My
DM Guide, here it sits at the table next to me. It's a beloved tome and has been well used over the years so let me describe it a little to you. It is the Wizard cover version and bought almost as soon as it came out, way back in the summer of 1984. It was pristine, it was new and it was to my mind at the time, a book that held a multitude of secrets since the departing
DM at the time held his real close and not a peek inside were we ever allowed. It smelt fresh and the glue that held it was strong, to be honest it smelt faintly of sick but I guess that it was just me. It didn't bother me however, I had it and it was mine and that's all that counted.
Now, it looks like a survivor of some nuclear war, battered, stained, thumbed to death but still grimly hanging on. There on one page is a wine stain, a memoir of a drunken night where having a good laugh seemed more important than playing at the time. There on another page lies a beer stain, again a sign of another good night. Speckled here and there are the remains of flavourings that had transferred themselves from various crisps to my thumb and thence onto the pages.
Pencil marks are in profusion too, some are sketches made by me in moments of boredom- others are corrections to a mistake or two in the book, yet others are attempts to describe flavours experienced when players partake a potion (poison tastes of honey- don't why I thought of that at the time) I had even started but never finished filling in the pages pertaining to artefacts. One player had even written "Yngvie is a louse!!" on one of the treasure pages. My dear departed father had gotten in on the act too by carefully printing, in PEN, my full name and address on the inside cover- something I was annoyed about at the time but it is something of him I still have so I'm treasuring it.
The once pristine smell has gone too, it now smells like some doddering old age pensioner at some retirement home, it simply reeks of tobacco smoke- reminders of the time when I partook of the weed. Mind you, a lot of the players also smoked so the guide coughed and spluttered through all of that.. The cover has bumps, scrapes, dents and the spine has lost a lot of the vivid orange and just looks bleached.
Sitting there it looks like a sad and neglected member of the
DM family but that's far from being the case. Although I don't play ADD much nowadays I still haul the old guy out and thumb through it, remembering every stain and the occasion when it happened, reading the rules and enjoying Gygax's prose. It reminds me of the great fun I had playing, the laughs and the drunken nights all those years ago.
Yup, I love the old guy, me and him have seen a lot down the years together. Will I sell it on ebay? no, some things are far too precious
