1. First store where you bought a TTRPG:

The first TTRPG products I ever bought were a bundle of Dragon Magazines at a yard sale, in 1988, I want to say? I would have been 16.

The bundle was 10 or 15 issues. It included 3 of Dennis Beauvais' 4 chess covers, so with a little research I could probably figure out which issues exactly.

It set me back $5 in 1988 money, equivalent to $475 today.

The first STORE where I bought a TTRPG was Crazy Egor's in Rochester NY. It was a year later, summer 1989. I had birthday cash and I caught a ride with my girlfriend's dad — who was a youth pastor slash DM, but honestly a cooler guy than that makes him sound.

Anyhow, I bought Talislanta 2nd Edition and Cyberpunk 1st Edition, 2013, in the black box.

I seriously loved the heck out of both of those games.

2. Favorite TTRPG game world:

I don't know how it is for you, but I experience a game world as a bundle of aesthetics, not as geography or politics or in other ways.

The maps are blank until we go there, but the sky looks a certain way, the people conduct themselves in certain modes, certain colors and certain sounds suffuse the scene.

This means that for me, a rich and vivid game world can be written in a dozen sentences.

I love the world of The Bloody-Handed Name of Bronze. It's a world that uses its aesthetics to alienates me from things I find routine.

I mean, it's the opposite of @kiplet's rum-soaked fruitcake: The Bloody-Handed Name of Bronze interrogates cliche, to remind me WHY we eat olives, WHAT IT MEANS to eat saffron, how existentially cool it is when the pepper caravan arrives.

(http://www.longstoryshortpier.com/2022/11/26/matter-awfully-stern)

In The Bloody-Handed Name of Bronze, the idea of the thing gives the thing its power. Your sword, for instance, gets an extra die if it's beautiful, an extra die if it's famous, an extra die if it's old. This is pretty normal for indie rpgs. But the game world is a Bronze Age on the edge of an Iron Age, so the next rule is: if something's made of iron, it can't be beautiful, and it can't be old.

And I'm like, OH. Oh I SEE.