My job brought me across the Atlantic for a few days and I’m currently in Manchester, England. I decided that since I had some downtime this afternoon, I’d check out some gaming/comic/geek stores within walking distance of my hotel.
Surprisingly, there are more stores that I could walk to, than there are back home where I can drive too. Nice. My first stop was “Travelling Man” on Dale Street. It’s a very cool comics/D&D typestore with a bunch of neat stuff that they don’t even sell at my FLGS in Miami. Paizo flip mats, Fiery Dragon Counters, tons of other RPG’s, and of course comics of every type.
I then went to Forbidden Planet on Oldham Street. That’s a more run-of-the-mill mega mega store where you can find just about every geek thing available, SW stuff, comics, Manga, RPG’s. I think it must have been triple the size of “Travelling Man”.
Although Travelling Man is apparently a chain of stores here, I prefered it over Forbidden Planet. It was a lot more quaint, and had the FLGS feel of old. A bucket of dice waited by the register, and I contemplated buying a set to kill my PC’s with British dice, but I hadn’t exchanged US money yet and wasn’t going to credit card a set of dice.
To bad there weren’t games being run, I would have tried to jump in.
Ahh… good times. Now I should get to work.
www. Newbie DM .com 
Youseph Tanha
February 25, 2009
I wanted to take a moment and say ‘hello’. I myself am just getting into D&D and am starting out with the 4e version. I am also blogging about my my experiences of learning how to play the game on my website. My first post on D&D can be found here: http://www.yousephtanha.com/blog/2009/02/24/my-quest-to-learn-how-to-play-dungeons-dragons/
I wanted to say thank you. I have found your blog here very helpful to myself. Your posts on maps and tokens have been very eye opening to me and I look forward to reading your future posts.
Keep up the good work!
Darran
February 25, 2009
You may want to check out ‘Fan Boy 3’
http://www.fanboy3.co.uk/
newbiedm
February 25, 2009
Thanks for the kind words, Youseph. I read your blog, and you’re right, there’s something special about D&D that no other game can match.
I hope you get to enjoy it as much as you’d like, and good luck.
Youseph Tanha
February 25, 2009
@newbiedm,
Thanks you!
samvdw
February 25, 2009
Visiting game stores in different areas is awesome. I’ve never visited one outside of my country, but I’ve visited them all around the country. They are definitely a type of store where no two stores are alike. You’ve got the small mom-and-pop ones, all the way up to the huge commercialized ones. And each store has different types of patrons that are often quite interesting to meet. Gamers are such a… diverse, group? 😀