Just ran across this the other day and thought it might be of interest to some, particularly non-US collectors. This is an article from Swedish gaming magazine Runan #38, December 2005. It was written by Mikael Börjesson, one of the founders of Titan Games and describes his experience doing the Swedish Basic Set, various modules and his unpublished 2nd edition Player's Handbook. I just ran it through Google translate so it's a bit wonky here and there but still pretty easy to follow. Enjoy!
The Swedish history of role-playing games is a series of articles about Swedish role-playing games through the years. The non-profit part of the hobby and foreign role-playing games are not covered. One might think that the Swedish history of role-playing games is a matter of course for a Swedish role-playing player, but we believe that there are at least two reasons to look back. On the one hand, new role players are recruited from younger generations who were not involved, and on the other hand, this series of articles can function as an unrestrained tumult in nostalgia. In this second part, we meet the two smaller Swedish role-playing game publishers Spelverksta’n Titan / Titan Games and Ragnarök Speldesign, which competed with Adventure Games during the 1980s, and we explore how role-playing games were born.
Kåseri about the history of Titan Games. Text: Mikael Börjesson.
It all started on a rainy autumn day in 1974 when I read a review in an American SF fanzine called Supernova, about a strange and puzzling fantasy game called Dungeons & Dragons. The enthusiasm in the somewhat incoherent, but completely lyrical, review made me buy a check for $ 25 and send it to the Tactical Studies Rules (TSR) in Lake Geneva. A month later, a package arrived from them with a box of imitation wood containing three small booklets with rules.
I was immediately hooked by the game's unique idea and tricked everyone I knew into starting to play with me. Everyone wanted their own copy of the rules, as well as all the supplements that now appeared (Greyhawk, Blackmoor, etc), so I ordered more and more games. In the end, I had a small mail order business that sold D&D and other games to people around Sweden.
Towards the end of 1981, after having been an exchange student in England for six months, I spoke to Fredrik Malmberg on the phone and was told that he and a few others were translating Basic Role Playing into Swedish to release it under the name Dragons and Demons . After praising Fredrik for the original name (and getting a fond tan back), I told the news to Kjell Régmer and Thomas Gunnarsson (my sister's then cohabitant, later a pet at Tradition) who came to my house to play Traveler. All three of us felt that the time was ripe for someone to invest properly in role-playing in Gothenburg and decided that it would be the three of us.
We quickly hunted right on a premises and in April 1982 started a gaming store in Gothenburg, Spelverksta’n Titan. All three of us had been active in gaming associations and conventions for several years and quickly became involved in the role-playing game Dragons and Demons, which Fredrik and company released the same summer. I personally went up to Stockholm, or rather to AB Jan Edman in Vagnhärad, where I, Fredrik and Lars-Åke Thor spent the day packing game boxes, wrapping them and packing them in my car. The next day, Dragons and Demons premiered in Sweden. Fredrik promised that I would get one of the numbered copies as a thank you for the help (100 pieces stamped with numbers 1 to 100), but I have not seen it yet.
We not only sold Dragons and Demons in the store, but also wrote articles about it in our magazine Morgonstjärnan (for example corrections to the rules, the translation of the adventure that was in the original, Sarkath Hans' tomb, etc.) and published a full-fledged adventure, Tvillingbergen. Despite that, we were quickly depolluted by Adventure Games after a few years and Thomas left us to seek glory and wealth elsewhere. Kjell and I continued to import and sell games.
After a few years, in early 1985, we had managed to become distributors for TSR and one evening when I called to check out an order, I was connected to a man named André Moullin. He was (according to his own statement) a good friend of Gary and had been hired to handle foreign contacts. We talked for several hours about role-playing games, translations and Sweden. Only a few days later it became clear that we had to translate and publish D&D in Swedish. It was so exciting that we hardly cared about the conditions….
TSR drove a hard line. Approximately SEK 25 per game in royalty to be paid in advance. At least 5,000 units would be produced ... and production would be done by their German distributor, FSV in Stuttgart. But Kjell, me and my then fiancée, Maria Fanto, smiled happily and worked on the translation.
However, the Germans were completely uninterested and constantly delayed production. The translation of the Basic Rules was completed in early 1986, but then nothing happened. Finally, Maria and I booked our holiday in Stuttgart and sat on the Germans' lap for three weeks and read proofs. In the three weeks, more was done than was done in six months. In the end, the work was done and the games went to print.
