Quote from: Armchair Gamer;1023289On a tangential note, can you explain why Ravenloft was such a hit in Brazil?

I don't think it was a hit, actually. We've had only 3 Ravenloft releases: the Domains of Dread hardcover back in the 90's (as "Domínios do Medo") and years later just the 3.0 version of the S&S setting and mosnter book, Ravenloft and Denizens of Darkness (as "Nativos das Trevas").

Quote from: RF Victor;1023301I don't think it was a hit, actually. We've had only 3 Ravenloft releases: the Domains of Dread hardcover back in the 90's (as "Domínios do Medo") and years later just the 3.0 version of the S&S setting and mosnter book, Ravenloft and Denizens of Darkness (as "Nativos das Trevas").

  Curious. Back in the 90s, there was a notable Brazilian presence in the online fanbase and contributors to the Kargatane Netbooks.

I don't think any other cover has had as many homages to it as the First Edition Player's Handbook. Stuff like this. You don't see that with other covers.

Quote from: Motorskills;1023201Peripheral to the core hobby of course, but in the UK at least, this was pretty huge.

Fighting Fantasy was HUGE in Brazil too! Here the series was called "Aventuras Fantásticas" ("Fantastic Adventures") and the Introductory RPG was the first RPG for many of us: it was cheap and you could find it everywhere, in regular bookstores (so: pretty much the same model that made it a winner in the UK!) For a long time you could only buy RPG books from specialty RPG shops and a few comic stores, and we had very few of them.

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For a long time nobody had any idea that this Steve Jackson wasn't the same as the guy from GURPS -- the undisputed KING of RPGs until Vampire and AD&D arrived years later. And our GURPS at that point looked like some sort of psychology book!

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I think another iconic cover was not a book per se, but the cover to the original Ravenloft module which was borrowed for Castlevania.

Quote from: RF Victor;1023307Fighting Fantasy was HUGE in Brazil too! Here the series was called "Aventuras Fantásticas" ("Fantastic Adventures") and the Introductory RPG was the first RPG for many of us: it was cheap and you could find it everywhere, in regular bookstores (so: pretty much the same model that made it a winner in the UK!) For a long time you could only buy RPG books from specialty RPG shops and a few comic stores, and we had very few of them.

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And yet another cover of a fighting man vs. a dragon...

Quote from: remial;1022197ok, A) what the hell is this book here?

I'm pretty sure that was in a joke section in an April (Fools) issue of Dragon... Yep, did some digging and it's issue 120.

How in the fuck has this not been posted yet:

Quote from: PrometheanVigil;1023754How in the fuck has this not been posted yet:

More like "Why the fuck has this been posted!"  

 Just kidding.

Out of all of them, first edition AD&D player's handbook comes across as the most iconic.  It's not my favorite by a long shot, but probably most iconic.

Quote from: PrometheanVigil;1023754How in the fuck has this not been posted yet:

That was an iconic cover, but dear god the interior was atrociously illegible.

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Move aside....

Quote from: Armchair Gamer;1023289On a tangential note, can you explain why Ravenloft was such a hit in Brazil?

Was it? It sure wasn't anywhere else in Latin America that I know of.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1024527Was it? It sure wasn't anywhere else in Latin America that I know of.

  I think I was drawing unwarranted conclusions from some active Brazilian members of the online fanbase in the late 90s/early 00s.

Fair enough. I know that in Argentina and Uruguay the big games were D&D (starting mainly with 2e) and Vampire/WoD for quite a long while. I know GURPS was hugely popular in Brazil but not so much anywhere else.  CoC became quite popular in the early 2000s.

A few other games became popular here just by virtue of having become available. Falkenstein and L5R, for example, just because books arrived.

Of course, in the last 10 years or so, with PDFs and PoD and easier shipping, all kinds of games have become popular.

Single fighter facing off against a dragon is a pretty old set up.  It doesn't seem iconic to roleplaying as much as it is iconic to European myth and fantasy in general.