Born in Kiel in , lived there for most of my life. Left university with a diploma in chemistry and having founded Kiel university's rpg association AKF ArbeitsKreis Fantasy, which translates something like "study group fantasy" or "work circle fantasy". Spent a little over a year working in Northern Norway right after getting that diploma, and returned shortly three years later. I started world-building sitting down writing up characters and countries and drawing maps at about age 12 or so, started reading fantasy at age 14, started reading English language fantasy at age First heard about role-playing games at around age 15, but never got my hands on any before age 20 after probably 2 years of playing solo adventure books.
First rpg experience was as GM with rules improvised from "Warlock of Firetop Mountain" and "The Citadel of Chaos" the latter for its magic rules and two completely improvised adventures - one dungeon, one overland journey. Played The Dark Eye for a short while, then acquired Midgard the first German rpg, still first edition and found out about an rpg convention in my home town.
Got into a game of the then brand new second edition of Midgard, enjoyed it vastly over what I had in earlier published games, and created a gaming group of fellow chemistry students. Visited another of the local conventions run by a couple of high school students who also produced a fanzine which was semi-professional for the standards of its time.
That convention turned out to be the last one by that group, and when nobody else went about organizing another convention in Kiel, I started looking into doing so myself. In order to do so, I founded the university rpg association with the members of my Midgard game, we got a room for free, and held our first convention Unicon , optimistically planned for participants, with a turn-out of participants.
Two years later and with four conventions under our belt, I finally managed to start a RuneQuest game, though once again on a world of my own rather than the Glorantha setting most people associated with that game.
