RPGequired RPGeading

While I am chronically something of a slow reader these days, finding it difficult to apprehend text without carefully digesting virtually every word on the page in a painstakingly methodical process that tends to self-discourage, I've been convinced of the value of books for too long to ever stop trying no matter how frustrating the process of devouring them grows. Lacking any other time in my current schedule when I find myself wanting to deal with printed material, I've taken to reading on the bus; usually fantasy novels are the dish I serve myself, but at the moment my meal ticket is the core system book for the 'Mage: the Awakening' Role-Playing Game. (If you don't know what an RPG is, or think it stands for Rocket-Propelled Grenade, I recommend that you get your butt over to Wikipedia and educate yourself on the topic, because I don't feel like spontaneously composing a clone of "Dungeons and Dragons for Dummies" to get you up to speed before you can continue listening to me talk about things I consider interesting.)

I love roleplaying setting books in large part because they are stories without a plot or a main character - I feel that these things as often limit the story as provide it with definition. A plot grows old and tired long before a setting does; watching a movie like "Ninja Scroll", I tire of the story trying to surprise me when I already know how it ends, but I still burn with a desire to know more about the Eight Devils and the other ninja clans, with their many bizarre and wonderful special abilities. It would please me greatly if at some point Hollywood or Tokyo would experiment with creating a movie or TV show that is purely descriptive, not having a sequence of events but simply a lavish audiovisual-motion depiction of things that are cool enough to be stared at like statues in a museum, with no expectation that they should act out some probably-derivative plotline.

So, while I possess enough works of literature that I'm never likely to run out of new things to read, I still treasure the Mage book and other RPG supplements for the fact that, having no plot and no suspense, they can be appreciated indefinitely without regard to where you are in the storyline. I don't even have to keep re-reading the books; once I've consumed them, the worlds they describe come alive in my head, and play themselves out in various permutations anytime I'm bored enough to daydream (such as while I'm at work). In essence, while reading "The Lord of the Rings" lets you thrill to the adventures of Frodo and Aragorn and the various other protagonists, a Middle Earth RPG book simply tells you about the orc-filled mines of Moria, the Ents of the Fangorn Forest, the blasted wastes of Mordor or the palaces of the Elves, and lets you explore any and all of these settings inside your own mind. That, my friends, is adventure that never ends.