How big is your RPG collection?

How big is your RPG collection?

  • Colossal - 1,000+ products....yes, people like me really do exist

    Votes: 57 22.6%
  • Gargantuan - 500-1,000....I need a room (and might have one)

    Votes: 44 17.5%
  • Huge - 300-500....I'm your garden-variety pseudo-collector

    Votes: 33 13.1%
  • Large - 100-300....I guess this isn't just a passing phase?

    Votes: 44 17.5%
  • Medium - 20-100....a solid, playable, collection

    Votes: 51 20.2%
  • Small - 5-20 - i'm a minimalist

    Votes: 19 7.5%
  • Tiny - <5 - just the basics

    Votes: 4 1.6%
  • None - Who am I and why am I here?

    Votes: 0 0.0%

Well... I believe that is probably colossal. Good chance of it anyhow, and I'm a statistician by profession.

So out of curiosity, how much do you spend per month on gaming books?


Not much right now, really. I've been accumulating since '83, worked for a game company for a while and now my wife and I own a used bookstore.

Lately, I've just been filling in gaps fairly cheaply.

I'd say, maybe $20-$30 a month.
 

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My collection used to be extensive back in the 80s - it's where a lot of my pocket money went. :) D&D, Traveller, Runequest, Gamma World, Chivalry & Sorcery etc.

Then I had a great cull in the early 90s and reduced it to just a couple of systems (i wasn't playing that many of them after a while - all depending on when the groups could play).

Now I have one primary system and very much like to play others on occasion. I've just been given a copy of Lamentations of the Flame Princess and it looks like some good OSR fun!
 

Most of my collection is boxed up right now, but like spades1013, I've been playing a long time (1977), and actively collecting older stuff since I learned that Dragon sold back issues way back when.

My shelves are somewhat thinned out, and better organized now, but these pics from 2008, 2009, and June of 2010 give a good sense of about 60% of my collection: they don't picture many of my miniatures sets, or the stuff that's boxed up in the attic (magazine collections of Dragon, Polyhedron, Dungeon, White Wolf, Different Worlds; additional wargames; etc.)

So, without further ado, here are the older and more current pics (newer toward the end):

grodog_collection1.jpg



This pic (above) is to show off my wife's "dust guard/make the gaming stuff look less ugly in our bedroom" tapestries; there's one on each of the two 48"x80" bookshelves in the room.

grodog_collection2.jpg



My modern rpgs shelf (same one picture above, just with the tapestry rod removed, which is what I usually need to do while looking for a title). This includes my Call of Cthulhu, Ars Magica, RuneQuest, Star Wars, 3.5/d20 stuff (mostly WotC and NG), Fading Suns, and White Wolf Storyteller stuff (mostly 1e WW, some 2e I suppose).

grodog_collection3.jpg


This is the opposite wall of the room, to help share the awesome disarray of my stuff :oops: ---some of which is caused by the various baby boxes in front of the gaming stuff in front of the fireplace (the picture is sitting on the fireplace lintel), but I just haven't made the time to get it as organized as I need to yet. I do have another week of paternity leave coming up, though, so I'm hoping to make some good headway then.

grodog_collection4.jpg


grodog_collection5.jpg


The above two are some of the boxes in front of the fireplace, and the table between the fireplace and the other bookshelf.

grodog_collection6.jpg


grodog_collection7.jpg


These two are the bookshelf at the right-hand side of our bed (my side). This is where some of the non-TSR D&D is (top shelf), most of the rarer non-TSR stuff, my AD&D stuff, and the Greyhawk campaigning binders, RJK/EGG correspondence/manuscripts/etc.

grodog_collection8.jpg


grodog_collection9.jpg


These are views into our turret room, which is on the front of our house, and off of our bedroom; we'd originally envisioned this room being a baby nursery, but it's been storage since we moved in. There are 4 standard-sized bookshelves along the right wall, and lots of boxes piled around in front. Many TSR boardgames and other misc. boardgames I don't want in the kids' reach in the basement are here too. The shelf closest to the window has gaming magazines, the next shelf has one shelf of overflow magazines, and three shelves of my HPL and related fiction (the rest of my regular fiction bookshelves are also in the basement); the next shelf is Moorcock stuff; the final shelf was supposed to be Neil Gaiman stuff, but got taken over by various and sundry medicines, shampoos, tissues, and other extended-bathroom supply stuff since our bedroom bathroom is pretty small and has essentially zero storage. So, the Gaiman books are boxed up on the floor, along with all of my miniatures, a few boxes of AH/misc. wargames, and some other bric-a-brac.

grodog_collection10.jpg


grodog_collection11.jpg


grodog_collection12.jpg


These last three pics are the HPL and MM shelves.

