The Ones I’ve Never Taken Out to Dance (RPGaDay 2017, Day 17)

 

August is RPGaDay month. Yep, a month solid of RPG-related posts, answering these questions:

Today’s question is this:

Which RPG have you owned the longest but not played?

Today’s answer will be short, because, well: it’s an easy answer: 

Until I left Canada, the game I’d owned the longest but never played was Amazing Engine. I had a couple of books for the system—For Faerie, Queen, and Country (which was a neat book in itself) and Kromosome, which was an alright cool cyberpunky type game setting book. Both were designed to use the Amazing Engine game system, which I’ve read wasn’t bad, but which really didn’t catch on the way TSR had hoped it would.  

I owned both for years, but never played them. This is the reason why I brought them with me to Montréal, which ultimately led to me not owning them anymore—they were in that box that contained all the collected Wraith books that got “lost in transit” (yeah, right) by Greyhound, when a friend shipped them to my parents’ house in 2002. Yeah, there’s a little teardrop in my eye somewhere. 

Okay, not really a tear, but For Faerie, Queen, and Country really is one of those gamebooks I’d pick up in an instant if I saw it on the shelf and had the cash to spare in my wallet. The concept—a Victorian world where faeries are real, and have both a practical and a political presence in Britain—is cool in and of itself… but I get the feeling Castle Falkenstein (which I haven’t read, but I have heard about) sort of took the same idea and then did more with it. (I’ve seen others argue this, too.) 

However, given that I no longer own either of those books, I guess I’d have to say Ravenloft. I know, that’s not technically speaking an RPG, but an RPG supplement. Still, I’ve owned both of the main 2nd edition AD&D Ravenloft boxed sets (Realms of Terror and Domains and Denizens), plus a small stack of supplements—mainly Von Richten Guide series books—that I picked up cheap second-hand at a game shop on Whyte Avenue in Edmonton, where I lived in 1994-95 (yes, twenty-two years ago!). I remember being excited, especially because the Domains and Denizens boxed set still had the dice and 

However, I’ve never actually run or played a single session of Ravenloft-flavored AD&D. 1 Again, I considered bringing the Ravenloft stuff to Korea with me last time we visited Canada, but I ended up leaving all my D&D stuff behind.