#RPGaDay: Day 20

20. What is the best source for out-of-print RPG books?

Answer: I'm not sure what the intent of this question is. I don't mean to be snotty about it. I just don't think there is some hidden resource that someone will turn everyone onto. It's not like there is some megastore built from a mythical RPG hoarder's secret stash. Even if there were, if I knew about it, do you think I'd let anyone else in on the action? Sorry, little joke.

Fifteen years ago I could walk into a local game store and find a treasure trove of out-of-print, used games and accessories. With the emergence of online marketplaces that's all but a thing of the past. I have a little bit of sadness for the modern, brick & mortar game store, having to stick your neck out on product you're not sure will sell. Gaming shops used to be such cool places where you'd hear about new games or books. Now I get a lot of blank stares from the staff when I ask about an OSR they've never heard of. I suppose I'm a little spoiled living in Dave Arneson's hometown. There was a lot of used games floating around from all the people that played up here. There still is compared to a lot of places I guess. Hell, Fantasy Flight Games is based here. Maybe I should shut up.

Half Price Books sometimes will yield results as from time to time people die and their relatives don't have the energy or will to sell their role-playing son/brother/daughter/sister/husband/wife's nerd books on eBay. It feels a little morbid to profit from someone passing away like that, but at least I'll give the stuff a good home.

You might ask yourself, why bother trying to track down all those moldy (Moldvay?) old modules when you can find most of them in PDF form on various sites? My answer would be because PDFs don't cut it for me and they never will. I hate reading PDFs. No matter what platform I'm looking at it on, it hurts my eyes and is a pain reading a two-column layout digitally, even on a tablet. Then there's maps. Those definitely are pretty useless as a digital file. You could argue that I could have the PDFs professionally printed out and bound, and while that's true, it's also more work than I want to do.

So does that mean I won't stoop to buying or downloading a PDF from RPGNow or DriveThruRPG? Of course not. The internet is a great place if you know what you're looking for, and even sometimes if you don't. I just got a PDF of the original Chainmail rules the other day. I'd be hard-pressed to find an original copy of that lying around, even in Minnesota. I've been thinking about doing a post comparing all the OD&D clones I have and how they compare to the original White Box rules (plus Chainmail). Maybe that will give me a reason to go have my PDF printed and spiral-bound.