RPG Library Use

Between backing Kickstarter projects, Bundles of Holding, Humble Book Bundles, and of course OneBookShelf, I have a lot of RPG material that is non-GURPS. I am a sucker for system-less content and indeed non-generic content that can be mined for inspiration. Obviously GURPS is a relatively niche product in a mainly d20 market, so there's lots more D&D-compatible stuff out there. I already have much of the GURPS catalogue, so I feed my hobby fix with plenty of systemless and D&D stuff. This was how I discovered the World of Jordoba Player Guide which is the basis for our DF campaign setting, from a Humble Bundle collection.

    The fact that PDFs don't take up physical space makes this habit harder to resist (although I still have plenty of dead tree material too). PDFs are easier for reference; searching for a particular GURPS rule at the table takes less time on the computer*. However I prefer to read print than screen, so much of my PDF library languishes on my hard drive unused, which is a shame. More importantly, there's undoubtedly a trove of unmined inspiration that I've yet to tap.

    So I need to fix that. Part of this is printing the content that I will want to read more than once. More importantly, and more difficult, is organising the files on my hard drive so that I can find appropriate non-GURPS stuff easily when I'm just browsing.

    Recently I backed a bunch of generic projects on KS by Philip Reed Games, and among them got PDFs of all four of his Outdoor Encounter Cards (I don't see the other three decks on the DriveThruRPG store, but that page will give you an indication). Nice B&W art, with a brief descriptive text and suggested idea below. I already got inspiration for one encounter, which I then adapted to link to a couple of existing ideas for the campaign. That was good, but since then the PDFs have sat on my HDD unused. So now I have printed all four of the series onto card paper and trimmed them (somewhat haphazardly) with scissors to fit into a card box. 

    It ain't as pretty as professionally printed cards of course (that wasn't an option on the KS for me), but it is eminently more accessible in this format for my purposes. With that done, the task of sorting through my PDF material continues...

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    *That said, a good index massively helps. GURPS books do very well on that score. I have an anecdote that I may have mentioned this previously on the blog, but in the early days of this DF campaign (before I started this blog), the wizard in the party wanted to conjure a wheelbarrow using the Create Object spell. To know how much energy the spell would require meant knowing the weight of a wheelbarrow. I could have guessed, but I didn't have to... We happened to be playing that session at my place, so I got up from the table, walked over to the bookshelf and grabbed GURPS Low-Tech, opened the index, found Wheelbarrows on p.133, and had our answer. It takes me longer to tell that story than it did to find the info. Consider that a recommendation for Low-Tech; the GURPS Low-Tech Companion series is also good if you want additional historical verisimilitude on their specific topics.