End Of An Era

Today, I ordered a copy of a Mongoose Legend roleplaying book direct from the Mongoose Publishing website, marking the end of an era for me - the last time I will go out of town to get a gaming book from the FLGS.

All this time, thirty years of my life, and I've headed out of town semi-regularly to visit Manchester, Liverpool, Chester or Birmingham - every single time, it was to lay my hands on a book that I couldn't get from town.

Since the end of 2011, I've been buying game books from DriveThruRPG pretty much exclusively as PDF documents. I've not needed a hardcopy of a game book since the day I bought the Mongoose Legend core rulebook from Fan Boy 3 in Manchester. That - along with the exorbitant cost of travel out of town - had already drastically cut down on the frequency of my visits from weeks to months.

The closure of New Aeon Books, an occult bookstore I'd haunted since the late 1980s and 1990s, also contributed to the drastic reduction of frequency of my visits. Offhand, I don't know of any decent occult bookstores in the North West or North Wales now that New Aeon has closed down, and London is way too far for me.

But I still needed books on occasion, and that would mean ordering them in my FLGS and making my way to Manchester, or phoning Waylands Forge in Birmingham to check if they had a copy and heading on down to the Venice of the West Midlands.

Until today.

About the only hardcopy I have wanted to obtain of late was Arcania of Legend: Blood Magic for Legend. I have Legend Core Rulebook and Arms of Legend in both PDF and hardcopy format; I just wanted the hardcopy of this third book and that would be that. Anything else, I can collect as a PDF from Drivethru. Just these three books are all the Legend hardcopies I may need.

So today, instead of phoning the FLGS, I just ordered it from the Mongoose Publishing website, and that was that. All that remains now is the waiting.

And when the book arrives on my doorstep ... that's it. No more visits to Manchester, Brum or anywhere for roleplaying books. If I need a hardcopy and I can get it from Waterstone's, I'll check on the website and arrange for its delivery to my local branch; and if I need an RPG book for any reason, chances are it's going to be as a PDF from DriveThru, directly downloaded to my computer and flash drives.

It'll feel very strange, not heading out of town on a whim any more. I guess I will need to have another reason to go up to Birmingham, Chester, Manchester or Liverpool from now on, other than the hunt for books.

And I bet you thought, all this time, I was visiting these towns for the prostitutes or something.