A Guest Article on the History of Stormbringer in Spanish by Jose J. Rodriguez
“¡Sangre y almas para mi señor Arioco!” Blood and souls for my Lord Arioch!
In the late 70s some Spanish gamers started to play role playing games thanks to some English and French editions. RPG’s popularity grew in the next years, and in 1985 Dalmau published the first RPG Spanish edition – Dungeons and Dragons. It’s said they were overambitious and printed too much red boxes (around 20,000), and therefore they lost money.
However, RPG fandom didn’t stop growing. Joc Internacional (Barcelona, Spain) published the RuneQuest Spanish edition, and it grew an immediate hit. Actually, RuneQuest was one of the most popular RPGs played in Spain, and percentile skill-based games were very well received by the Spanish gamers. In order to exploit that success Joc Internacional published many Chaosium books as La llamada de Cthulhu (Call of Cthulhu), Stormbringer or Pendragon. They created its own percentile skill-based game too – Aquelarre (a Spanish Dark Ages RPG), but that is another story for another time.