RPG A Day 2020: Day 22--Rare

 RPG A Day 2020: Day 22—Rare

I’m old enough at age 46 that I prefer print media to digital any day of the week. I’ve purchased, collected, gave away, lost, downsized and reacquired many RPGs and related materials over the years. I still have regrets about not finding a way to hold on to a large collection of Champions books that was gifted to me by a friend who also had to downsize—as well as a ton of old PSM magazine issues, what a good video game magazine that was. That said, as much as I wish I’d kept certain things being a hoarder really never did me any good. The stack just keeps growing and you know you can’t take it with you…not even in this world. As I’ve mentioned before I have bits and pieces scattered all over the place USA, Philippines and here in China and as much as I want to keep it all, I can’t. When I’m trying to drag my library with me through the airports and paying all those fees, I can see the appeal of sticking with PDFs. On the other hand, I don’t see any digital downloads ever being rare or desirable and once it’s released online the pirate industry kicks in.

In spite of all the trouble I’ve had holding on to my hard-copies, I’ve not lost everything to the ravages of time nor has all my collection fallen into complete disrepair. Just by virtue of my being old some things in my RPG collection are uncommon if not rare. Here are a few.

1. WWF Basic Adventure Game (1993): The World Wrestling Federation—now known as WWE—was a very different beast back in the 90’s when this game came into being. It is post-Hogan/pre-attitude era with the likes of early HBK, Yokozuna, and Doink the Clown stinking up the ring. The game itself looks good if not overly complex. I’ve read through it several times, but never played it aside from creating wrestlers. It’s current location is in the Philippines in my treasure chest.
https://index.rpg.net/display-entry.phtml?mainid=40

2. Tinker’s Damn (1997): An anime inspired game with loosely defined rules that left coming up with most play mechanics to the imagination of its players. Again, one I’ve never played, but one that I did read through several times. Nowadays, with Kickstarter and whatnot it is fairly easy to pick up a book with a limited print run if you want it. Back in the 90’s and earlier if the neighborhood shop didn’t order it, you would probably have never even heard of it. In my case, this one fell off the truck at work because I liked the cover art.
https://index.rpg.net/display-entry.phtml?mainid=13712

3. Dreadmire (2005): This one supposedly has an interesting and controversial backstory which I didn’t know about at the time when I picked it up. It’s a supplemental about swamp setting. I’d like to read it someday as the person who wrote it seemed to know a lot about living in a swamp. Unfortunately, the print setting is so small that I find that I never get very far in any attempt.
https://index.rpg.net/display-entry.phtml?mainid=6891

Also, of note is that I have a first printing of Vampire: The Masquerade from the old White Wolf books along with the Gangrel clan book. I don’t say those are all that rare either, but they survived several culling and I hope to keep them.