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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8248473" data-attributes="member: 18">Yeah but presumably that was because that stuff sold better, and it was a trend that impacted the entire industry and indeed continued and intensified into 3E with Adventure Paths. It's easy to see why too - we ran a lot of 1E adventures back in the day, and whilst they often briefly featured some spectacularly cool ideas and wild fantasy in them, they never explored either in any depth, and then you were in some fairly generic/dull area, and with little/no plot to uncover or progress, they were not inherently emotionally involving. Whereas the 2E adventures which actually had a plot tended to sort of drag you along - even if you didn't like the NPCs involved, they usually at least made you mad! I think especially for people new to DMing or RPGs the plot-based structure was particularly helpful. It also felt to me a lot easier to justify spending money on a plot-based adventure, not just for D&D but other games as well.I lived in central London (Hackney) and started in 1989-ish so it was a bit easier where/when I was - if you went down to the Oxford Street general area (reasonable bus ride), you had Orc's Nest, Forbidden Planet, Virgin Megastore - which had a surprisingly huge RPG section - indeed all Virgin stores I saw in the late '80s and early '90s did, including in Oxford and Scotland - and Games Workshop, which at that time, still carried RPG stuff - I bought all my initial AD&D 2E books from the Games Workshop in the Plaza, which is, amazingly, still there to this day (or was last year). I think they stopped carrying them soon thereafter though. I think that period was probably actually the peak of in-store/high-street availability of RPGs in the UK - I bought Shadowrun, Cyberpunk, Traveller:TNE, Rifts etc. all at Virgin stores. But yeah GW stopped, and then at some point in the '90s Virgin did too, and Forbidden Planet was always a bit hopeless selection-wiseTrue re: bookshops, I remember being surprised in the early '00s when I started seeing 3E books on the shelves at big bookstores (not long before those bookstores started vanishing of course). And of course in the US you also had the Wizards of the Coast stores for a while. Everywhere I've been in the US though seemed to have a decent RPG store not too far away. A vivid memory is being in woodsy rural part of Massachusetts in the early '90s and we came across a store which had a huge RPG section in the basement.</blockquote>

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