#RPGaDay - 3. First RPG Purchased

My second choice game, which wasn’t there either! So Call of Cthulhu it was. This is not a collector quality copy. This is a well used, well worn and well loved copy of Traveller complete with sellotape patching.

The first RPG I purchased was Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu which I spent my birthday money on in a little shop in the Arcades in Chester when I was eleven years old. I also picked up copies of the collected Lovecraft that Penguin had issued around the same time. I think I got those through WH Smiths back in the day when it was still a decent bookseller.

I didn’t want to buy Call of Cthulhu. I wanted either the D&D set I had seen at the local toy and gift shop (“Rainbow” in Holmes Chapel) or a copy of Starter Edition Traveller. My passion for these had come from reading What is Dungeons & Dragons? (by Butterfield, etc.), especially the split text walk through of the Shrine of Kollchap dungeon included in the book. However, Rainbow had sold its copy, and the shop in Chester only had Call of Cthulhu, which kind of set me on my course.

As an aside, my mother tells me I was very cross that the copy of D&D had sold, and she had to keep a straight face as she had bought it for my aunt to give me as a Christmas present.

We played Cthulhu a lot around 1983, and I enjoyed it a lot. However, by the time the 3rd edition hardback book shipped, I was bored by it. You couldn’t get the same fear and terror, because everyone else had bought and read the rules. So I put it aside for some quite some time.