Shelfie #006

My name is Lukas and I would describe myself as a Game-Enthusiast, Game-Developer, Tinkerer and Scanner. I made video-games for a living for quite some time, and after a while away from the industry, I re-joined just a few weeks ago. In my free time I am focusing more on analog games like TTRPGs, skirmish wargames and sometimes boardgames with many projects started, but none of them published (yet).

A reflection of my interests, fascination, history with games and dreams for the future. It's also a never-ending source of inspiration for me as I tend to grab something from the collection to skim through, (re-)discover something and make up scenarios in my head. I also like to see it as a kind of library to give other people insights on what's possible and available in this greatest hobby of all.

It's just growing 😅 Some stuff I am not as interested anymore keeps moving to the bottom of the shelves or into the basement shelves. But my desire is to never get rid of anything permanently. I like the idea to show the collection to my recently born nephew (or maybe kids in the future) and tell him stories of past adventures of mine. And then handing him the books to go on his own adventures. I never had this experience myself, but I guess that's one reason why I love buying old, well-used games from other peoples' collections.

I wanted to say Shadowdark instinctively, because it's such an awesome game. But the more I think about it, the more I believe it has to be the Knock! magazine collection (that's one thing, right). Rulesets are so important to play the game, but even more important are the people we play with and the creative people creating those rulesets, adventures and other things in the hobby. And in my opinion that creativity is perfectly condensed in the Knock! magazines. It feels like the source code to a lot of amazing stuff. And I think Kelsey Dionne (creator of Shadowdark) said something similar once 😆. If I could keep another thing (or a bunch), I'd add my small collection of zines of all different kind. Because zines represent a similar cauldron of inspiration by a ton of great creators in our hobby. I really need a better way to store them, right?

The Rollenspiel-Nordwest Gazette (RNG#1), the (first) zine we made in our local community. Like the Knock! magazines, it feels like an awesome collection of creativity, joy for our hobby and community that I am very proud to be a part of. Also I finally managed to write down (and kind of published) a version of my own system in the back of it, which is super cool.

After a looooooong wait, the Legend in the Mist Kickstarter finally arrived a few weeks ago. Although I am not sure I will ever play it as written, I think it's a great source of inspiration for vibes, ideas and mechanics. The idea of rustic fantasy and the grounded setting of the Ravensdale just tickle me in exactly the right way.

The oldest one in general has to be B2: The Keep on the Borderlands I got off of ebay. But the one that has been in my possession for the longest is the Das Schwarze Auge 4.1 (The Dark Eye) core book . I got that one around 20 years ago when I tried playing TTRPGs for the first time. It never really worked out for me back then, because I had no group, my friends weren't interested and the rules were pretty clunky. But the seed was planted and has grown big since then.

First Dungeon World (and other PbtA games after that) showed me that even very basic and fundamental mechanics (like initiative for example) can be thrown overboard to create a very different kind of experience. And later Shadowdark which opened the gates to the OSR for me and showed me that relatively basic rules help me personally as a GM to improvise at the table and lifted a huge burden of cognitive load off of my shoulders while running games. Dungeon World and Blades in the Dark started that journey, but just shifted the complexity from rules to coming up with meaningful consequences etc. Shadowdark finally allowed me to just sit down with friends and have a great time without hours and hours of prep and/or sweating at the table.

D&D 5e. When I first started playing just around when 5e released, I thought this would be my go-to system forever. Mainly because of the base mechanics of rolling a d20 over a target number, basic skills and relatively streamlined combat (compared to DSA for example). But the more I played and, more importantly, ran it, the more the suggested expectations took over. Every combat has to be somewhat balanced, players are expecting an interesting story to be presented to them, pre-written adventures are huge and complex to prepare, the mechanics "teach" the players to just react to the GM's input, etc. Since then I think I found everything I hoped for back then in the OSR. Maybe that will change in the future as well. We will see.

This is a tough one. But I'll go with Mörk Borg. A lot of games in my collection have amazingly beautiful artwork, but for Mörk Borg, the book itself is the artwork. For me Pirate Borg is a better game than the vanilla Borg, but I'll say it again: the Mörk Borg book itself is art.

Broadly from top to bottom by favorites to not-so-favorites. But also by shelf-height in some cases 😆 Some of those books are just taaaaall! I try to keep product lines or themes together, like the One Ring, Star Wars, Warhammer, Land of Eem, etc.

Into the Cess and Citadel, because I love Into the Wyrd and Wild and I refuse to just get a digital copy. I have grabbed Into the Wyrd and Wild so many times for inspiration and world-building for my Shadowdark game and that just doesn't work digitally for me.

Gwelf: The Survival Guide by Larry MacDougall, with its beautiful art and worldbuilding, just begs me to run a campaign in the setting some day.

I am not that big of a dice-guy, I mainly like large amounts of them. But the one I fell immediately in love with are from the Pirate Borg Starter Set with their big numbers. Easy to read, still not boring font, interesting shapes for the D4 and a D2 coin included.

For pens it's the Zebra Sarasa Clip all the time. I prefer the thicker 0.7mm variant, some other people—cough Jonas cough [Editor's note: There are dozens of us! Dozens!]—prefer the inferior 0.5mm variant. Disgusting. As a player I use simple, cheap dotted A6-sized pocket-notebooks I got in bulk once. I don't really prep for most of my games, but for my Shadowdark setting, I use an A5-sized binder for modularity. It includes one sheet for each hex I already detailed, a calendar to have a meaningful campaign with strict time records and some house-rules. For day-to-day life notetaking, I adopted the Grail Method as described by Perry Daniels. That, of course, also includes many TTRPG-related notes and ideas.

My digital collection lives on a NAS and is not that well organized, but almost completely offline. I use a small script that downloads my entire DriveThruRPG library automatically, so nobody can take it away in the future (thanks WotC for the paranoia) and a separate (manually downloaded) folder with Kickstarter rewards and stuff like that. I tried to collect a lot of PDFs in the past, but realized I will almost never use them digitally. So I try to get physical stuff nowadays or print digital only products as A5-sized zines for actual use. I use GoodReader on an iPad for the occasional digital skim-through.

I want to give some honorable mentions to some books, because I just think they are super cool and/or interesting and you should check them out if you haven't already. They greatly influenced my collection and the way I play in one way or the other: Old-School Essentials, Swyvers, Forbidden Lands, DarkSpace, The Sprawl, The Monster Overhaul, Dolmenwood, The Perilous Wilds, Beyond Corny Groń, Spire, Neverland, Mothership.

I'd love to see what inspires great minds like Kelsey Dionne and Gavin Norman. But also what my GM-Friends Jonas and Aaron keep in their collections and what interesting thoughts they have!