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| Gary Gygax doing a demo of the ill fated Dangerous Journeys RPG |
Although Gary Gygax travelled to Europe various times (we found a 1984 interview in the Italian newspaper La Stampa!), first as president of TSR and then as a honoured guest of various gaming conventions, finding images of him in the Old Continent is quite rare. In 1993 Casus Belli magazine (world's longest living RPG magazine, still published today!) invited him as Master of Ceremonies for the magazine's awards for the best RPGs. The awards were given during the eight edition of the Salon des Jeux (at the time France's main event for hobby games, now defunct) and of course Casus Belli had a report with photos. We doubt many people outside France have seen these images!
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| Writeup of the awards ceremony |
In the case you are curious, the awards were given after a readers' poll and they were: best French original RPG Nephilim (which is very different from the Chaosium version), best translation Vampire the Masquerade, best sourcebook Scriptarium Veritas for the French In Nomine Satanis/Magna Veritas RPG (absolutely NOT comparable to the US In Nomine) and the Prix Special de la Redaction went to the (all French designed) Hawkmoon sourcebooks.
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| Gary Gygax autograph session along Francois Marcela - Froideval |
Of course Gary Gygax demoed his new game, Dangerous Journeys (released by GDW in 1992) and sigined a lot of D&D and AD&D books - if you look carefully at the first photo, you can see a copy of the French edition of the Dungeon Masters Guide for AD&D first edition, the Guide du Maitre. All the images from Casus Belli 75, May/June 1993.