While vacationing in Finland, I went into a store in Helsinki, and lo and behold! they had some old finnish D&D items there. I bought a copy of each they had, with my wife rolling her eyes beside me "Why do you buy something you can´t read anyway? Would not one item be enough?" They had several copies of each of the four items I bought there, along with quite some other old finnish
RPG translations, from around the same date. I was wondering to see finnish editions of Rolemaster/MERP, Runequest and Paranoia there, from my memory all in editions from the late 80ies/early 90ies. It seems that when
RPGs were gaining ground in Europe (outside UK) in this time, some folks in Finland thought translations were worth it. Seeing that many items were still in stock in more than one copy, many of them shrinkwrapped, this did not work out, it seems. These items are sold cheap there, I bought all four for under 20 Euros. The non-D&D translations were made by a different company, not protocol productions.
I havent´t seen any recent translations of
RPGs, but some items might have been finnish
rpgs.
Strangely, the items differ in size - the ones with the white top border (note that B9 has a white top as well, which is probably a printing error, as the basic adventures have red borders as usual, according to
Foreign Editions Master List and
Finnish Dungeons & Dragons Archive) are in A 4 format, as usual for European books, but the Ghost of Lion Castle is much smaller, even smaller than US Letter size. I have no idea why this would be so.
The store is part of a chain with seven stores across Finland:
Fantasiapelit - role playing games - board games - card games - miniatures - comics & manga They have tabletop games (seems to be a big thing, as they had a lot of stuff - well, the painting and building keeps you busy in those endless winters, I guess), manga/comic/graphic novels, board and card games and a surprisingly big amount of RPG stuff. (I can´t recall seeing so many Ars Magica books in a gaming store for a long time, for instance). Luckily, they recommended a subterranean garage for parking, and the right exit - we almost fell into the store when stepping out of the elevator. From the outside, we would probably not have found the store. You would need to leave the main street to a small square, to which a flight of stairs leads down (Helsinki has a very distinct topography, with lots of hills). Then you would turn almost back and to the right, walk into what looks like a Subway sandwich store, (and a few steps down again), crossing more or less through the customer area of said Subway, go down a few more steps and reach the store. It seems that this store area was added to the elevator of the garage as an afterthought, with no outside windows and only a tiny sign beside the Subway sign. But I guess it keeps the rent low, as Helsinki is not cheap. Oh, and the garage itself is a sight to see, too. It was built right into the bedrock below Helsinki, with at least some buildings standing on top of that area already. The way down into the garage is shown in this video. You can see the whitewashed bedrock after a bit, and it goes quite some way down:
helsinki parking - YouTube Quite impressive.
