#001

I'm Clayton Notestine. I'm a writer, critic, and design educator in the tabletop rpg space. I run Explorers Design a design label for educational content on graphic design, mechanics, and industry trends. I've made a few contributions to the industry in the last years, including the Classic Explorer Layout Template.

Idiosyncratic. Selective. (With a few stragglers I've overlooked.) Not as vast as others might expect. There was a period, while judging in the Ennies, when my collection was well over 1,200 pieces—I donated most of that to my library and traded the rest. My collection is primarily focused on designers I admire, for their POV or their design talents.

For most of my life, my rpg collection fit in a canvas sack. It was easier to transport when I moved for work. In my teens, I thought I would hold onto every big book I got my hands on, but life is too short to collect games I'll never read or play again. To put it another way: shelving is expensive, and 5e takes up too much real estate.

It would have to be the first book I dug out of a yard sale bin: the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide. I still remember smuggling it under my Catholic grandmother's nose.I can replace nearly everything but that book. Of course, now I'm thinking about Reach of the Roach God... Losing that one would sting.

It used to be Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast but it felt weird having this one-of-a-kind game collecting dust on my shelf, so I donated it to the library where teenagers are playing it on the weekends. Reach of the Roach God holds the title now. Last I checked, it's selling for $500. I reference it often.

Nearly every book in my collection earned its spot by surprising me, but Silent Titans is probably the single biggest influence on me in ways I'm still unravelling. The typesetting and the way it uses bullet points are a capital offense, mind you, but everything else about it is still waiting to be repeated. It's personal, cerebral, discombobulating, and yet so tactile. Someday. Someday. Someday.

There's a voice in the back of my head that says, "Some of these companies don't deserve the games they steward." I'm not saying every company should be like Tuesday Knight Games—that would be asking too much. But I think some games, like Pendragon and Runequest, survive purely on sentimentality. When I crack them open, I'm surprised by how little has changed since I played in the 2000s. The mechanics don't change, but I think Runequest would be more like Runequest if they did.

My non-rpg books are the biggest contributors to my games and they're squirreled away everywhere, on shelves, under my bed, in my car door, propping up flower pots—name a place and I have a book or piece of media wedged inside of it. My favorite non-rulebooks that I'd consider part of my collection? Every book I own by Terry Pratchett and Raymond Chandler. The former is my favorite fantasy author—the weirdest, slyest worldbuilder of all time. The latter can write characterization that'll make you laugh and spit on your own carpet.

A set of orange dice with black numbering. They're probably off balance somehow. I rummaged them out of a pound of dice in college and I've yet to find any dice with a color scheme I like more. They fool me into thinking I'm not materialistic.

I use dot grid paper with tear away pages from Fabriano. It's an Italian stationary brand. For writing I use Blackwing and Mitsubishi pencils. They smell like art class and scratch nice dark lines onto the paper without me having to form some kind of antagonistic relationship.

It's my dark secret. Full of pdfs of games I haven't played or read. For the longest time, I preferred PDFs because they don't go through TSA like my canvas sack of books do, but I've since changed my mind, and I hardly look at them.

Seraphina over on Dice Exploder probably has a collection with names I've never heard of. I'd love to peruse her collection.