As I am on the accelerating slide towards the end of this mortal coil I think about all the crap, I mean collectables, books, games, hobby items, and so on, that I own and how it is all destined for the land fill when my wife or son or whomever cleans up after me has to deal with it. I like to think we are custodians of physical objects and while some things are just consumables others should be passed on to be used and enjoyed by others. The best person to pass things on to others that will enjoy them is of course the owner that bought them to use and enjoy themself.
With that out of the way I am going to be doing an intermittent series on this topic, on how I will be downsizing my collection to things that will be used and enjoyed. I will still cover other topics but this will be a reoccurring feature of the blog.
Colin Green, the legendary Spikepit, used to do boxings, a response to unboxing videos, where he would record himself packing things up to get rid of and I think that is an excellent idea. I don't know that I will do the same but I might, I like the positivity that goes into that. I also don't know that I will list everything I own and weigh the pros and cons of it, that seems almost depressing to me. What I do plan to do is discuss what my idealized collection, hereafter called "The Collection", will look like and my progress towards it
Obviously there are categories of hobbies and possessions. For the purpose of this blog I will concentrate on roleplaying games, board games, card games, some books & physical media such as VHS, DVD, CD, and BluRay. For this first post I will try to defend some recent purchases and be honest about some others at the prompting of Harrigan ( https://harriganshearth.substack.com ) on the BS Landia RPG Community discord. I recently bought a number of games from Chaosium. I had a discount code so while I was at NecromoniCon ( https://necronomicon-providence.com/enter ) I picked up the new Horror on the Orient ( https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/394897/horror-on-the-orient-express-the-board-game) Express board game. I remember seeing the Kickstarter but for reasons at the time skipped it, foolishly because it now cost me more. I don't know that I will keep it, I'll report back after my son and I get a chance to play it. I mention the board game because it is an example of a purchase that is more of a spur of the moment thing and not a planned part of "The Collection".
The specific purchase Harrigan asked about was made with "The Collection" in mind. I decided I should have Call of Cthulhu (CoC) in my collection, I am a big fan of percentile (d100) based systems and BRP, Chaosium's house system, isn't a bad implementation of that. Since CoC is a very popular system it is also a good one to be familiar with and one that it isn't hard to get players for. There are a lot of pluses here. My history with CoC started with 4th edition but those books went away long ago. I did not jump on the recent reprints of the early edition boxed sets either. So when I saw they did a 50th anniversary printing of their current, 7th, edition I decided to pick it up. It also makes sense to me to have a copy of 7th edition as that is the most likely one that I would play or run. Since I was ordering off Chaosium's website I went ahead and added the other two slip case sets they had as they probably belonged in "The Collection" and they are the Masks of Nyarlathotep and Malleus Monstrorum which is basically a monster manual for CoC. While there are a ton of other cool sourcebooks and adventures for CoC if this is all I have in my physical collection for that game I don't think I will want too much for material.
Also in the picture are the collected editions of The Department of Truth comic, I haven't read them yet but they come highly recommended. I do have a number of omnibus style collections of comics for "The Collection" which I will cover in a future post but I don't know if these will join them or not.
Another physical book that I have bought in the past for "The Collection" that I'll mention here as I may or may not write blog post about it is The Traveller Book which I think is just about the perfect all in one book for a game. It is classic Traveller not the current Mongoose version but that doesn't bother me. People often cite TSR's Rules Cyclopedia as the perfect all in one game book but I would argue that The Traveller Book does it better with less pages. Maybe I will write a post about that...
I think I can easily keep all the physical RPG books or boxed sets in "The Collection" on a single book shelf, at least that is the goal. In fact I expect the RPG printed material, not including dice, playmats, minis and stuff like that, to not even fill up a single bookcase. We will see.
Do you have any thoughts on this topic? Culling your collection, building an ideal collection, CoC, or anything else I mention? I would love to read your comments!
The next post will be in two weeks and I'll be putting a pin in this topic and return to discussing games. I have a couple topics brewing so we'll just have to see which one gets published first. Until that time be excellent to each other!
Addendum: I did recently pick up a copy of Call of Cthulhu 4th edition for nostalgia's sake, it will be in "The Collection" but 7th is what I expect to play. Towards that end I also picked up Pulp Cthulhu.
