Treasure Type G

[robotnik2004]

Eep. Our gung ho young realtor wants to put the condo on the market by April, which, as I'm sure you can tell by the beautiful balmy weather we're having, is not very far away. This means doing all the little home repairs we've put off doing for the four years we've actually lived in the place. It also means getting rid of, or at least packing away, about two thirds of our possessions. Apparently crap like "books" are a total buzz-kill when you're selling a house, somewhere in desirability between "infestation of roaches" and "unquiet Indian dead." I'm actually psyched about paring down my material possessions. ("You are not your khakis, you are not your graphic novels, you are not your ironic collection of amusing cereal boxes and Mao-ist kitsch...") But it's a little more sudden than I expected.

So yesterday I grabbed some torches and a gnomish hireling and ventured into my office closet to see what possessions I could liberate myself from. Look what treasure I unearthed!



Care to take a peek inside?



Yes, it's time to divest myself of all this old gaming stuff. I've picked out a few things to save out of sheer nostalgia, plus I'm holding on to a handful of games I might actually play in future, but I would love to find good homes for any of the rest of this stuff. So peruse, and please make me an offer. (NB: "I'll take it if you're giving it away free," constitutes a perfectly reasonable offer.) I don't think I'll bother with the eBay route; even the rarer things I have don't seem to go for much more than a few bucks there, and all my modules have been so well loved, they're hardly in mint condition.

So what's in the chest?




The only hardback I'm definitely keeping is the 1st ed. Monster Manual. It's the first one I got (Christmas 1980, I think), and the one with the fondest emotional attachments.




Ah, sweet Village of Hommlet. What a lame adventure you were. My friend Neil bought you and brought you to a game once for me to run, not realizing you were an introductory adventure for 1st level characters (all our PCs were levels 8 to 10 at the time). "How was I supposed to know?" he said. "Those undead guys on the front look pretty tough!"




The S-series. Man, that's classic D&D to me. Especially Barrier Peaks with the big book of crazed Erol Otis illustrations. Why kill orcs when you can kill robots? And that bootleg non-TSR "Elves" book was actually a very cool for the time epic campaign of linked adventures. A high point of my original early 1980s gaming.

Edit: Oh yeah, and Castle Greyhawk. That was a weird little number. For years there had been talk of releasing Gary Gygax's fabled dungeons of Greyhawk. Then in like 1988 or so, after TSR had given Gary the shove, they came out with this joke anthology of comedy dungeon crawls and called it Castle Greyhawk. I always wondered if that was a little "ha ha Gary we own the copyright so screw you" to Gygax.




Boo-yah. Dragonlance 1 through 15, hotties and all. And we played every one. I can probably still name them all in order (without looking at the picture, I mean). In fact, you want some TMI with your lunch break? I used to run through the names of them in my mind, backward and forward, the same way some guys use baseball statistics. Yeah, you know what I'm talking about.




I used to have a lot more of these, but I unloaded a huge stack of Dragon mags on my friend Derek about five years ago. Eesh, maybe eight or nine years, come to think of it. Anyway, check it out, at least two of those magazines are older than narcissisme. And the articles in that first Best of Dragon collection are as old as I am. The article where they first introduce the wheel of dimensional planes is in there, plus some crazy-ass Metamorphosis Alpha shit. Missing is Best of Dragon Vol. II, which I believe contained the fabled Anti-Paladin. I think I lent it to either Scott or Spencer Smith (they're identical twins, which makes it hard to remember) in sixth grade and never got it back.


OK, maybe otyugh-whacking is not your thing. Can I interest you in some:



A nice sampling of the three eras of Paranoia: the promising first edition, the classic second edition game and adventures, and the totally bullshit later years (in the form of "The Iceman Cometh") . With all things Paranoia now being dusted off and revamped for the XP line, I feel much easier about letting these babies go.




Now we're into my college-era gaming. Ia Cthulhu fhtagn. Damn, a lot of good memories in this little JPEG. Dig the Hound of Tindalos on the Dark Designs cover. The cyclopean epics like Masks of Nyarl and Mountains of Madness get all the buzz, but DD is probably my favorite CoC adventure collection. Just three little adventures, all for the 1890s, guaranteed to fuck you up.




More Cthulhu stuff, slightly out of focus to protect you from the SAN loss of that Unspeakable Oath cover. Alas, I don't have the very earliest TUOs, the ones where John Tynes actually thinks the King In Yellow is coming to get him, but there's still good stuff in here, including the genesis of Delta Green. (I'mo keep my DG corebooks, though.) And the British CoC stuff here actually holds up pretty well in terms of production values and so on.




How big is that box? Here's all my Top Secret stuff, plus the Q Manual from James Bond 007 and Top Secret/S.I., which was really a different game. Speaking of production values, the late Top Secret adventures, like Orient Express and Ace of Clubs, were lovely. Ace of Clubs was a random adventure (Club Med for Spies!), but the pictures were cool. And Orient Express had that totally excellent train map with the coffee rings and little notes from "Moe Green" scribbled on it. Plus Operation: Rapidpass (or was it Operation: Faststrike?) contains the trippiest Erol Otis drawing evah, which is saying a lot. (And yes, I've seen his illos of the Cthulhu Mythos in the special copyright violation edition of Deities & Demigods. Which you will notice does not appear here, since gammafodder has my copy.)




Now these, I could probably actually get a few bucks for, maybe at Pandemonium. And they're all in pretty good shape, since my little sister (now in her second year of med school) almost never chews on / colors in my gaming books any more. But I'd be happy to let them go to any one of you reading this for a few bucks or a beer or a promise to take a hunk of the stuff in the earlier pictures too. (That's the 4th edition of Ars Magica over on the right if the cover's too dark to read.)




And at the bottom of the box, utter randomness. I have no idea how, when, or why I acquired anything in this picture. The Dr. Who thing, alas, is only a blank screen. No actual Daleks are contained within. But what's Kaylee from Firefly doing with the Doctor?

Hope you enjoyed this trip down memory lane / descent into the depths of the Earth.

Seriously, does anyone want to cart any of this off? I do need to get rid of it, and I'd much rather put it into one of your hands than toss it. Even if all you do is drive around the corner and throw it in a dumpster out of sight, as long as you tell me that you took it out to the country to a big farm where D&D modules can run and play and chase bunnies.

)Sniff... I'm actually getting choked up!(

Next Time: Stick around, I have more stuff to give away. Zines, cereal boxes, totally random comics... and booze!