My +5 Sack of Accumulating
07.22.06 By Collin David
There are many definitions of the word ‘nerd’, all of them bearing their own unique stigmas and rare benefits, but there’s a very particular genre of nerd-dom that gets itself involved with ‘fantasy gaming’. Those excitable elf-warriors and orc clerics that faint at the site of a 100-sided die, those captains of interactive storytelling, those titans of +2 Swords of Vanquishing. Those eaters of Tostitos.
I was one of them once, and once you’re indoctrinated into that awkward cult, you’ll never leave it. You can change your clothes, you can surgically alter yourself, and you can change your name, but they’ll still have you. You hear the name ‘Gary Gygax’ and you get small palpitations, and somewhere, a sprite gets her wings. The small, smooth, roundness of the d20 is remembered by your hands, as well as the possibilities that it represents. The tragedy of rolling a 1 and stabbing yourself in the foot, or the triumph of rolling a 20 and decapitating the bugbear which threatens you.
Over the years, I’ve inadvertently collected all kinds of Dungeons and Dragons paraphernalia, and more than a few Magic : The Gathering cards (which is an entirely different exploration into geekdom), some of them well-worn and inherited, and some of them purchased in the hopes of incorporating them into a game, some of them signed by the artists that created them.
The last game of Dungeons and Dragons that I got involved in was bad news. Due to a combination of term papers, a girlfriend with fibromyalgia and the fact that 75% of the game involved the active party dragging around my corpse and trying to find ways to reanimate me, I didn’t have that much fun. I made sure that when I was allowed to create a new character and rejoin the party, I role played it in a screechy voice and used a Magic 8 Ball to make all of my decisions. Boy, did they love me then!
In a game where the rules are constantly being revisited and errata’d and corrected, old rulebooks don’t have much practical value, but hold plenty of nostalgic value. I spent hours drawing creatures from the second volume of the Monster Manual, which detailed all of the powers and dangers that the game’s creatures could present you with. More importantly, it had ink drawings of dragons and demons that I would eventually launch my illustration career off of. Eventually, I’d win some other D&D books in an art contest run by Tony DiTerlizzi (before he went all SUPERSTAR on us), who also signed the items that I’d won. More books and maps would be discovered in the attic, and FedEx would horribly destroy an original artwork that was used to illustrate one of the manuals.
One of the greater aspects of the game is that while many of the core rules stand, and the publishers create their own adventures for you to trek through, many inventive dungeon masters created their own adventures and castles and situations to traverse. I’ve also kept small relics from all of my past adventures with different dungeon masters - drawings of characters, sheets of statistics, segments of hugely ambitious and exciting maps on worn graph paper. The cumulative effect of it all is that it recalls hours upon hours of fun gaming and friends. One day, the manuals will be called out of dormancy, the dice will be dusted off, and I’ll once again summon the courage to take on that mist dragon head-on.
---
Article Tags: , Dungeons & Dragons, Gary Gygax, Magic the Gathering================
Gotta Collect? Then You Gotta Connect - Join our Collectors’ Community!
