At first, I thought this was a really weird prompt, but thinking on it — there’s a lot of older games out there that we wish weren’t gone. And to paraphrase Dr. McCoy, “they’re not really dead so long as we’re still playing them…” So the best second-hand purchase is probably the basic rulebook and GM box set for James Bond: 007 RPG from Victory Games. I’ve said (a lot) before that this was most likely the game I ran the most from 1983 until around the 2000s — not coincidentally because I drifted into that community through the army for a while and lost my taste for it.

An honorable mention has to go to the eBay score where I picked up pretty much all of the books for Jovian Chronicles — a anime-inspired, hardish sci-fi setting that I’ve wanted to run, but the mechanics are terrible and I’ve never been quite able to find an “in” to the setting. It’s rich, there’s tons of stuff, and there’s a background story in the materials that can be quite limiting. I guess I just never quite got to the point of dumping the background story material so that I could “make it my own.”

That’s why eBay and places like Wayne’s Book Store (thanks to Runesligner for turning me on to these guys), and Noble Knight all allow the dedicated (and sometimes money stupid) gamer to find all that stuff we used to love, but that is out of print.

Gah…! I looked up Wayne’s to get the link and there’s something I want.

See?