Remembering the low-budget fantasy movies of the 1980s in a previous column made me think about how roleplaying games, and fantasy in general, were almost exclusively male pursuits at that time. Which, in turn, made me think about how women were portrayed in fantasy media. What follows is not the

It was early 1983 when I discovered the game that would change everything – not just for me, but for the whole tabletop roleplaying industry. That game was Call of Cthulhu. At the time, I knew little to nothing about the Cthulhu Mythos. I had heard of H.P. Lovecraft, but only in the context of his

I had already seen 1975’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail before I discovered fantasy games, but the later ’70s and early ’80s saw a slew of fantasy films that, to my eyes at least, seemed to have been rushed out specifically to capitalize on the new interest in fantasy sparked by Dungeons &

In the 1970s and 1980s, music was a vital part of everyone’s social identity. The music you listened to was linked to how you dressed, who your friends were, and pretty much everything else – including the games you played. If you played D&D, or any other fantasy roleplaying game, the odds were that