After having discovered roleplaying
games – through Dungeons & Dragons – the summer before
I started high school, I quickly began exploring other games in the
adventure gaming hobby (including board-and-chit wargames). I bought
and devoured nearly everything TSR released at the time, dabbled in
Traveller, and started gathering whatever oddities I might run
across. Then I discovered the German equivalent of a fantasy
roleplaying game, Das Schwarze Auge.
In 1984 Schmidt Spiel – a German game
publisher with roots going back to the early 20th century –
published an original German-language roleplaying game entitled Das
Schwarze Auge (translation: The Dark Eye). It was clearly
inspired by D&D; the
designer, the late Ulrich Kiesow, translated both D&D and
Tunnels & Trolls for the German editions. It’s rise (and
fall) broadly mirrored its American cousin, with a game system that
seemed basic at first, with more supplements and editions adding
layers of complexity to the rules and setting, and finally becoming a
huge system and continuity creature that momentarily faded when the
publisher ran into financial trouble and declared bankruptcy.
Back in 1984 my family was taking a
week’s vacation in Germany after a two-week youth orchestra tour of
Germany, Austria, and Switzerland; my parents drove the instrument
van while my brother and I played violin in the orchestra. We’d
visited Germany before in 1981, an opportunity to indulge my penchant
for medieval history, castles, knights, legends, and other romantic
Old World interests, but I’d not yet discovered roleplaying games.
On one of our first days we wandered into a toy store in Munich – a
wonderful shop (affiliated with the famous FAO Schwartz company) and
I found two German-language roleplaying game boxed sets sitting
side-by-side on a display: the German edition of Basic D&D
(the Frank Mentzer red box version) and a taller, black box called
Das Schwarze Auge. The game offered an opportunity to merge my
interest in roleplaying games with my German language studies (a
pillar of my junior high and high school years that fizzled out with
the academic severity of college). So I bought it, brought it back to
America, and, using my limited language abilities and a
German-English dictionary, set about reading the game and rolling up
a character.
Das Schwarze Auge basic boxed
set came with one twenty-sided and a few six-sided dice, a main
rulebook, and adventure book, an imposing gamemaster screen, and a
host of sheets for mapping, character creation, and adventure
tracking. The game had some similarities to D&D. Five
stats defined characters, though one rolled only a single D6 and
consulted a chart for the range of stat values one might get. It used
a “class-as-race” system, so one could be a magician, fighter,
elf, dwarf, or rogue-like vanilla “adventurer” (omitting such D&D
tropes as clerics, thieves, and halflings). Magic-users had a reserve
of astral energy expended to cast various low-level spells. A
solitaire adventure took up most of the page count in the adventure
book; it walked players through an initial encounter, then further
exploration which led to the premise for the short if standard group
exploration of a dungeon setting (the D&D basic set
released around that time, the Frank Mentzer red box edition, was
the first to include a solo tutorial adventure).
I didn’t get very far in the game
beyond reading it with my very limited knowledge of German, rolling
up a few characters, playing the solitaire adventure, and possibly
running an adventure with my terribly patient brother (who also took
some German). It helped fuel my enthusiasm for gaming and German
language studies as I tried to learn how various bits of roleplaying
game lingo translated into German. Several years later – when Das
Schwarze Auge eclipsed sales of D&D in the German
market – my Dad brought back some additional scenarios, including a
solo adventure, from a business trip to Germany. At some point I also
bought the “expert” version of the basic rules and a handful of
adventures; possibly on that 1984 trip to Germany, I can’t recall,
though I barely used the advanced materials.
Over the years I’ve acquired other
German language game books from friends, industry trades, or chance
opportunities, mostly as novelties: a Call of Cthulhu Dreamlands
boxed set, a Stormbringer adventure collection, a nice
hardbound GURPS basic set, a few Middle-earth Role Playing
supplements, a handful of Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game
books, and a Paranoia boxed set with the oddly understandable
label “Acthung! Satire!” prominently displayed on the box. I’ve
not gone out of my way to seek out German-language versions of my
favorite games; my fluency has long passed with my fleeting youth,
though I do appreciate the language and still read and speak some of
it when necessary...just rarely outside the context of the adventure
gaming hobby.
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