36th Anniversary

 This past month the store celebrated its 36th year in business and I figured I would take this opportunity to look back at some of the changes I have seen over the past three and a half years:

Credit card processing—Through most of the 1990s, cash was king (still is, but that is another topic). Credit cards were used, not debit cards as those came about much later and the process for using them was a lot lengthier that today’s insert or tap. Credit cards has raised number and names for use with a manual machine, not so fondly referred to as the “knucklebuster”.  Each machine contained a plate with the merchant’s processing information embossed on it. When making a credit card purchase, the sales clerk would fill out a multi-layered carbon, later carbonless, form, summarizing the items purchased and total amount charged, have the customer sign the form, then insert the card into the machine and slide the imprinter back and forth, imprinting the merchant and customer information onto the form. Since the clerk held the machine in place with one hand and slid the imprinter with the other hand, it was possible to strike the knuckles if not careful. Credit card processors would also mail out booklets every so often, containing lists of hundreds of thousands of fraudulent credit card numbers, which the clerk was expected to check before taking the card. The customer would get a copy of the form, the store kept a copy and a collection of copies from the day’s credit card sales got mailed off, usually daily, to the credit card processor. Happily those days ended in the late 1990s when even small stores got access to electronic credit card processing.

Credit Card Use—Along with the change in credit card processing, we saw an increase over the years in the use of credit cards themselves. Through the 1990s, the majority of our sales were in cash and purchases were comparatively small, in the $10 to $30 range On an average day, we would use the knucklebuster 5 to 10 times a day. On a typical day today, 75 to 90% of our sales are made with credit or debit cards with average up to about $25 but a $200 to $500 sale, unheard of until the advent of the trading card game, is not uncommon. Also common today are high school students and younger with their own credit cards or, more often, some form of phone based payment.

Trading Card Games—Prior to Magic, and later Pokémon and Yu Gi Oh, as well as the dozens of other trading card games that sought to capitalize on their popularity (anyone remember Super Deck or Towers in Time?), the game store served a very niche market, primarily young men aged 12 to 25, especially in college or military service. At the time Games Workshop’s business model targeted boys aged 10-12, who the company expected to play for about 4 years, then move onto other interests, like girls. Women did play but they accounted for about 10 to 15% of the customer base. TCG’s, especially Pokemon, vastly expanded the typical game store’s customer base, bringing in hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of new customers and exposing them to the hundreds of other games available.

36th Anniversary

 

Thanks to everyone who came out for our 36th aniversary celebration on Feb 15. We opened the store door's on Feb 14 of 1990 and frankly I am a bit suprised we are still around after all these years.

To the Aid of Falx

It is not surprising if you have never heard of "To The Aid Of Falx". It was a 16 page module released by TSR in 1982. Written by Frank Metzer with art by Jim Holloway, only members of the RPGA at the time could purchase it. The only module rarer than this one, as far as I know, is the first printing of Palace of the Silver Princess, all of which copies were recalled and destroyed, although some remained in distribution.

Temple of Elemental Evil

Got in a copy of the original Temple of Elemental Evil over the weekend. The first edition version , still in pretty good shape. I remember the year it came out at GenCon. D&D players had been waiting for it for several years, ever since the village of Homlet module came out. Players had gotten to the point that they thought the TOEE would never release so when it finally arrived, the line at GenCon was a block long (rather like Illinois marijuana dispensaries last January) and 90% of the people walking around the convention had a copy.

What is Marketing?

Wintersession started today wwith a new slew of students coming into Principles of Marketing I figure now is a good time for a refresher look at the history of marketing, which is, if you make, distribute or sell a game, an activity in which you engage. Marketing itself, when you look at it as the process by which a good or service moves from the producer to the consumer, dates back to ancient times with much exploration due to seeking new trade routes or access to products. Columbus’ voyages, for example, were undertaken to find a shorter, and therefore less costly route, from Europe to southeast Asia. Printed and clay seals used  to consistently identify the producer of such products as wine and olive oil were used in Mesopotamia  as early as the 4^th century BCE while archaeologists have found marks in Pompeii indicating  Umbricius Scauras branded his own fish sauce as early as 35 CE However the term “marketing”  first applied to buying and selling products during the 16^th century CE while the use of the term in its modern sense first appeared in Harper’s Magazine in 1884.

