speaking of saturation...

Today I deleted my automatic daily eBay search for all things Traveller related. Not because I've suddenly stopped digging on Trav, but because I don't need it anymore. Except for a very few cases where I am unwilling to pay collector prices for an item (Spinward Marches Campaign, I'm looking at you), I otherwise have pretty much everything I want from the out-of-print Trav market. I'm not one of those guys who has to have every single item ever printed for a gameline. I can quit anytime, I tell you! At some point I could see myself picking up some more Far Future reprints, such as the Journal of the Travellers Aid Society compilations or I might get some of the '101' line from BITS. But for now I'm quite satisfied with the mountain of material already in hand. There are a few PDFs floating around that are of some interest, I suppose. Some of the stuff from ComStar Games looks pretty good. Still I wouldn't be surprised if my next Traveller purchase was the new 5th edition of the game, whenever that might come out. Don't expect me to shut up about Trav, though! I've still got plenty to work on in my obsessive wiki project.

With the elimination of my daily Traveller scan, I'm down to exactly one automated eBay search. (Down from a peak of around 25 or so searches. At one time I was buying old crap like it was going out of style.) I'd still like to scare up a copy of Tom Moldvay's module Seren Ironhand. Over the last few years several copies have shown up for sale, all listed by this same "hamilcar" fellow who must have a case of them stashed away somewhere. Every time one comes up my cheapskate bid leads the auction until the collectors swoop down en masse and snipe the price well out of my comfort zone. I love Moldvay's work but I ain't paying forty bucks for one adventure! Especially for part two of a trilogy when parts one and three were never published.

Now that I think about it, I don't know for certain that Hamilcar owns more than one copy of Ironhand. Maybe he sells the same copy over and over, and he's really some sort of psycho who stalks and kills his buyers! Clearly I should call the police! Surely they would want to consider this possibility!