Seeking Advice About Theft

With all these scans, I feel a lot better about the situation. It wasn't as much about the loss of the objects as the loss of the content of the objects. But if my exhaustive search this weekend isn't successful, I am still stuck with one additional concern. Do I ditch all four friends? Or do I just hope that it never happens again?

Without anything to go on, I don't think I'd do anything more. (I am very conflict-averse, though.) If you like the people, and nothing else goes missing, chalk it up to "one of those things". I wouldn't ditch three friendships over vague suspicions about a fourth, especially if I didn't know which was which.

Shellhead wrote: With all these scans, I feel a lot better about the situation. It wasn't as much about the loss of the objects as the loss of the content of the objects. But if my exhaustive search this weekend isn't successful, I am still stuck with one additional concern. Do I ditch all four friends? Or do I just hope that it never happens again?

Ditching all of them seems extreme. However, you'd do well to keep things in an area that guests can't go or in a locked area. I don't know what your game/RPG collection physical situation, but moving it into a bedroom or room that can be locked will be better for peace of mind.

Rliyen wrote:

Shellhead wrote: With all these scans, I feel a lot better about the situation. It wasn't as much about the loss of the objects as the loss of the content of the objects. But if my exhaustive search this weekend isn't successful, I am still stuck with one additional concern. Do I ditch all four friends? Or do I just hope that it never happens again?

Ditching all of them seems extreme. However, you'd do well to keep things in an area that guests can't go or in a locked area. I don't know what your game/RPG collection physical situation, but moving it into a bedroom or room that can be locked will be better for peace of mind.

That seems prudent, but I might actually do the opposite. My game room is the finished 2/3 of my basement, and includes bookcases of board games and a couple of shoe organizers that store my ccgs. Nobody has ever taken any of that stuff because they would have to do it right in front of the whole group. I could add another bookcase and prominently display all my rpgs and keep and keep an eye on them during gaming. Storing them on the first floor seems riskier because people occasionally go to the first floor during gaming, but generally everybody else is in the basement. I also have a decent dehumidifier in my basement to protect all that paper and cardboard.

Shellhead wrote:

Rliyen wrote:

Shellhead wrote: With all these scans, I feel a lot better about the situation. It wasn't as much about the loss of the objects as the loss of the content of the objects. But if my exhaustive search this weekend isn't successful, I am still stuck with one additional concern. Do I ditch all four friends? Or do I just hope that it never happens again?

Ditching all of them seems extreme. However, you'd do well to keep things in an area that guests can't go or in a locked area. I don't know what your game/RPG collection physical situation, but moving it into a bedroom or room that can be locked will be better for peace of mind.

That seems prudent, but I might actually do the opposite. My game room is the finished 2/3 of my basement, and includes bookcases of board games and a couple of shoe organizers that store my ccgs. Nobody has ever taken any of that stuff because they would have to do it right in front of the whole group. I could add another bookcase and prominently display all my rpgs and keep and keep an eye on them during gaming. Storing them on the first floor seems riskier because people occasionally go to the first floor during gaming, but generally everybody else is in the basement. I also have a decent dehumidifier in my basement to protect all that paper and cardboard.

Then it sounds like you have everything handled. Let me know if your Siege of the Citadel EVER goes missing. I'll come up to your neck of the woods to hunt the sumbitch down.

Siege of the Citadel is too big to be stolen. They would need a large Bag of Holding (tm) to sneak it out.

Shellhead wrote: Siege of the Citadel is too big to be stolen. They would need a large Bag of Holding (tm) to sneak it out.

A compelling argument for large, mini-laden KS games.

hotseatgames wrote:

Shellhead wrote: Siege of the Citadel is too big to be stolen. They would need a large Bag of Holding (tm) to sneak it out.

A compelling argument for large, mini-laden KS games.

My Ogre DE KS box doubles as a storm shelter. If a 'friend' ever shows up with a semi truck, I know that's what he is coming for....

Partial good news. As part of an exhaustive search of my basement, I dug through a pile of empty cardboard boxes that I was saving for the next time one of my friends moved. Two of the boxes at the bottom of the pile were not empty. One contained irrelevant stuff to be sorted and mostly tossed, but the other one contained about 2/3 of the missing stuff that I feared was stolen. It's all in nice condition, not at all affected by moisture, dust, insects, whatever. This gives me hope that a thorough search of four more closets may yield the rest of the missing stuff. There are likely some boxes that I skipped over in previous searches because I deemed them too small to hold all the missing stuff, but could potentially hold the remaining 1/3 of missing stuff.

I put off this search for way too long, spending the last two years dreading the possibility that one of my new friends was a thief. Even if I somehow never find the rest of the stuff, it's Stormbringer and Call of Cthulhu stuff that can be extracted from that site listed on the previous page. And I feel that I can let go of the idea that anybody stole from me, which feels great.

Good to hear. That type of stuff messes with your sleep and well being.

Found the rest of my stuff, in a box labeled Stormbringer. The label was on the side facing away from the closet door. Since the box was in backwards, I think that past searches failed because the two big books were clearly not in this box, and grabbing a random sample of the contents facing away from the door likely pulled up some old Runequest stuff that I definitely was not looking for.

So what’s the stuff you’ve found that you didn’t even know you ever owned?

Sagrilarus wrote: So what’s the stuff you’ve found that you didn’t even know you ever owned?

Nothing. There was some Runequest stuff that I wasn't too worried about. The only surprise was something that I forgot I owned, which was Nexus the Infinite City. It's a standalone rpg from the early '90s designed by Robin Laws, and it's also the predecessor to the Feng Shui rpg. The setting is Cynosure from the Grimjack comics, with the serial number filed off. There are a lot of interesting ideas in Nexus, but I never heard of anybody who actually played it.

So now you gotta decide if you will apologize to the guys you suspected of theft.

Or just treat them to a night out with no further explanation.

But nice to have a happy resolution. I've been in this position many times.

jason10mm wrote: So now you gotta decide if you will apologize to the guys you suspected of theft.

I never said anything to any of them, so I don't need to apologize to anybody. I have been quietly stewing over this suspicion for the last couple of years, and this thread is the only place where I ever said anything about the missing stuff. I wish that I could have done the exhaustive search a lot sooner, but the first year of the pandemic saw me spinning my wheels a lot, while the second year was all about catching up on everything else that I didn't handle the previous year.