White Gloves
A semi-autobiographical strip today. I recently picked-up the collector’s edition of Volo’s Guide to Monsters which is cool and shiny – in both a figurative and literal sense – but I’m terrified to use it. I paid $60 for a lovely piece of shelf decoration. If it were just a variant cover I’d be careful but feel willing to risk using the book, but the cover is a mix of gloss and matte black with metallic silver highlights. It’s very lovely, but I’m terrified of damaging it and reducing its value as a collective… even if I’m never likely to sell it.
This isn’t the first time I’ve been paranoid. I purchased the collector’s edition of Rise of the Runelords for Pathfinder. But that was just faux leather (harder for grubby fingers to damage) and a higher price, which paradoxically made it easier to justify using: more money to have wasted on the book not to use it.
Both of those books are way too expensive and ostentatious for my blood, but I totally get where you are coming from.
Before Geoffrey McKinney’s Carcosa RPG became a thick $40+ hardcover book (with foil leaf cover, bound bookmark, and jokes about anthropodermic covers) for the Lamentations of the Flame Princess rule-set (an old-school D&D retro-clone), it was a simple $12 booklet presented as an unofficial “Supplement V” to OD&D, cut & bound by McKinney himself. The low price and novelty of the setting* became an instant hit in the OD&D community, so he was forced to stop making them on his own due to the sudden demand for his booklets. I was lucky to get it while it was still available. I have a few rare, old RPG books in my collection (as well as some over-priced 3.x door-stoppers that end up not being worth it), but despite it being a $12 booklet from 2008, it feels way more special to me due to the work he put into it, and the originality of the setting. =)
*The setting is a dark, godless CoC-themed alien world, void of all the usual high-fantasy elements, and geared more towards pulp-era sci-fi/fantasy.