The Old Games

For the past few weeks, I've been working on cataloging and organizing my bookcase full of gaming books and such.  Since I obviously enjoy the older game systems and their associated modules and settings books, I've got quite a lot of stuff.  The difficulty has been trying to find a good way to place them in the book shelves.  Especially since the shelves are antique lawyer style cabinets with glass fronts.  I'll post a picture of them once I get everything in place.


Of course, as when you dig through a collection you've not looked at in a while, you find treasures you forgot about....like my old gaming stuff when I first learned to play and several of my original dungeons I put together.  Ugh...they were awful Monty Haul, fill every space of the graph paper, no sense of ecology things....But I did find  pocket folder filled with 1e characters I spent a couple of weeks on.  I remember thinking I should have a stable of NPCs to pull out if I ever needed a party of adventurers to be encountered.  Those were fun to look at.  I was scrupulous about following the rules of character creation and equipping.  I could probably still use them today for a 1e game....

But something else I found as well.  Back when the OSR was starting up and I was beginning to give up on 3.5, 4e just looked awful and Pathfinder's bulk looked intimidating, I found the website of Jason Vey.  His write-up of an OD&D Hyperboria fascinated me.  I would love to run such a game at some time.  Now Jason has another website and I've bought his stuff.  Very nice and very useful.  Then I did some more internet digging and found some other stuff that intrigued me.  Like this.  And this.

And then I came across a box of games from a dear friend of mine and I want to play those too.  The 2nd edition of Paranioa boxed set was in there along with at least a dozen different modules.  Under that was a batch of the original Traveller books (the LBBs) and a batch of 2nd & 3rd edition Call of Cthulhu modules and rulebooks.  Some of these I hadn't thought about since we played way back in graduate school.  Of course, we also played Star Fleet Battles but as a beer & pretzels game of "kill the ship". 

Ah...the fun we used to have when life moved at a slower pace.  Taking all of a Saturday to play a game was acceptable.  There were no demands from work after you left at 5ish.  No cell phones to interrupt anything.  And the term "gamer" meant a person who played at a table with other "gamers", using funny shaped dice, pencils, and paper; not a person on a computer or console.

Guess I'm just getting old.

(swiped from here)