Uncomfortable Truths

Thoughts Occasioned by Reviews

Since I’ve spent the past few weeks reflecting on Grognardia’s regular features, I thought it might be worthwhile to turn my attention today to my reviews. Before sitting down to write this, I didn’t think I’d done all that many. I knew I’d written plenty of Retrospective posts about older RPG products I felt deserved renewed attention, but those focused on the early decades of the hobby, not contemporary releases.

However, when I looked over Grognardia’s statistics, I was surprised to discover that I’ve actually written nearly 200 reviews. That’s a lot!

So why did I think I’d written fewer? Two hundred posts place the review series squarely in Grognardia’s middle tier in terms of length. Yet, that’s still more than most other recurring features and roughly half as many as the Retrospectives, which remain the blog’s longest-running series by far. Even so, I hadn’t realized just how many there were. Why not?

After thinking about it for a while, I came to an uncomfortable truth: I didn’t want to have written that many reviews. To admit I had was to admit that, despite my protests, I’m just as entangled in the hobby’s consumerist habits as anyone else. It’s not a pleasant realization. This is, after all, a pastime that can be pursued with little more than a few friends, a handful of dice, and one’s imagination. Somewhere along the line, though, we built an entire industry around selling things to support something that doesn’t really require them at all. Remember the afterword to OD&D, “why have us do any more of your imagining for you?”

One need only look at my bookshelves — or, worse, my garage — to see the evidence. I own more RPG products than I could ever use, even if I lived to a ripe old age and played every day. Many have never seen the table at all. Some, I’ve barely read. And yet I keep acquiring more. Reviewing them only underscores this pattern: a cycle of discovery, acquisition, and evaluation that sometimes feels like a substitute for actual play.

Of course, I can offer the partial defense that many of those products were sent to me by publishers rather than purchased outright. During the First Age of Grognardia, the blog was one of the most widely read in the Old School Renaissance and publishers were understandably eager for coverage. Even a critical review meant attention and, in a niche hobby like ours, attention is gold.

But the truth is a great many of the products I reviewed were things I bought with my own money, drawn in by an interesting premise, an evocative cover, or the hope that this one might spark new inspiration. That’s the paradox of it: I rail against the commodification of imagination, yet I, too, often find myself seduced by it.

Maybe that’s the point. The tension between imagination and materiality has always been baked into this hobby. The dice, the rulebooks, the miniatures are all tools, yes, but also tangible symbols of something fundamentally intangible. They give shape to our creativity and, perhaps, make it feel more real. Buying a new book can be an act of aspiration: a belief that, through it, we might rediscover the spark that first drew us to hobby in the first place.

Still, there’s a line somewhere, a point where collecting overtakes creating. I suspect my unease comes from realizing how easily that can happen and how often it has, even to me, who is keenly aware of it. I obviously don’t think the answer is to renounce all material trappings of the hobby or to pretend the industry that’s grown around it is inherently corrupt. However, I do think it’s worth remembering that, at its heart, roleplaying isn’t something you buy, but something you do.

Perhaps that’s what I’ve been circling around without quite saying: the reviews, the retrospectives, the piles of unread supplements are all part of a larger conversation about what we value in this hobby. Are we celebrating imagination or just consuming its byproducts? Probably a bit of both. And that’s all right, as long as we don’t forget which comes first.

(This isn’t the post I intended to write when I sat down to do so, but it’s apparently what was on my mind in some fashion. I have more to say about Grognardia’s reviews, but I’ll save them for next week.)