My Other Blog: The Problem with Indie Games

I just published my first entry in my *other* blog. It's here:

The Problem with Indie Games

I post to this blog every other Saturday; on the other days, lots of other interesting people write interesting things; there's a LJ feed for the whole thing here: gonegaming

Unpacking Boxes of Roleplaying Books

Over the last years I've boxed up an increasing amount of my roleplaying material. This is mainly because most of it doesn't get much use. In fact, most of it has never gotten much use. My collections of MERP, Traveller, Tekumel (now mostly given away), and a gazillion RPG magazines mostly existed to sate the collecting urge.

However, with the advent of new shelving units the last few weeks I've been able to pull storage boxes out of closets and replace them with a handy dandy shelf in the closet. Not as space-efficient, mind you, but it lets me make my stuff more accessible.

What fairly astounds me as I unpack magazines & books is how totally I dropped out of the roleplaying community right around my departure from Chaosium. I was there until September 1998, and now looking my RPG magazines, I find:

• My last issue of Pyramid magazine is December, 1997.
  
• My last issue of Other Hands magazine is July, 1998.
  
• My last issue of Shadis magazine is October, 1998.
  
• My last issue of Valkyrie magazine is Sometime, 1998.
  

I'm sure if I looked through my RPG books I'd find the same drop-off.

I've long known that working at Chaosium burned me out on RPGs a fair amount, but it's weird to see the very physical evidence of the same.