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Rifts and the rest of the Palladium line? I think the Complete Strategist keeps Palladium Book and Kevin Siembieda in business.
World of Darkness? Huge Selection
Warhammer Fantasy Role Play and WFRP40k? My God yes.
Pathfinder? Amazing selection.
D&D 4e / 3x? Eh. Not great, and the only section you are stuck looking at book spines and not covers.
OSR? A few copies of LotFP Grindhouse Boxed Set, Carcosa and Labyrinth Lord Core and AEC. That was all I saw.
No OSRIC, no Swords & Wizardry and certainly no modules with the exception of DCC RPG adventures.
Fucking humbling experience to see games like The Dying Earth RPG had more product available than the whole OSR.
Even the bit of OSR stuff you mention in this post is more than my LGS has ever carried...ever.
ReplyDeleteI would be surprised to find many gaming stores with as much OSR selection as that.
ReplyDeleteMaybe this is just my limited perception, but the movement seems to have travelled more via word-of-forum and in pdf format than via the "window-shopping" model we were all stuck with in the 1980's.
None, not a single FLGS in my area offers any thing from the OSR, and when asked I get strange looks and then guided to the D&D/Pathfinder sections.....
ReplyDeleteERIC!
I saw a smattering at SciFiGenre in North Carolina, but I don't think it sold well & seems to have declined. Now that I'm in London, Orc's Nest has again a somewhat-random-seeming smattering stashed here and there. They don't really seem to differentiate OSR from all the other random independent & heartbreaker things that get put out.
ReplyDeleteWell, that's kind of the problem with the OSR movement, it's not really from publishers, but hobbyists. Game stores aren't going to order books off of Lulu or RPGNow.
ReplyDeleteThat's why Goodman's DCC disappointed me so much, since they are close to being a real, full time publisher (even though he has a day job) it was the OSR movement's chance to get a retro clone into stores and supply chain. Instead, we got a fantasy heardbreaker that was about as D&D like as Hackmaster or C&C, vaguely, if you squint, but nowhere near as good. It could have taken it mainstream, instead, well, OSR is going to continue to be niche.
My local game shop has 1 copy of Labyrinth Lord (has been there for two years), a handful of DCC hardbacks and modules but loads of copies of Carcosa and Isle of the Unknown. Other shops I've been to mirror this Raggi-centrism. Geoffrey Mckinney is the most visible OSR author in Northern Britain by far.
ReplyDeleteNone here in Saint Louis at the FLGS that I know of. Maybe at a used book store if you are lucky and they do not over price the stuff.
ReplyDeleteOnly Labryinth Lord and the AEC here in East Central Illinois.
ReplyDeleteAll of the Advanced Adventures as well as our monster book Malevolent and Benign are available to hobby shops through distributors in the US and the Europe. If they're not there, it's because the shops 1. don't know about them or 2. don't want to stock them.
ReplyDeleteI managed to get my FLGS to stock a copy of LofFP once (and it did sell). I also managed to get them to stock C&C, which was a bit like pulling teeth but it sold well enough that they restocked. Other than that....nada. Technically they did get Stars Without Number in, when it went "big time" through Mongoose's retail channels, briefly; most OSR product isn't in the Diamond Distributor warehouse, though, so there's no chance it's going to be on store shelves, normally.
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