The Library

Blast from the past: Old RPG rulebooks and modules from my teens... I was reminded of my years playing AD&D and tabletop RPGs by @sinusoidalsnail posting an old magazine I used to own.

That 1986 "Gamma World" is a deep cut, a proper TSR release but I could never find more materials for it. "Cyberpunk" (1988) was cool as hell, though. 😎

Mathematics/Design 
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linktr.ee/sinusoidalsnail

Art and code since 1994. https://linktr.ee/mariuswatz

Omg wow, thanks so much for sharing these 😍

The covers are awesome! And I was caught off guard by the Cyberpunk one! Because I vaguely knew the video game was based off of a tabletop game, but didn’t realize they modeled the logo off it and everything! Looks like it was super fun 🤩

Good point. The old-school scifi of Asimov etc. never felt like a relatable vision of the future, it was too clean, too perfect. Gibson (though barely techno-literate himself) was able to make you imagine a near future where a lot of the basic facts are direct extrapolations of the present.

Also, I picked up the #1 issue of WIRED (March 1993) around the same time. So suddenly cyberpunk felt real.

That's really interesting to me, that you say it changed your perception of sci-fi. I've always read sci-fi as mostly "speculative future" (or in some cases, a reasonable alternative to the past/present) with a small amount of fantasy. And I wonder if it's because I had internet access from a somewhat young age, before reading a lot of sci-fi. I imagine that's probably a really interesting transition to have gone through, from pre-internet to post-internet, with sci-fi already existing in your schema before that transition

Yeah, it was pretty popular back then. As I recall the combat and skills system made it fun to play, too. 

Reading Gibson's Neuromancer changed everything I knew about sci-fi, made it less fantasy and more of a speculative future. Definitely informed my thinking about the world when I finally got Internet access in 1993.