Long ago—before cell phones or even pagers—back in the very early days of 1980, I had an idea. I decided to keep all my gaming materials in a single binder so I would always have what I needed, when I needed it. I didn’t know it then, but my nine-year-old brain was setting a habit that would last for decades. I still do it today, though my methods of storage have changed quite a bit.
That first binder, packed with all my Dungeons & Dragons notes, filled quickly. It soon held not just my characters and their stories, but also world notes, rule adjustments, and even my first hand-drawn maps. I made four maps that I gave to my sister for her seventh-grade teacher to use in his class. I have no idea whatever became of them, but I like to think they might have inspired another young person to become gamer.
The years progressed as they do, and more files, paper, books, and maps would follow. My first personal computer, gifted to me from an uncle, was a Timex Sinclair 1000. I typed as much of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual into that little machine as it could hold. When it ran out of memory, I saved the files to a cassette tape drive and then started again. Looking back, that was probably the start of my archiving madness.
Time moved on, and so did technology. By the early 1990s, my Apple IIe, acquired from my sister, became my main digital storage for gaming materials, though I still relied heavily on hard copies since they were easier to take to school or friends’ houses and floppy disks were notoriously questionable.
1995 was the eclipse year. That year saw a preponderance of my gaming materials migrate to my new PC. I wrote my first full adaptation of Warhammer 40,000 and Tyranid Attack into the Space Hulk rules system. When Second Edition Warhammer 40,000 came out with the Tyranid Codex, I included it as well as the the old Zoats from my Rogue Trader days. At the time, I was experimenting with HTML and formatted the entire thing as a web page. Eventually it was printed into a 70-page rulebook. That print still exists, in its binder—a friend of mine has it, along with all my old Space Hulk materials.
I know “librarying” isn’t a real word in standard English, but it perfectly describes what I’m doing—turning all my scattered files into a well-organized, easy-to-access digital library. If you visit the Game Archives page, you’ll find a list of the games currently being added to that growing collection.
– Dru
Dru's Den of Ill Repute 