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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Staffan" data-source="post: 9608577" data-attributes="member: 907">Sweden in the late 80s and early 90s was a bit odd when it came to RPGs.The Swedish-language market was absolutely dominated by the company Äventyrsspel, who were making a fair number of games themselves. They were publishing Drakar och Demoner (the predecessor to Dragonbane) and Mutant (sort of spiritual predecessor to Mutant Year Zero, but while MYZ takes place in a setting where civilization fell in living memory for some, Mutant was set some time later when rebuilding had started) that they were writing themselves, but they also had translated versions of Chill, Star Wars, and Middle-Earth Roleplaying. They had one half-way relevant competitor in Lancelot Games, who also published a handful of games: the low-fantasy Khelataar, Western, and Wastelands (post-apocalyptic where the apocalypse was an alien invasion).However, one of the things Äventyrsspel published was a magazine, primarily focused on providing bite-sized (and sometimes not so bite-sized) material for their games. In one of these issues, they published an overview of English-language RPGs. Not super-detailed, but like a paragraph or two about each of about 30 different games (although maybe more like 25, because they treated various GURPS sourcebooks as separate games in separate genres). In subsequent issues, they provided more in-depth looks at various games – notably Rolemaster and Warhammer FRP. This, of course, opened the eyes of many young gamers to the wide variety that was out there.Then came the 90s, and with the 90s came the release of KULT. This was, I believe, a major mistake on their part, because it was a significant shift from the fairly kid-friendly RPGs previously published. Certain people launched attacks on RPGs as a whole, and major toy and book stores didn't want to deal with that fallout and stopped selling them – so now you could only buy RPGs in specialty stores. Buf if you're visiting a specialty store anyway, why would you buy one of the boring Swedish RPGs, when you could buy Warhammer FRP which had a punk dwarf on the cover? So in the early 90s, gamers would often be playing a wide variety of games.</blockquote>

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