Goodbye, Monster Manual...

A comment from Joseph last week about old times in Eugene:

"I'd just come over to your place, and you'd be reading roleplaying books," he said, "it was weird."

"I worked in a bookstore, and collected them like someone would collect comic books," I responded.

"I know, but it was still weird."

Okay, maybe it was a little weird, and I'm always proud of my friends when the call me out on my bullshit and/or oddities, but in my defense I was almost always reading something at my old place in Eugene- novels, comics, news, nonfiction, whatever. If I was sitting at my home, and you walked in on me, chances are I was reading something. And yes, sometimes that was RPG sourcebooks, which, yes, is kind of an odd thing to sit around reading.

I got into RPGs in middle school, where a friend of mine invited me to join his Dungeons & Dragons game. My character was named Randy, and he was a half-elven thief who backstabbed people a lot. I had tons of fun playing D&D, but skipped over it in high school. There, I got addicted to speech and debate, mock trial, and other extracurriculars. I was busy being a teenaged intellectual, and didn't have much time for pretending to be an elf. I still watched Star Trek, read Tolkien, and had a huge crush on Agent Scully of the X Files, but I thought that I'd left the big centerpiece activity of geekiness, roleplaying, behind.

It wasn't until college that I got back into it, forming a D&D group with my friends. It was tons of fun- we hung out in dorm rooms and apartments, drinking Mountain Dew and beer, bullshitting and listening to music, and all the while imagining that we were killing the shit out of orcs. It was good times. I eventually got to like it better as someone who ran the game (the Game Master, or GM) rather than as someone who played it.

I enjoyed being a GM for the same reason that I enjoy cooking- it's instant creative gratification. You make something (like a lasange or a plot involving vampire warlocks), you cook it up, serve it, and there's an appreciative audience right in front of you. Running a successful and fun RPG session is a sort of high for creative types because it's an instant outlet. You have your story, people react to it by way of participation, and there's instant appreciation. What's more, I loved seeing my own stuff remixed. The players, via their characters, interacted with the world I made, commented on it, and added to it. It was like jamming with awesome musicians. (Well, most of the time, anyway.)

So, throughout and after college I was continually thinking up plots, stories, and quests for my friends. Campaigns, recurring stories, would run for weeks. We often met at my place, and each week I looked forward to my friends, my audience, showing up. I cleaned up my living room, stocked my fridge with beer, and was eager to splash my creative juices all over people. In one campaign, they were a bunch of superpowered mercenaries who killed an evil god king, in another they were a bunch of Werewolves who killed of Portland's vampire population. In still another they were all evil elves, and for another they were fey creatures fighting Lovecraftian beasts in modern London. I ran single-shot games, too, with stories that only lasted one night. I had a mystery involving ghosts that I was very proud of, and in another all of the players discovered that they were walking dead (yes, I do like creepy dead shit, as you may have noticed). One very successful one involved Nazi vampires stealing a submarine. Two of my old coworkers were at that one, and they enjoyed it so much that they bought themselves a bunch of roleplaying sourcebooks the next week.

So, I was proud of this, proud of these stories that I had an instant audience for. I devoured roleplaying books, mainly for ideas and inspiration. I had books about monsters and heroes, books of fictional places, and books on things like how to make statistics for castles. Books of things that I wanted to use, and they fed into my imgination. When I read stuff I thought, "I want to tell a story that has this in it." I imagined putting my friends in space and in the distant past. I imagined running games where everyone was a wizard, and others that heavily involved robots. I was always thinking about some fantasy world I could make, some ornate, created place that my friends could inhabit for a little while, react to.

When I went to Japan, I stored all of my RPG books in boxes, and thought about how I wouldn't have this hobby available to me anymore. Recently, I got them out of storage.

I dont' really want them anymore. They're all on Amazon now, the whole lot of them.

This isnt' to say that I don't have affection for them or that I don't like them. Far from it. I know that as much as I've de-geeked in the past two and a half years, part of me will always be that little boy who, dazzled by Tolkien, made a half-elf theif named Randy. I also know that I'll always need some kind of outlet for my creativity. One of the nicest compliments that I've recieved recently was from a girl who said, "You have a very active imagination." She meant it in a good way. Well, I'm pretty sure she did.... Anyway, back to the matter at hand...

I'm getting rid of all (yes, all) of my old RPG books for the following reasons:

-I will probably run an RPG session again at some point in my life, but I don't need RPG to inspire me. If I want to run a game about, say, zombies, I know enough about, and am creative enough, to make my own damn zombies. I don't need a book to tell me what a zombie is, or how to portray one.

-Money. Most of my books are out of print, and worth money to the right people. That's money that I can use to finance more interesting stuff, like traveling.

-I am in a place where I want to be unencumbered. I dont' want to have to worry about how my things are doing. It's liberating to not give a shit about your stuff, to not be concerned with a collection or a pile of objects. Yes, I know this sounds sort of new-agey and whatever, but it's true. Stuff weighs you down, man.

-It is sort of weird having a giant pile of books in your living space devoted to, for example, pretending you're a dwarf. I know that this is a little petty and that I shouldn't apologize for my proclivities, but still...

-I have other outlets for my creativity. I've been at my desk every day turning Hired Tongue into a coherent narrative, and also writing on this and my other blog. Oh, how I love the internet as a means of getting feedback and attention.

So, I'm saying goodbye to my little darlings, and I feel fairly good about it. I'm also eyeing my CD and LP collection, as well as my other books, but there are a few irreplaceables in there that I know I'll be keeping. In any case, I feel fairly good about this, sloughing off old stuff, being able to part, joyfully, with things that were once important to me.