Monday, August 13, 2012

Old Game Books are Never Old...

I woke up this morning and looked out my window at the sleepy world waking up, and these thoughts floated through my mind (as readers may know, I've got a cartoonish, Garfield-esque bad attitude about Mondays, so it's no surprise that I would need some inspiration on the dawning of such a day):

Old game books are never old. They are eternally beginning. The promise of adventure is eternal. No matter how old that book may be.

When you read the introduction to Moldvay's Basic or peruse Pathfinder's thick book of core rules, the adventure begins.

When you crack open a module like B2 Keep on the Borderlands or the latest 4E module, the adventure begins.

When you flip through the pages of an old Dragon Magazine or read the latest issue of Kobold Quarterly or an OSR 'zine, the adventure begins.

When you do these things, the adventure begins. Either for the first time, or once again for those who have experienced said book in the past and wish to revisit familiar realms.

This is just part of the magic of gaming: time has no meaning for these wonderful tomes we use to create adventures that are "products of your imagination." They were published decades ago or within the last few months, but it doesn't matter. The adventure never gets old.

The adventure is eternally beginning. 

1 comment:

  1. Well said. If Nietzsche were here, he'd say that every rpg is a premise whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw.

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