Because of when I was born (late 1978) and the way the world has changed during my life, I think a lot about access to information. When I was a kid, it was difficult to get access to the info I wanted. Say, info about Dungeons & Dragons, in the form of D&D books. There were a whole lot of reasons for this, but they’re secondary to the result: I only had a little bit of D&D stuff as a kid.

Now, thanks to the internet, I have all the D&D stuff, and stuff from any other RPG, at my beck and call. If there is something I want, and I have the scratch to pay for it, I can get it in my hands in the span of a few days. This is awesome. Like, really, really awesome. But it also has an unforeseen side effect: I rarely have to make do with something else.

Because of the relative scarcity of the things I wanted as a kid, I was forced to make do a lot. Couldn’t convince mom to go to buy that nice new Monster Manual at the bookstore? Trudge off to the library to check out Daniel Cohen’s A Natural History of Unnatural Things for the umpteenth time.

Daniel Cohen was a children’s author who specialized in books about monsters, ghosts and other weird stuff. Most of his books are collections of essays about legendary boogeymen. Unnatural Things follows this, covering witchcraft, werewolves, vampires, demons, giants, fairies, zombies and robots. Each essay pulls from everything from folklore to movies with glee, usually accompanied by a smorgasbord of woodcuts and film stills. He wrote over 100 books like this, but Unnatural Things is probably my favorite – it has something to do with the one-two punch of that delightfully 70s cover design and the Arabian Nights-style cyclops that features so prominently on it.

Was A Natural History of Unnatural Things the book I wanted? Nope. But in making do with it, it wound up broadening my horizons. By the time I got to Appendix N, I had read a good quarter of the authors it contained, because books like Cohen’s nudged me to do more than make do with other authors while I waited for the next roleplaying book. And all that making do eventually fed into a big pool of knowledge that I have used as inspiration for pretty much every game I’ve ever run.