The heartbreak of garage cleaning

[Ulrick]

I may sell some published stuff from time-to-time. But I will never again throughout any material I've written. The last time I did was in 7th grade (like 17-18 years ago). It was a hand written adventure called "The Tomb of Times Past." I threw it right after running it for my friends--we all thought it was a lame adventure and I could do better.
I remember throwing it into the garbage figuring that I wouldn't regret it. I remember thinkig: "It was a stupid adventure after all. The characters travelled all the way to the Abbor-Alz to discover a near-empty crypt. They fought only a couple skeletons, a nasty ghoul, and found very little treasure."

Other early adventures from my middle school years met the same fate: "A yuan-ti and his tasloi minions using a siege tower against a town? Ha! Yeah, right!"

A few years later I did regret getting rid of that old stuff, because I wanted to see what my adventures were like back then. A couple of poster maps I drew from that period are gone, too. I'm not sure what happened to them.

The moral: hold on to what you've written, even if its terrible. You might miss it someday.

 

[shadzar]

Give it to someone else to use....then at least it had a chance at a second life if not discarded. Maybe even that person will pass on parts of the whole of it to someone else.

If you dont want monetary return on it, then giving it to someone else is ALWAYS better than adding to the over abundant landfills we have today, or polluting the air with burnable "refuse".

If no one else wants it either recycle it by using it for something else, or donate it to somewhere if they are interested. If your own design, paper makes for good wrapping material, so make a book cover for an RPG or other book out of your old map and have an interesting conversation piece when others see it.

 

[TerraDave]

I don't throw out my old notes and that sort of thing. If anything, like I to pick them up and say "WTF".

I have also been careful to keep older stuff I know that nostalgia or interest might force me to rebuy. Anything from 85 or earlier that I somehow lost I regret, and rounding out my collection in that area remains a priority (it helps that less was released back then, compared to the huge flood of stuff that would come later).

3E and now 4E stuff, that is what I need to get rid of.

 

[Tarek]

I should throw out my old campaign materials. It's baggage I don't need cluttering up my mind. Getting rid of it will free me from this nagging unfinished feeling.

 

[fba827]

What do the rest of you long timers do with your old material? Ever faced with tossing some of it?

During one move, i had to throw out lots of stuff too (well, okay, i put it in the book and paper recycling). i gave myself two medium-sized boxes for RPG material, anything that couldn't fit in there had to be gone....

original d&d adventures from my OD&D days, scores of AD&D books, all my hollow world gazetteers, dozens and dozens of spiral notebooks filled with maps, concepts, encounters, plots, etc that i did by hand

It has since grown to 3 boxes worth of material with stuff I purchased, or did, or drafted since then. But, wow, I felt some serious pain when I had to get rid of the older stuff. In fact, I still think about lots of the material I gave up then and still sort of wish I had it.

Every time I think I should get rid of some of the books I don't touch now, I start thinking about that earlier situation and how much I might miss the books once they are gone even though i'm not touching them at the moment.

but, yeah, i definitely felt the pain when i had to do it and will feel the pain if I ever have to do it again ...

 

[thedungeondelver]

I tend to hang on to characters. Adventure ideas and maps, not so much.

There's a few that have sentimental value to me: the map I did on the blank sheet of graph paper in the back of B2, for example...some horrid notes for incorporating Aliens (complete with profile style drawings!) into STAR FRONTIERS...stuff I should probably just toss in the garbage.

Nowdays I do it all on the computer so it just gets deleted.