Marketing can be divided into three general areas or eras:  production, selling and consumer and, much like the development of study of marketing, all took place within the past century

During the production era which ran from time immemorial until about the 1930s, the focus was on production. Consumers did not have much choice, nor for that matter did producers. If you wanted to make a product, you were pretty much limited to what you had on hand. Similarly, if a customer wanted to buy something, they were generally limited to a very small or no selection.  The production era can be summed up in Henry Ford’s famous phrase “You can have any color you want, as long as it’s black,” which Ford famously said in 1909. The customer had very little choice or say in what they wanted and had to take what was available

The Allure of Ruins

Ever wonder why so many D&D (and other fantasy adventures) are set among ruins? The abandoned tunnels beneath an old castle is such a trope that we refer to it as a "dungeon crawl". If you remember the Lord of the Rings, Middle Earth was festooned with ruins, relics of an earlier, grander, age. In my own campaigns, if I add in a lone statue as a descriptive note or put a ruined house on a ridge overlooking the valley through which the characters travel, I can almost guarantee that one of more of the players will want to go explore it. Why our fascination with ruins? This column from the BBC says ruins and lost civilizations have fascinated humans since at least the 6th Century BCE

NetRunner The Original

Most people are familiar with FFG's Netrunner Living Card Game.  However, over a decade earlier, WOTC released the NetRunner TCG, both the company's second Richard Garfield game and its second trading card game (Magic was first in both categories). In turn, the Netrunner TCG "universe" was based on concepts from R. Talsorian Games Cyberpunk RPG, using the idea of hackers trying to crack corporate dataforts.

Much like the modern version, one player had a corporate deck, while the other player had a runner deck. Unique among TCGs, the cards incorporated in the corp deck differed from those in the runner deck, as each player constructed their playdeck from a different card pool. Both the core game and its expansion Proteus, released in 1996.  A second set, Silent Impact, was developed but never released in that form, though a set of 52 cards from it came to the market as the Classic expansion in 1999.

Why We No Longer Carry Historical Miniatures

Every once in awhile I hear from someone that the brick and mortar store is dead or that stores need to evolve into new models. I have to smile every time I hear that as the game store has evolved and will continue to do so.

For example, back in the 1990s, we used to stock a full 8-12 feet of historical miniatures:  Napoleonics, ACW (American Civil War for those who don't speak acronym fluently), Civil War Ironclads, etc. However, over the years we saw a shifting in demand. Customers wanted specifically posed figures for specific units for specific eras of specific wars. To satisfy the demand would have required us to drastically expand the amount of space devoted to historics without a significant increase in sales. We are talking several thousand dollars invested  for a few hundred dollars increase in figures sales as most people only wanted 1-2 figures at a time. Unfortunately, we had to put in orders of $400 to $500 at a time in order to satisfy those 1-2 figure purchases, leading to extensive inventory creep.

Slowly, in order to get exactly what they wanted, customers turned to mail order purchases, first from catalogs in the early 1990s, then as the Internet became more familiar, to online purchases. The store, we slowly cleared out the remaining historics and replaced them with the bludgeoning Games Workshop, Ral-Partha and Reaper lines.

The downside of this to historic miniatures is that, as stores like ours moved away from historics, so did public play space devoted to them. Most historic miniatures games are played either in homes or at conventions such as Little Wars and Historicon, where you play with people already familiar with your preferred genre of history but have little chance to introduce outsiders to the game, one of the benefits of playing in public. In the 1970s, miniatures wargaming WAS historics, now they are a fraction of the industry.

25 Years and 4 Big Trends

Castle Perilous Books and Games opened 25 years ago this month, actually on St. Valentine’s Day. Why we chose to open on February 14, I have no idea all these years later, except maybe since it was St. Valentine’s Day, we wouldn’t see much traffic, giving us a chance to shake out the bugs without bothering customers the first day. We operated out of a 2^nd floor suite with no elevator and about 500 square feet of retail space. What can I say, rent was cheap and we were right across the street from SIUC and we did well. Today, the store occupies 6000 square feet 8 blocks from campus with about 10,000 cars passing us per day and our sales flabbergast me compared to what I considered a great day back then. Oh how times have changed and this seems a good time to look back at 4 trends that shape the game industry today (there are certainly more but four is a nice round number):

1)      The shift of RPGs from print to PDF—As have mentioned in previous posts, we started off dealing RPGs and miniatures. While there were many companies dealing in RPGs (see Shannon Applecline’s Designers and Dragons for a overview), TSR and AD&D dominated the field and with no crowdfunding, no desktop publishing and no PDFs, a company had to have a lot of faith in their product to launch one. In most game stores, the RPG section dominated, unless their focus was historics, either miniatures or boardgames. Today, due to the aforementioned crowdfunding, desktop publishing and PDFs, the overwhelming majority of RPGS reside on computers or the Internet, with most stores only stocking Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder with maybe a few local favorites.

