Might be an APAzine?

Steve Marsh would probably be a good source for info. He's Ethesis here on the Acaeum...he also has his own question and answer thread over on Dragonsfoot.

Adam Shultz wrote:Tis so an APA from the Cali area. Associated with Runequest/Chaosium mostly by geographical location and the closeness of the community in sunny cali at the time.

Looks cool. I need that image.

Well, Nicolai Shapero was kind of prickly, but bright.  He felt he could do something to compete with The Wild Hunt as an alternative to Alarums & Excursions.

Nicolai tended to a high powered version of D&D (with jokes about demons requiring golf bags full of weapons to fight -- this one takes a +5 weapon, this one is silver, this one non-metallic and no blades, etc.) dungeon crawling.

It was an interesting endeavor.

I should note that the first "solid" or real APAzine in D&D was A&E.

It is still going (see http://thestarport.org/xeno/aande.html ), though it is smaller than it was (copy count is down to 95).

Then, the East Coast and Mark Swanson/Glenn Blacow did The Wild Hunt.  In spite of efforts by a lot of us, Glenn died early and Mark never recovered.  I had dropped out before the end, but came back for the memorial issue.  For some reason, my copy of that issue never came (Mark mailed one to me twice, it just didn't get to me).

http://baycon.org/1995/p95/mb6.html for more on Nicolai (I'd forgotten his furry stuff) and Other Suns (which I actually played, and solved a small campaign riddle with my applied economist character).

Wayne Shaw and Ken Pick were also part of that orbit for a while.

http://freelancetraveller.com/features/ ... nesis.html

(You can see they seemed to fold more into Traveller though).

Hmm, makes me wonder what happened to Nicolai.  I'd expect him to still be around somewhere.

afoolandhis$ wrote:I've got #1-#3 and #5. (If anyone has a copy of #4 for sale or trade, let me know! Based on responses in #5, I think Stephen Marsh had an article in that one, and I'd really like to read it.)

It's a lot of fun to read, especially because of the raging discord between "West Coast" and "East Coast" DMing styles. Of course, having learned to play in Wisconsin, I'm partial to the "Midwest" style, which I think in general is characterized by randomness and very slow advancement; oh, and of course, little or no role-playing.

I think the print run on #1 was about 60.

That's in interesting concept, regional styles. Growin up in the RPG backwaters of Texas in the late 70's, we had no earthly idea what to do anyway, but we had fun.  Roleplaying was mixed in, but man it was all about the numbers and dice rolling.
  So what was the differene between styles?  Did they have "RPG" wars like the rappers did in the 80's and 90's, maybe a couple of drive bys over philosophical differences in the alignment system?  I can just see Gygax and Kuntz wearing doo-rags and low riding past the corner where Arneson and his homies are throwing dice, looking for trouble....

Mike B.

Regionalism did play a role in the early days of FRPG.  It would make a very interesting study, but the number of interviews one would have to conduct would probably make it a Herculean project.  But we do have some indications that regionalism was a consideration:

Yep.  It's from the Sept.-Oct. 1976 issue of Little Wars.

I still participate in A&E. It continues monthly and is one of the more hefty apae I'm active in.

Shapero's still in the Los Angeles area, and I found the first five issues of The Lords of Chaos on Scribd. It was new to me, and I first learned of it from Ian Livingstone's book _Dicing with Dragons_.