Day 20 of #RPGaDAY asks us about the best source of out-of-print RPGs.
Wouldn’t that be the publisher themselves? Sure, the physical books might be gone, but you can’t go out of stock with pdfs. Over at John Wick Presents, our big thing is the new edition of 7th Sea, but if you want any of the first edition 7th Sea — or even things from the d20 Swashbuckling Adventures line– you can get ’em. And if there are no pdfs, you’re stuck looking at game stores, used bookstores, or ebay.
That’s not really an interesting question, so let’s follow this up in ten minutes with a better one.
Previously on RPGaDAY…
Last year I had fallen behind, but the questions there weren’t all that interesting. Day 20 in 2016 was about the most challenging but rewarding system I’ve learned. That’s a way of asking “what’s the hardest system I’ve learned but I’m glad I did” which is…boring. I mean, I was one of a handful of people that understood how the grappling rules worked in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (1st Ed), but did that provide some source of fulfillment in my life? Man, what a clunky question.
In 2015, the topic was “Favorite Horror RPG”. Horror in RPGs is like comedy in RPGs, you can’t force it. For the past decade, I really haven’t run any horror game. I played in a Welcome to Nightvale themed version of Dread, but that oddly veered into comedy than horror and the Jenga tower didn’t fall once — we got the wobbly tower to the point where there was still one legal pull when we reached the end of the scenario. I can see how Dread brings the tension — each time we had to pull from the tower the table got nervous and we realized we were sitting as far away from the table as we could. Fun. Goofy. In a game that wasn’t quite as lighthearted, I’d say go with that.
In 2014, the topic was “What RPG would you still be playing twenty years from now?” Seventeen years now. If we’re playing fantasy heroics, probably something derived from Dragon Age or Fantasy AGE. If we’re playing anything else, maybe whatever John Harper designs next.