You have a shelf full of rulebooks and you have spent hundreds of pounds/dollars over the years keeping it that way but just how much of what fills your shelf would you honestly buy if you were given the chance to read through it all those years ago? Sure you’ll have the systems and the settings that you’ll have played before as a player or picked up for a quick look while at a friends house but how many have you bought either off your own back or after barely reading a review online or in a magazine?

I’m looking at my shelf at the moment and a lot of it is obscured by the detritus beside my bed but at least 50% of what I can see is settings that I’ve barely used.

• Dragon Mountain – To this day I still have no idea why I bought it. The books have been flicked through maybe twice and then discarded to the bookshelf never to be opened again. In fact I think it was bought at the urging of a few of my players who quickly changed their minds after I’d handed over my hard earned cash and they’d got their grubby mitts of the books for themselves.
• Karameikos – I know why I bought this and I know why it still sits on my shelf and not in a landfill somewhere. For many years I played D&D using the Rules Cyclopedia and was sitting on the edge of my seat when I found out they were releasing the setting for AD&D. Again this setting has never been touched except for the occasional flick through to remind me of what mistakes TSR could make. I think it was still TSR at the time. It’s a lesson in how something right can become so wrong when no thought goes into the process.
• Birthright – This looked very promising when I first got a hold of it. And do you know just how much of the setting and rules I’ve used over the years? I’ve used the map. That’s it. I spent £20 and used a map that I could have made for pennies. This one I have no idea why I keep it on the shelf though. It must be the logo on the side of th ebox as it looks quite impressive.

In fact now I think about it I’m convinced that I keep them just to beef up my collection and make it look more impressive. Does anyone else do this or am I the only one thats so insecure about the size of his collection that I have to buy guff just to make myself feel better?

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Phil over at The Chatty DM has made a bit of a name for himself over the last few months with his TV Tropes posts and his take on ‘The Rule of Cool’. I always end up falling back on these exact sort of things when I’m struggling for a game idea but I gots to thinking… There are always weird and movie like happenings going throughout history and they are jut sitting there waiting to be cherry-picked.

In my office it is customary for the bosses to give their underlings presents. This usually consists of chocolates or Lush toiletries for the ladies and beer for the men. My current boss however actually put some thought into it this year and I ended up receiving an oral history of the formation of the UK and the USA’s secret service during WWII. Some of the stories the former agents and wireless operators tell might as well be from the movies as if they weren’t the ones telling them you would think they were completely made up.

A quick list of ideas for twists from just the start of the book are

• When the Special Operations Executive offices were first opened up in London everything was going fine until one day an officer took the lift up to many floors and the doors opened on to the temporary home of the Japanese embassy. Needless to say the offices were moved that very same day but how they were assigned those rooms in the knowledge that their enemies would be directly above the secrets service leaves me bewildered.
• When the Germans were trying to trace the whereabouts of a radio operator they shut down the power to various parts of the town while listening to the broadcast. When the line went dead they knew the area the operator was in which led to many ingenious methods of powering the radios without hooking them up to the mains.
• An agent was travelling through France when he was accosted by some German officers and made a break for it. The Germans took a few shots at him despite it being the middle of a busy town but he got away. The officer that shot at him though was insistent that he’d hit him and so checked all the local hospitals for gunshot wounds only to find none. When they checked for breaks or fractures they found only one and 3 hours after the initial encounter they walked in to the ward to find the English agent smiling back saying “I’m impressed”

Now obviously these are all to small to be the main hook for a game but each one adds a little flavour to what might be an otherwise bland encounter or as a nice side plot to keep the players on their toes during a lull in the main campaign.

With the sheer number of WWII books out there you could pick up any random book in your book store, use a few stories from them to pad your game out and be almost gaurenteed that your players will never have read them before. They might have heard something similar but every story you come across from WWII has its own feel to it. Go on… give it a try in your next game.

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Why do I have such a downer on updates to game systems?

1. It’s expensive.
I’ve spent thousands of pounds over the years on roleplay books. At least 90% of that was on supplements and campaign settings rather than rulebooks so you can understand when I get a little miffed when the publishers bring out a new version that makes all those supplements and settings worthless in the eyes the new system.

2. Same old story just different rules.
So when WOD went through a reboot very little changed. The mechanics where mixed up and ‘refined’ and that’s about it as the same basic story kept going. To be fair to White Wolf they basically shot themselves in the foot when they first published that Gehenna was on it’s way. Or were they just very shrewd people that knew exactly how many people would buy the new rules?

With Dungeons and Dragons 4ed  they’ve basically turned it into D&D lite. It’s not a refinement of the previous games or an expansion on the system. They’ve took the popular parts from online computer games and melded it together with the previous rules to create something that doesn’t feel, to me at least, like any D&D game I’ve seen before. Why not keep the old D&D line going or at least fix the bits that didn’t work and release 4ed as a new game line but one that uses the same world? Have it as an extension of the mini battles game and market it to the crowd of young gamers moving up from Pokemon and the other card games that seem to be morphing into spinnig top battles.

3. Did I say it was expensive?
Forget the cost of the books I’ve bought in the past that are now worthless. Lets look at how much it costs to get a Forgotten Realms game going now that 4ed is out. The DM/players guides come in at $60 for both of them and the setting books add another $60-70 onto that as well. Your talking over $120 just to play the basic setting and never mind any of the expansions they bring out in the future. What if you go to all that trouble and you find you really don’t like the new setting or you really don’t like the new 4ed rules?

4. Physical space
I live in a normal sized house in the UK. We have plenty of shelf space and yet I am forced to keep a sizable amount of my books in boxes in the attic. I cannot find anywhere to keep my almost complete collection of oWOD books never mind space for the new system should I ever give in and buy it.

5. Mental space
I’ve already memorised the rules and mechanics of 13 separate gaming systems over the years. Do I really need to squeeze another one in? At what point will my mind begin to fail and the AD&D equipment charts start to meld together and be mistaken for the Small Creatures Crit Table from Rolemaster?

The old games worked. Sure they had their flaws but so do the new versions. Pick one and stick with it but I just wish the old system I loved still had official work being published for them.

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