So a year ago or so I got lucky and found a Rubbermaid tub of roleplaying books in my local area. The gentleman selling just wanted to get rid of the books, or rather his wife wanted them gone, so I got the whole lot of nearly 40 books for $130. Score!
Even better, the tub contained a few rare items (Battletech 'Mech blueprint posters). I sold the posters along with a few titles I found lame (Palladium stuff and Dragonlance manuals) and ended up making the entire $130 back. So essentially, all the remaining ~27 books were got for nothing: double score! The books pictured to the left, the titles I'm contemplating selling, are just a part of the collection. Also included in the collection are the 1st Ed. Monster Manual, core books for AD&D 2nd Ed., the Blue Boxed Set of D&D, the red D&D Basic book from 1981, the D&D Companion, Masters and Immortals rulebooks (alas, no boxes or other contents of those boxes), Star Wars 2nd Ed. (WEG), GURPS 3rd Ed., some old Champions books, the Marvel Superheroes Ultimate Powers Book, and some really tore-up Robotech books.I've pulled the 1st Ed. AD&D books off the shelves a number of times with the intent of photographing them for eBay, only to put them back. There's just something about the orange spines, the tiny print inside, and the ink line art that tugs at my adolescent memories and makes me say "nah, I'll keep these". I know that Legends & Lore is useless (who needs the stats for a god?). I've looked through Oriental Adventures and rolled my eyes. I previously owned the Dungeoneer's and Wilderness Survival Guides and got rid of them in a prior collection purge. So why are these so hard to part with?
The Greyhawk books (Adventures hardback and City of... Boxed Set) are the most potentially useful, since Greyhawk was always my setting of choice. Still, I haven't had a solid gaming group for almost two decades and work commitments means that probably won't change. The likelihood of another GH campaign seems extraordinarily thin. Yet they're still on the shelf...
I'm generally done with class-and-level games, and I think of all the pdfs of new-fangled rules-lite games I could buy with the money I get from the sale of these books (and based on recent eBay, they would sell). Something is holding me back however. Nostalgia? Or are there hidden repositories of ideas buried in these books, detected by my gaming subconscious? What would you do?
If it was me, I would keep them. But then that is what I actually did. I play D&D a few times and then AD&D came out and played that a few times. My fiend gave me his D&D and AD&D stuff back in 1988, years after we had stopped playing. I have not done fantasy roleplaying since, and a couple of Traveller games in the 90s is my entire RPG experience since 1988. But I still have them. I have not even opened them Nostalgia. I keep thinking I may play with the Basic and Expert set one day but that is unlikely. I may get rid of them in another 10 years when I can finally let go. Maybe :-)
ReplyDeleteThanks Shaun; I think that's why I posted this: to get that kind of moral support. :) I think I'm leaning toward keeping them.
ReplyDeleteLate to the discussion, but I'd keep them too. I also have the 1st edition AD&D books, as well as some really old school rules like Chainmail, Angriff!, Tricolor, etc. Will I ever use them? Probably not. Gaming got me through high school, so I have a lot of sentimental attachment to them. I've sold some games and rules that I now regret doing so. I'd keep them.
ReplyDeleteI have to agree Chris, in that regret is as strong a reason as nostalgia for my current decision to keep the books. When I think of all the gaming material I sold off over the years, I get a bit sick. Gaming was extremely important to my adolescent experience as well; I'm rather surprised at myself for forgetting this when I decided to step away from gaming a decade ago.
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