Friday, January 20, 2023

Fire Up the Ephemera Furnace

Back in 2010, Elder Tunnels published a short adventure of mine called "The Ephemera Furnace." The villain in the piece (well, sort-of villain) is a mostly-dead knight whose priests held back his soul and kept him "alive" using a device that extracts the emotional energy from sentimental objects and converts it into magic fuel. 

Here in the far-flung future world of 2023, I'm finding myself short on cash, so I've fired up my own ephemera furnace on eBay, selling old collectibles. Some of them were mine, some were Mike's, and some were just things left over from our long-extinct comics & games store. I sold comic books first because I had some valuable ones and they're easy to ship. Now I'm adding toys to the catalog. 

The latest batch includes two of the original Mattel Star Wars toys (Dewback and Scout Walker) and a beat-up Rodan from the Shogun Warriors line. These were all Mike's. He liked big stuff, which made his stuff good display items for the store, which in turn meant that they ended up, mostly intact, in my storage shed.

Rodan was special. Mike loved giant monsters. I'm glad he lived long enough to see Pacific Rim. Instead of fighting Shogun Warriors (I'll also have some of those up for sale soon), he liked to start off having his titans menace smaller-scale toys. It was a dark day for He-Man and friends when Rodan and Godzilla came for Castle Grayskull. 

Rodan is also a popular collectible, though, and it's not like I was getting anything out of keeping him buried in the shed, so into the Ephemera Furnace he goes. At least, in a new collection, it'll be part of someone's life again.


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1 comment:

  1. And looking back at this, I think "The Ephemera Furnace" is the one piece of game design work that I'm unreservedly proud of. Or, adventure design, at least. I obviously didn't design Tunnels & Trolls.

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