A few months later, three pallets arrived with almost 2,000 loosely loaded game boxes on each outside our door. The bottom drawers were of course completely broken and we managed to save maybe 3000-4000 games. In addition, the Germans had chosen to make our logo black while everything else on the box was white (on a red background), which made it look like it did not really belong there.
At this point, I was mad at the Germans and after they delayed B3: The Silver Princess' Palace for another week, I broke off my acquaintance with them and demanded to be allowed to produce the rest myself. We got it. B4, B5 and B7 were made ready (with the help of a photocopier at the Architecture Section at Chalmers) and printed in Gothenburg. At that time, we had spent approximately SEK 200,000 in royalties to TSR and more than that on production, freight (from Stuttgart) and customs.
Since we did not have a game distributor, I went around myself and visited toy dealers. Got an order for 3 games here and 6 games there. Even Tradition bought some pieces ...
We immediately continued with the work on the Expert Rules and agreed that we could remove the adventure (which was in the original) and replace it with rules from the Companion Set. Our idea was to publish the rest of the rules later in the Master Rules. Three drawers felt like a maximum.
We received help translating the Expert Rules from Hans Anderson, who worked for us for a couple of months. If anyone remembers all the damn bar weapons that were in those rules, Hans stood for the Swedish names of all these.
In the autumn of 1987, we printed the Expert Rules, but the printing house used far too weak cardboard for the box and we had to sit and paste support into it so that it would not collapse completely.
Sales did not go very well (some would say awful), but we tried in every way to find our customers. We published the role-playing magazine Legend as a counterweight to Sinkadus, we created a fan club, the Swedish D&D Association, advertised on comic books and translated and published E1 (X3 in original). One would think that a company with TSR's muscles could give us traction, but they did nothing sensible. When "The Dungeons & Dragons Cartoon Show" came out on video here in Sweden, the distributor had called it "Dragons and Demons". When Wahlström's book publishers wanted to start investing in fantasy, TSR tricked them into Endless Quest instead of Dragonlance, something that of course could not compete with Äventyrsspel's Ensamma Vargen or even Fighting Fantasy. We did not get any help to work into the brand at all and the toy retailers could not understand why they would buy another game called D&D, they already had one ...
Unfortunately, Tradition had opened in Gothenburg by now, so the income in our store dwindled. Our customers did not seem to find Johanneberg anymore. So we opened a new and nice store down in the center, which cost even more money. Money we did not have. Now we really needed a breakthrough. And I thought it was called AD&D 2nd edition.
In 1988, I visited TSR in Lake Geneva and GenCon in Milwaukee. I met Jon Pickens who was in charge of the new edition of AD&D and decided that we would translate it. He made sure we got all the raw scripts so we could start working. I also met some other celebrities, Lorraine Williams (CEO), Keith Parkinson, Jeff Easley and Larry Elmore (illustrators), Track Hickman and Margaret Weis (author of Dragonlance) and others.
In the autumn of 1988 until the spring of 1989, we worked on translating the Players Handbook from the scripts we received. At GothCon XXIII we had the first American copies in the store and Dave "Zeb" Cook in place to sign them, while we showed what would come in Swedish soon. We had to make some corrections to match the finished product, but by the summer we had a finished translation ... but no money.
The truth was that we did not have a chance to publish AD&D on our own. We still had not got back even a fraction of the half a million we spent on D&D and now we were facing a new investment of another half a million, at least. We desperately needed a partner with capital and resources.
Just then I heard that Äventyrsspel terminated the collaboration with its distributor (AB Jan Edman) and I thought that our breakthrough was here. We had a strong product and they had money, sales channels and, hopefully, revenge. I talked to Sune Johansson, their CEO (who I already met long before when we helped Adventure Games with the launch of Dragons and Demons), but he simply did not want to cooperate. Apparently he felt that he had burned his ships in terms of D&D at the toy retailers and preferred to see Lancelot Games as producers of his new product line ...
In that situation, we capitulated, closed the store and suspended payments. We asked TSR to help with a Joint Venture so that D&D and AD&D could survive in Swedish, but they were cold-hearted.
The end (from a commercial point of view) was to unpack what fit in my home and throw away the rest. The translation of the AD&D Players Handbook resulted in a final proofreading which I bound in a folder and used privately.
Titan Games closed the store on January 5, 1990, suspended payments on January 31, 1990 and liquidated. The debts from our attempt to make D&D a Swedish role-playing game lasted until November 28, 2001. Today I am debt-free and one experience or two richer.
In order not to make a long story even longer, I end here.
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