My collection is making good progress: I've spent several weekends organizing, sorting, and such, and am nearly done with that stage of things! If you scroll back earlier in the thread, you'll see the mess that our bedroom and my storage closet were; things have definitely improved, in the bedroom in particular, where most of the extra boxes have been organized, consolidated, grouped, packed up, labelled, and migrated to the attic:

grodog_collection_organization_progress_004-small.jpg


The boxes remaining in front of the fireplace are AD&D hardcovers and modules (still need to be sorted and grouped beyond shrink/non-shrink), as well as the more-valuable non-manuscript items like OCEs and supplements, Tractics sets, quarto-sized non-TSRs, and wargaming magazines.

Both of the big bookcases are now focused on my immediate research and writing needs (i.e., Greyhawk, dungeon design, Gygax, Kuntz, etc.), and the other rpgs I'm most-likely to play besides D&D in the near term (Call of Cthulhu, Ars Magica, Paranoia, etc.). Both have some open space that I'm still in process of re-sorting to a more-optimal configuration, and I still need to spend more time with the CoC materials to better organize them too.

The closet room is also much-improved, though still a bit of a mess, which is mostly caused by my boxes of minis that aren't as nicely organized as I'd like, and the Moorcock and Gaimon books that I boxed up to make room for shelving/sorting space. The closet will improve once I start to cull the duplicates and unwanteds in earnest!:

grodog_collection_organization_progress_001-small.jpg


and

grodog_collection_organization_progress_003-small.jpg


and

grodog_collection_organization_progress_002-small.jpg


One more weekend of work, and I think I'll be good-to-go!

allan_gaming_shelves-2010-06-13_001-small.jpg


This last image is the main board/war games shelf in the basement, although some of this has also been packed up more recently, too.
 

I think I'm in the Medium category, but I may be leaning into Large.

Counting Dragon, Dungeon, and Polyhedron magazines though, I'd definitely be in at least Large territory.

I'm not really interested in having a collection that is too massive, because I'd never have time to read it all, let alone put it to use.
I do adore books in general though...
 


I underestimated my geek library!

Turns out I have over 400 books. My wife, who's a librarian, has been cataloging them and came up with 413 books that can be easily cataloged and 40 or so that I'll have to manually enter into Library Thing:

My Geek Book Collection

BTW, LibraryThing is awesome for cataloging your collection. Enter or scan in the ISBN and it plugs in the book data for you. Goodman Games stuff, for some reason has been a pain to enter because the ISBNs aren't in the system.
 


I've just spent the past two hours updating my gaming library lists and counting books. :yawn:

The total comes to around 180-190 (Large). That's not including magazines (only a handful after the last purge), books that belong to my wife (she recently edged into Medium), hard copies of PDFs (dozens), and stuff I've culled but haven't yet disposed of (which take up a shelf by themselves).

We have a 6' shelf that holds most of it, with 1-2 shelves' worth of overflow elsewhere. D&D and GURPS dominate my collection, with about 60 books each, with Call of Cthulhu and True20 next at 15-20 each. (The CoC stuff rounds out my 2 shelves of Lovecraftiana.) My D&D collection used to be much bigger, before I got rid of almost all of my pre-3E books; by the time 3.5 came out, I knew I wasn't ever going to play those older editions again.

Next to the RPG bookshelf is another 6' shelf that is packed to bursting with my LEGO collection. Several years ago, I decided that I couldn't afford to build up a decent-sized collection of conventional minis, so I got sold most of them and started building LEGO minis for my games--I was going to keep buying LEGO regardless. ;)
 

p.s. These Colossal collections truly amaze me. I've been gaming for almost 30 years, and GMing for most of that, but even if I had the money and space for to buy them, I could never see myself owning that many RPG books--where would I ever find the time to read them all?!? :erm:
 

A question for those with the Gargantuan collections - do yo do a lot of DMing/GMing? Do you primarily use your own home brew world or a published world?

My answers:

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I DM about 90% of the time or more, and have an expansive home brew.
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