the Buddha weeps at my RPG collection

By: Unknown on 06:25

Over the weekend I tried to re-organize my game stuff. I do this every year or two, as inevitably all my little projects unravel the previous way I had arranged it all. I have three places that hold all my game crap, a tall halway bookshelf, a short pair of bookshelves next to my bed and a very narrow shelf next to the TV in the bedroom. I started off by deciding that all my fancy-pants hardbounds should be displayed in the hallway and built from that starting point.

I was really happy to get all these books properly shelved. Previously the majority of them had been stacked horizontally, making it a pain in the butt to get at the book at the bottom of the stack. In case you care, that's a big chunk of HackMaster, a Rules Cyclopedia, several retroclones, My AD&D hardbounds (the one without the spine is my original DMG), Wilderlands stuff of variou stripes, three Castles & Crusades tomes, a Holmes Basic D&D boxed set and two Savage Worlds books (the 1st edition rules and Andy Hopp's Lowlife).

The bottom shelf is more motley of a crew: a Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader hardbound, the Traveller aliens reprints and a couple Trav adventures, Aces & Eights and some Knuckleduster books, five or six Palladium books, everything I kept for D&D 3.x (a few adventures and some Dungeon/Polyhedron issues), Uncle Gary's Canting Crew, three copies of the Starmada Compendium (I kinda like that game), three or so GURPS books, two BESM settings (Centauri Knights and S. John Ross's Uresia), Pokethulhu (more Ross), the LUG Star Trek Narrator's book (even more Ross), and books about RPGs (Lawrence Schick's Heroic Worlds and lesser lights in the same vein).

And here's the ugly stuff. The brown box on the left contains the ashcan version of my Miscelleneum of Cinder and a few outlaw copies of Encounter Critical I made to give away to people. Underneath the box is a stack of old Dragon issues and TSR (A)D&D modules. I got rid of my gigantic collection of Dragon issues (excepting Best of the volume 1) when I got the Dragon CD-ROM archive years ago. Since then I've accumulated about a dozen issues without really trying, mostly in odd lots bought at eBay and con auctions. The big, messy stack to the right of that one is a mix of other RPG magazines: Stardate, Battletechnology, Adventure Gaming, Different Worlds, White Dwarf, Valkyrie, Shadis, etc. When I need to steal some ideas for a session that's a pretty good place to look.

The other two stacks on that same shelf are sort of a catchall of stuff I didn't find a good home for when arranging the other places. The plane white box has some Traveller stuff in it. The top of that same stack is a couple of neat new things I've gotten from Mythmere Games and a cheap edition of Lord Dunsany's Gods of Pegana (no Sime illustrations inside, but for ten bucks what can you ask for?).

The leftmost stack on the second shelf consists of a big pile of Judges Guild D&D-type products (modules, Dungeoneer & Pegasus issues, and miscellany) with a few Mayfair items from the Role Aids line on the bottom. Next to it is a schizo stack with Judges Guild Traveller supplements on the bottom, then a layer of books full of random tables, and on top is my OD&D stuff. The stack on the right is a bunch of other RPGs, mostly in poor condition and missing the original boxes: Gamma World, Star Frontiers, Paranoia, the Price of Freedom, Living Steel, Ghostbusters, the Palladium FRP, and probably a few I'm forgetting.

The bottom shelf holds mostly comics and other non-RPG books, but you can maybe make out the Castles & Crusades boxed set on the left. Next to it are a bunch of Traveller LBBs.

Not pictured is the stack immediately to the left of the brown box. It's made up of a few ragtag member of the Gazetteer series for Mystara and all my Moldvay Basic/Cook Expert rulebooks. It probably says something about me that without planning it I arranged my books such that I could reach my Moldvay Basic books from where I sleep at night.

I also didn't snap a picture of the tall, thin shelving unit that mostly holds boxed sets: Dawn Patrol, Boot Hill, Lords of Creation, Marvel Superheroes and a buttload of BattleTech. I didn't really do anything with it except to make sure that all my Encounter Critical stuff was together in its spot stacked on top of Lords of Creation.

And then there's the bag of stuff I take to the game store for my World of Cinder campaign. And the books in my briefcase. And I probably forgetting about some stuff stashed somewhere...