It’s the weirdest thing.
GURPS Witch World has been something of a Holy Grail for me; it was one of the few books that I didn’t have from the Third Edition*. Needless to say, Amazon makes collecting this stuff easy, right?
Wrong. Third copy. First copy never made it to me. Just disappeared into the ether. Second copy? Well, the Post Office said that they delivered it. Determining this took five days and half a dozen calls, and all of said calls were particularly poor examples of customer service. Give you an idea; when somebody called back to apologize – because I totally called the USPS to complain – they managed to hang up on me in the middle of it. And they totally were trying to be nice at that point.
But I got a copy of the book on the third try, right? Yup! – Only, one problem: after I bought it third-hand I took a closer look at the seller information. Turns out that I got my copy from the internal library of Curt Schilling’s doomed gaming company 38 Studios. This is roughly equivalent to getting an interesting treatise on worm-related mysteries from the estate sale of that poor unfortunate recluse who was found on top of the blasted heath with a most peculiar figurine in his possession and a rather alarming look on what remained of his face.
If so, no wonder the damned thing showed up in the mail within a week.
Moe Lane
*And I have, false modesty aside and be damned, a comprehensive collection. I even have a copy of GURPS Horseclans Bili the Axe: Up Harzburk! – and that was the one that Steve Jackson Games recalled (and is rumored to have burned).
http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/books/BiliTheAxe/
I can sympathize Moe. I used to work at a furniture store and we once bought a few truckloads of furniture from Enron’s liquidation. We ended up losing a quarter of the staff (including me) by the end of the year, but that was probably a coincidence and not Ken Lay’s curse. I hope. Because we sold all of those desks and I don’t want Jack Marshak to show up and tell me that we need to track them down and reclaim them.
That is my favorite example of a TV series that had absolutely nothing to do with the original movie that shared the same name.
Oh, but wasn’t it a fun show?
‘s the danger of being a completist in a .. somewhat arcane field.
.
At some point, most of the examples were thrown out by an army of mothers “tidying up junior’s room” and the remaining ones are gonna come from folks in .. less happy actuarial situations.
.
Don’t let it bother you. Diversify your income streams, but don’t let it bother you.
.
Mew
You’re making me miss my first set of D&D dice.
You remember, the ones you used a crayon on to make the numbers more visible.
Quality control wasn’t the highest back then. The d20 wasn’t quite symmetrical and rolled 20s nearly 1/5 of the time.
.
I felt it was borderline cheating as a player.
But now that I run more than I play… There are any number of NPCs it would have been perfectly appropriate for.
Oh, I remember dice like that .. ‘course, my d20 was skewed the other way .. it *really* liked coming up 9.
.
Mew
I had that set. The plastic wasn’t the best quality and not as hard as it should be; by the time I replaced them the d20 had a corner that was so far chipped that it almost became an additional face.
This calls for: http://youtu.be/_jbfIRh8kP8?list=PLE81682AF02132B3B
I’ve seen that collection, folks. He’s not joking — if SJG put it out, odds are good that he’s got it. I *might* have a GURPS Traveller book that he doesn’t have, but only because I’m an insane grognard going all the way back to the LBB’s. Anything else — pfft, forget it, he’s got you beat.
What are you still missing from your collection? just curious….
Some of the Atlases and an adventure sourcebook here and there. Depending on how you score different editions: for example, I consider the various editions of GURPS Horror to be separate books, because there were significant changes to the texts from edition to edition. I do the same for GURPS Autoduel – although, frankly, the second edition was both a mistake and a blunder.