Buying Back My Youth

    I am always in the process of buying back my youth.  Just this past week I purchased the hardcover reprint version of the Dark Sun Boxed Set, something I've always wanted, but could not afford (we were poor farmers and my family couldn't afford food half the time, much less RPG stuff for me).  I grabbed The Will and The Way, also, so that I have all the psionics rules I'll need - I found a pristine original copy of the Complete Psionics book for 2E at a local game store here in Detroit.  

    I also just had the paperback reprint of the BECMI Dwarves of Rockhome Gazetteer and the AD&D 2nd Edition Sages & Specialists DMGR book delivered, two other titles I always wanted but never had the chance to buy.  Also, instead of re-buying used/falling apart copies of the AD&D 2nd Edition rules (including the PHB, DMG, and Tome of Magic), and since I hate the "revised" versions currently for sale in print on DriveThru, I chose instead to take old PDFs of these books with the classic blue, black & white layouts (the revised "red header text" versions are visually just not the same for me - I used to be able to tell you what illustrations featured on what page number in the old versions) and smash them into an omnibus and have them printed in a hardback for my own personal use (I do that a lot with old rules, like my BECMI boxed set omnibus book I made for myself).  I rationalize this in this way - I bought each of those books two or three times in my life, so Wizards made their money off me when it mattered.

    Why am I doing this end-run back to my youth? I own hundreds of rulebooks, supplements, and game rules sets. I'll never play them all.  Well, nostalgia, for one.  I like these older supplements, and the system that makes them function. I have just about as much love for AD&D 2nd Edition as I do BECMI - I played them at the same time from about 1990 onward.  I also want to own the things I wanted when I was young, and that includes certain d20 supplements from my 20s that have gone missing or sold to make rent after d20 was out of fashion.  They're like a warm blanket on a cold day.  I can read them and fall in love with the content inside all over again.  Life was simpler then, just me and my books, and none of the horsecrap I deal with on a day to day basis now.  Life has changed a lot since then, obviously, both personally for me, and in the world at large.  Not all for the worse, of course.  I make more scratch than my folks ever did, and can afford quite a bit more, so now is my time to sort of start over and collect the things I always wanted to have.  I hope I can make it to retirement (I have health problems that could make that difficult) so I can enjoy all the books I have yet to read and use, but I've prepared mightily for that.  My retirement fund is measured in unread pages.

    My adolescence and early 20s also was terrible, in general. Family upheaval, crap jobs, suicides, horribly active Crohn's disease, and just regular rust belt problems so to speak.  Life was hard to enjoy, especially since I didn't figure out my mental chemistry was all sorts of off until later (I mean, who had money for a doctor?), and I finally found a medication that keeps me on an even keel that I've been on for a decade.  With it, life is grand.  Without it, it's terrible and not fun at all and it's like a dark tunnel with only death at the end of it.  Now, my daughters are almost grown and my oldest graduates high school this year, my stepsons are both adults (even though with their autism they are still at home), my wife (my second wife) is who keeps me going every day, and my job is great and I'm doing what I'm good at other than writing.  But nothing, just nothing, is as comfortable as the roleplaying supplements that forged the way I think about game rules and what a game book should be.  The escape in those pages is magical.  Problems get forgotten.  A few bucks gets me a new dose every so often.  And I can build my collection of the one thing that made being younger me worth it.