Footnotes

1 See Appendix

2 A role-playing game in which the players take the roles of Warner Brother style cartoon characters.

3 An A5 photocopied fanzine about role-playing games.

4 A square bound pseudo-academic journal about "story making systems".

5 It says so on the internet so it must be true

6 A story telling card game.

7 "In the way that Ronnie Biggs is known as the Great Train Homager".

8 I have no idea what that means, but it appears in my first draft and I didn't have the heart to delete it, in case it turns out to mean something very profound.

9 In the 1970s, Games Workshop were the main retailer of role-playing games in the UK; and White Dwarf, their house-magazine, was the main source of information about D&D and Traveller. In the 1980s Games Workshop became a game and miniatures manufacturer and from then on White Dwarf published exclusively support material for their own products. Gamers of a certain age are still quite cross about this.

10 1D20 means "one twenty sided dice". 3D6 means "three six sided dice".

11 To Hit Armour Class 0.

12 Dungeons & Dragons was created by two gamers, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson.

13 A kobold is the smallest and weakest baddie in Dungeons & Dragons. They were usually depicted as blue-skinned goblins. Very probably they could climb through a water tap and even a through small key hole.

14 A lot of Dungeons & Dragons was about genocide, but perhaps we will not go into that this morning.

15 The designer of Traveller

16 Literally no idea.

17 Advanced space ship and space navy rules for Traveller.

18 SPOILER: It was the earth all along.

19 SPOILER: She really was the eccentric old lady's grand-daughter

20 "She's got a boyfriend, he drives her round the bend, he's 23, he's in the marines, he'd kill me." It was McFly. I checked.

21 SPOILER: It was the earth all along.

22 For reasons lost in the Mists of Time Clerics are not allowed to shed blood with a sword; but they can smash people's heads open with a mace.

23 The more readable of Samuel Beckett's novels

24 One of the lads I used to play Dungeons & Dragons with at school who was in a car accident years later.
The guy at college with congenital muscle disease beat the doctors by several decades.
The very clever student union guy who got brain cancer.
The guy who played in all my college games who was in a major train crash.

25 When something happens because the referee says it happens, not because it is generated by the rule-set.

26 Pretend there was a long digression about the authorship of the General History of the Pirates in this space.

27 The Marvel Comics in-house fanzine

28 Spelt "kosmic"

29 Middle Earth Role Playing.

30 Never mention FRUP.

31 i.e two dice numbered 0-9; read as two digits, between 01 and 99, with 00 counting as a hundred

32 This was the same player who died in the railway accident.