How Darkness Brought Me Back into the Light

Back in 1996, I was a wreck, mostly due to the panic attack and realizations that I suffered soon after my birthday that year.  I was so bad off.  I barely did anything.  By that summer, I was starting to make changes.  One of those, as I have mentioned in earlier posts, would be weightlifting.  I know, it was a radical change for me, but it has improved both my health and my mode ever since.  Another change was getting into role-playing games.  While I never did join up with any others to actually play with, I still enjoyed learning how and imagining myself as a designer for such a world.  My primary interest was in the World of Darkness lines from the original While Wolf studios.  I knew much about them from gaming magazines, as well as the very short-lived television series Kindred: the Embraced that was based off of one of their lines.  Well, there were some other outlets of information that I won't go into.  That September, I decided to actually get into the games by buying the first core book.  The store was out of stock, but they did have the fairly recently released historical game line core booklet.  It had the same basic rules set, just set in the Dark Ages instead of modern times.  I got it, and I was hooked.  Sure, I really wasn't interested in history, but just knowing about the world was enough to brighten my world, so to speak.  A few days later, I purchased the companion book, which expanded on the material covered in the core and allowed for more possibilities in game play and function.  A month later, on Halloween, I finally got the actual modern setting core book.  I then went back to the store later that day to pick up the player's guide.  I just had to have it.  I would wind up getting the other core books a quickly as I could, getting supplements that caught my eye.  I was even getting new products, sometimes as soon as they came out.  I was ordering them from my local shop, as well as searching them out at other stores whenever I could.  I passed over a few, that in hindsight I wish I had gotten.  One of the reasons why I chose/forced to open a book store was so I could get these books directly, without having to worry about having my local shop missing my order.  Turns out, the store's primary distributor didn't carry that company, but I still would get some through our secondary distributor.  In 2003, I lost well love half of my collection, as well as so many other things, to a flood.  Two months later, I found out the company was ending the current games and replacing them with new lines, ones where a definitive ending wasn't so guaranteed.  That meant not only that I had lost so much, but there would be no way for me to ever easily get them back.  I managed to replace a dozen or so immediately, mostly core books, and a few more in the decades since.  I got much of the new games as they came out, a mix of from the local game store and well as my own (our new primary distributor was carrying the books).  While I liked them, I never got into them as much as I did the originals.  Things changed in 2010.  The company changed its business model, part of the numerous corporate shake-ups it was experiencing.  It was going to a print-on-demand/download model.  Since I didn't have a computer or a credit card at the time, this meant I was our of luck getting their new books.  I even missed out on getting the one last book that I really wanted for my collection.  My distributors never got it in when I was placing orders.  This led to another minor panic attack, nowhere near the big one or the one I had when I realized the original lines were ending.  I would keep track over the years, finding out about new products, while occasionally working on my own games, trying to perfect them enough to warrant trying to see if they could be good enough to join theirs.  Corporate conditions kept changing, as properties and companies changed hands.  Books were still being online only, but a new company now owned the intellectual property, while another company founded by the original crew made new books, both for the new games but the originals as well, as special "anniversary" style products featuring both old and revised/new information.  Almost the entirety of the old books were also available again in this format.  As I mentioned in the last post, everything game together for me to finally purchase the six core rule books as PDF downloads, at a price less than getting just one of them as a POD hardcover.  I still would prefer physical copies, as well as some of the other new/updated books, but they can come later.  I am still pouring over the details in the books, but the old joy is returning.  Having these games as an interest helped bring me out of the funk as was in, at least enough so I could continue living, if not fully back into the world.  Connecting online would be the start of that, but this has helped me become who I am now, a person I much prefer to how I was back then,