Topic: How and when were you introduced to SW?

[kyussopeth]

For me it was the early 90's the SW atlas 1st ed. looked so cool from the cover that even though I had little interest in Rolemaster I intended to buy it from the flgs. It sold out before I could get it, then a 2nd ed copy came in and I bought it and was hooked immediately. I bought every single supplement for it at Gen Con '93 straight from ICE and was sorely disappointed by the generic awefulness of the majority of the supplements. However Emer,The Iron Wind, Tanara, Jaiman, Quellborne, Eidolon (which I bought later) kept me interested, but it seemed ICE wasn't any more so I quit paying attention to any word of new releases.

I never lost my affection for the setting especially the Iron Wind / Unlife and incorporated many ideas from SW into my D&D campaigns I even bought RM2 to help understand the rules that defined the NPC's.

Something that sticks with me to this day about SW is that I always associate SW with two other media creations of the same period I discovered SW. The first is the entropic Soundgarden tune Blackhole Sun and the other is the TV series Babylon 5. They inseperably united in my imagination so much so that thinking about one always makes me think about the others.

Blackhole Sun is the Unlife's seductive despairing theme. The Minbari are Loari, the Vorlon & Shadow are the light and dark side of the Althans and the younger races are just playing out the last battles of an ancient war that long predates them.

[PhillipAEllis]

My first exposure dates back to when I started playing as a GM.

Though I first encountered RM through a friend, Curtis, who had me play a solo adventure in Southern Mirkwood, I shortly afterwards came in contact with another friend who loaned me both a Paranoia sourcebook and Vog Mur. Around the exact same time I started GMing Rolemaster and buying the MERP modules via a shop in Sydney (I was living in Wollongong at the time).

It was a couple of years before I moved to Sydney, and so was able to start collecting the Shadow World modules.

[VladD]

With my friends of the time, we were looking for a setting that was more compliant with higher level rolemaster spells and powers. SW gave us just that. 50th lvl non-divine NPCs, Colleges, powerful ancient technology and enemies. We also liked that it was plug and play for Spacemaster (1st&2nd), which we were playing at the time. I would have liked to do a Spacemaster campaign on Kulthea, but somehow we never got to it.

With my later friends we played quite a bit in Kulthea, but I tried to avoid the cleared path and carve out my own campaign there.

[Guillaume]

As a GM, in the early 90s.

I was looking for something to change from Middle Earth, my players were getting bored of Hunting Nazguls, Culling Dragon herds in mountains in the North of Mirkwood and Playing Hide and Seek with The Balrog ( at that time the party was made of a pack of LVL 30+ characters... ).

And there was that nice box ( Master Atlas 1st Edition ) with all those nice Very High Level characters, a very interesting timeline and adventure ideas every two lines.
It was directly usable with RM, and the modules looked as good as the MERP ones.
The last selling point was that it wasn't all black and white ( good guys in the right corner and bad guys in the left corner ) but everybody was in a shade of grey...

At the same time another GM started a campaign in it, so I joined as a player along with all the other players from my MERP group. A bit later I started my own campaign, after making sure that I wasn't going to interfere with the campaign I was playing in. ( The campaign I was a player in was centered in Jaiman, so I went and made a Campaign in Govon )

[Cory Magel]

I believe the late 80's or early 90's. picked up some of the setting materials to steal from, mainly the maps.

[yammahoper]

Emer box set, late 80's. 

We were rather dedicated Middle Earth players, but my game had already begun exploring a vast multiverse.

Morgoth became the Will of the Void, ever struggling to escape his banishment and return to conquer time and space, not that anyone knew that (except the party).  Endor remains my 1st world of creation.  The party gated to the Ethereal Plane and traveled to the SW to ensure the Ancient Enemy remained behind the Gate of the Void.  That was a very high level party also, though eventually even they were slain (most of them).

[kyussopeth]

Looks like many people loved the epic, high level tone of the campaign setting. That attracted me too especially the Unlife, a properly inhuman faceless menace, but also the sci fi underpinnings of the setting helps me see the setting as real which is actually important to me. As a GM I have to believe in the setting, I have to be able to suspend my disbelief or else the prep work becomes a chore. The Shadow World hits that mark for me (as does M-E) so much so that the setting seems intuitively true. It all seems to make sense to me.

The biggest problem I have with the setting is that instead of all those substandard (i.e. below the very high standard of TKA's work) modules & sourcebooks there should have been more detail on Jaiman (Urulan, Saralis, Lu'nak, Wuliris Sourcebooks along the lines of Emer 1 & 2 or Xa-ar or even cloudlords or the Iron Wind) I am well aware that its not Terry Amthor's fault, but its the only serious complaint I have. I hope SW makes enough money for Terry to continue working on expanding it. I want it just popular enough to make Terry's life comfortable, but not popular enough to have Forgotten Realms style cannon lawyers everywhere.

I really hope the new RM rules work out & don't further fragment the RM fan base. Shadow World needs a healthy happy publisher & I have nothing, but good will for them. Since everything TKA has produced for SW over the last 15 years or so have been even better than the original run that drew me in in the first place.

[Alten]

I was introduced to RM first, as a modular system to complement AD&D. When I got hooked to the new system I bought the boxed set that was around in the late 80s, which had the Cloudlords module in it. But it was not until a few years later that the seller at my favorite RPg store really got me interested in SW. Haven't looked back since...

[Mercenary30]

I started off, like many as an AD&Der.  I sold all my stuff before joining the USAF.  While in tech school I discovered MERPS, and then proceeded into RoleMaster from there.  Shadow World was the best part of the Role Master system. 

I did enjoy Origillion Horror though as well as Norek. I will also admit they had a very different flavor.  It was apparent to me which supplements were TKA authored and those pieces were the best ones.  Jaiman was always my favorite, closely followed by Eidolon.

[Telwyn]

I found the first edition Shadow World boxed set at my local gaming store back in 1989. The evocative cover and interior artwork combined with the imaginative locations and sense of a coherent setting drew me in. I ran the first game with another system (I think it was AD&D but forget) but eventually the world's richness was enough to convince my group to try RM2. 
 
I've run a few different campaigns using the world over the intervening years and after quite a gap I'm now developing a new campaign loosely based on the Grand Campaign framework.