoping I can find a few more people like me in this Lemmy community.