"Desert island" RPGs...

I've seen this meme a lot lately, and frankly I'm not impressed.

Limiting the selection to a "top ten" seems hardly strict enough. Seems like the easy way out.

Instead, I want you to give me a "top three."

Mine:

1. Labyrinth Lord. The best version of the best version of D&D.

2. Fudge 10th Anniversary Edition. The most flexible and intuitive RPG ever designed, in my experience. I'd use this for everything and anything that D&D didn't do better.

3. Delta Green (Call of Cthulhu). Even without any version of the CoC rules to back it up, this the single most exceptional example of an RPG support product to appear in the last two decades. Indispensable.

You know what I'd love to get my hands on?

Some of TSR's old Mail Order Hobby Shop catalogs from when I was a kid.

Being obsessed with D&D pre-Internet and not having too much money to buy product or a local hobby store, those suckers were sure tantalizing. I probably paged through some of them until they just about disintegrated.

eBay, perhaps?

Because it's not being reported nearly enough: Aaron Allston needs help.

With the emotional fallout over a certain well-known designer that fails to understand pre-WotC D&D so much it physically hurts and James Mishler's negative predictions about the future of RPGs as a moneymaking industry, there's one story that I feel has been sadly neglected.

It seems that RPG and sci-fi writer Aaron Allston, who counts the legendary Champions supplement Strike Force and the D&D Rules Cyclopedia among his more famed gaming works, has suffered some heart trouble resulting in an emergency bypass operation. Like many others who've found themselves unexpectedly navigating the treacherous waters of the U.S. health care system, the bills have piled-up and Mr. Allston is in need of some help.

Please see this site for information on donations and an upcoming charity auction being held to benefit Mr. Allston.

Thanks to The Sandbox of Doom for the heads-up on this one. And to any other bloggers and forum junkies out there, please help spread the word.

Get well, Mr. Allston.

Being there.

Almost two decades after I was introduced to D&D, I had my first