So in my years of gaming, I've collected more than my share of RPG core rules books and sourcebooks. If I had to put a number on it, I'd say that of the gaming books that I own, I've played/employed 30, maybe 40, percent of them. And when I bought them I intended to try to play perhaps 70 percent with that last 30 purchased just for their settings.
We're doing some basement remodeling here at home, which has necessitated moving my RPG books out of their bookcases and onto the floor temporarily, so I took a few pictures that I'm putting in this post. Over the years, I've lost more than a few games to damage, a loan that never returned, or that simply got lost in the shuffle, but I've done my very best to keep what I've bought.
(Please forgive the one odd anthropology textbook in there)
You're going to notice a LOT of White Wolf's World of Darkness in there. How could I not when they feed my weakness of giving me source material by the pound that I keep wanting to find out about? Who could blame me on that one? The system, setting, and point of view were revolutionary for their time - RPGers everywhere have a lot to thank White Wolf for.
A good portion of the games in my collection are so long out of print that it's not funny. Some of those were made by game companies that turned out to be unsuccessful and folded after a few books or so. Games like Reich Star (please excuse the swastika) was a game that played with the question, "What if the Axis had won World War II?" What would the world be like and how would the players act in it and I found that fascinating. Never played it, never intended to play it, but the setting that it presented was intriguing. For the record, and to belay any negative comments here, it was not a game that portrayed the Axis as the good guys - the world was a darker, more hateful place in this setting because of their victory. In my reading of it, the question that it presented to players was, "How do you fight against such a system when it is in power?" or at least that's how I took it.
The game itself was a wholly unfinished game that was obviously rushed out the door and would have relied on follow-up sourcebooks and rules companions just to make it playable. In my opinion, it also did nothing to add to the setting of the Dune universe. And it just so happens that Dune is my most favorite novel of all time. Here is a situation where I thought that I was finally going to get a system dedicated to a fiction that I loved and it failed on both fronts. Outside its collectibleness, it is worthless to me. An example of disliking both system and setting - a singular anomaly in my collection.
At this point, it's just sitting around waiting for me to find the right charity auction to donate to. I will never play it or open it again. But, unlike a hoarder, when a thing gets to that degree of uselessness to me, I do get rid of it. No use in keeping around garbage that will only ever just fill up my shelves in lieu of better gaming materials.
So my questions to any readers are: what does your collection look like, what do you get out of them (mechanics, setting, both), and do you play them? I'm very curious to hear.
No comments:
Post a Comment