Mentalechoes

Back when I was in university, I joined a group of friends in starting up a Rolemaster RPG campaign on the weekends. There was a steady group of five to six of us, with guest heavy sessions where we would have anything up to ten or eleven all crammed into a study room. Admittedly back then the guest sessions were generally curious geek guys from our computer science course who gravitate towards this kind of pasttime, and even more curious women trying to work out what kind of game would make guys scream bestial roars at one another and then roll dice. We played in earnest for nearly three years, and I can honestly say I had some of the most entertaining times of my life in those grey cement brick study rooms with Rolemaster manuals scattered over the tables, living out tales of high adventure!

So at the end of that time of my life, it was with a touch of sadness and more than an hour of screaming and ranting when a friend of mine who promised to sell me his Rolemaster manuals (all fourteen of them) ended up giving them away to another (very undeserving) friend for free. It took me nearly a month to get over the shock, and about three more to stop schemeing these Machavellian schemes to get those manuals back while simultaenously dropping both of those bastards into a volcano in a seemingly freak accident. It was more than losing a couple of books, it was losing the tangible history and icons of those magic days and nights of our friendship and unbounded imagination.

For the past few years I’ve been on ebay, scowering the dusty corners of online bookshops and the private collections of sellers looking to put back together my small RM 2nd edition library. And I’ve been largely successful, with now nine of the fourteen books in my possession. With each new addition that arrives I savour opening it, because as I turn over every page the memories come flooding back and I smile at the vividness with which I can almost hear the tabletop echoes from decades ago. I think it’s been more fun this way, having to collect the books one at at time over a period of years as it does make me feel a little bit like a collector in some small way. There’s a pride when other people who share the same hobby look at the books and remark how wickedly cool it is to see them together. I’m pretty sure I never would have appreciated the other books had they all have been sold to me back in the day. And I’m not one to hold a grudge at being fucked over now by that old bastard mate! I can’t hardly remember it at all… the fuckers!

I think with things like this, we aren’t so much collecting items, as collecting the fun parts of our past, and bring the good times to life again, if only for fleeting moments!

Andy.