2)      The shift of historics from stores to mailorder—When we opened, every game store worth its salt had an Osprey book spinner rack and likely also a selection of historic miniatures, as well as some shelf space devoted to Avalon Hill, Victory Games and SPI wargames. Today, Osprey racks are scarce as hen’s teeth, historic boardgames are limited to Memoir ’44 and Axis and Allies and, should you find historic miniatures in a store, they likely consist of Flames of War, Sails of War and Wings of War. Most historic boardgames and miniatures sell at wargaming conventions or over the Internet.

3)      The rise of the trading card game—Ah yes, Magic the Gathering and all its offspring. When the Alpha set of Magic released, my distributor could not explain the concept to me so we bought 1 deck and 2 boosters, which sat on the shelf until players came back raving about this new game they found at GenCon. The industry adopted the TCG and never looked back, with, I would estimate, 95% of all game stores stocking at least some Magic, if no other TCG.

4)      The (concurrent) rise of the boardgame—As I noted earlier, most game stores, when we started, focused on RPGS. If they carried boardgames, they stocked historic ones. No long, the last years have seen the rise of the Eurogame, led by Mayfair Games and Settlers of Catan (now just Catan). While playing boardgames in the US still does not have the cachet of those produced in Europe, witness the number of boardgames imported from Europe each year, sales and importance of them to most game stores supplanted the RPG in the product mix of most existing stores and fit as a major component of the business plan of most new game stores (that don’t focus on TCGs).

More changes coming. Yeah, I would bet so. What they are, not a clue.

How Gary Gygax Lost Control of TSR

Very interesting article by Jon Peterson on the early years of TSR, how the company grew and how E. Gary Gygax eventually lost control of the company he helped found.

Jean Rabe: From RPGA to USA Today

If you played AD&D in the late 80s and early 90s, and especially if you played RPGA (Role Playing Game Association, the Pathfinder Society of its day) events, you may never have met Jean Rabe, but she certainly had an impact on the Organized Play of the day. I used to run into Rabe fairly often at Midwestern gaming conventions but hadn’t seen much of her for more than a decade. During the past couple of years, though, I have seen her at a few more cons and wanted to find out what she has been doing the past 20 years.

Rabe’s association with the gaming industry started in Evansville, Indiana, back in the late 80s where she helped run the Glathricon gaming convention. At one of the conventions, Rabe struck up a friendship with the Guest of Honor, Penny (Petticord) Williams, who worked as the RPGA Network Coordinator. When Williams decided to leave TSR and the position in 1987, she contacted Rabe to let her know the position had opened. Rabe, tired of covering murder, theft, and assaults in her job as a newspaper reporter in Evansville, applied, interviewed for and got the job within 48 hours.

Rabe spent the next 7 years working full time for TSR, first as the head of the RPGA, making certain events got processed in a timely manner and editing the organization’s magazine, Polyhedron (yes, this was an era when all magazines were printed on PAPER and sent out via the MAIL), then as a full time designer and editor, working on the Child’s Play and Vale of the Mage AD&D modules, among others.

Wanting to pursue her own writing, Rabe left TSR in 1994 for a freelance career, though she continued to work in the gaming and fantasy genre, editing the official BattleTech magazine MechForce Quarterly for FASA  and writing several novels for TSR, including the Dragons of a New Age trilogy, which focused on the next major event to take place in the Dragonlance series. She also wrote three short stories set in the Star Wars universe, which appeared in West End Games’ Star Wars Adventure Journal and three Endless Quest books, all in the late 1990s.

Moving beyond gaming related novels (though she works actively in that field; WOTC published Goblin Nation, the three-volume Storytellers series in 2009, and she just finished the novella “Maiden Voyage" for Strange Brew: The Ultimate Witch and Warlock , a Pathfinder and Castles & Crusades compatible supplement, scheduled to appear later this year), Rabe wrote and edited mainly in the fantasy field, writing The Finest trilogy, the Rogue Angel series and Fenzig’s Fortune. However, she also has the murder mystery Submerged (as Jordan Grey) and a number of collaborations with authors such as Andre Norton, Stephen  D. Sullivan, and F. Lee Baily (yes, that F. Lee Baily). Just this year, The Cauldron will see print, written with Gene DeWeese.

Though she hasn’t written a gaming module in decades, Rabe still loves roleplaying and is active in the Pathfinder Society, though as a player, not a coordinator, but she does have outlines of another gaming related novel in the works. With 30+ novels under her belt, including a couple that made USA Today’s bestseller list and a handful of awards for her writing, “all in all, I’m happy. I think I’ve had some amazing opportunities and have a basically awesome life”.

Traveller, Dark Conspiracy and Dragon Dice: The Gaming Legacy of Lester Smith

I attended Quincon, a small tabletop gaming convention in Quincy Illinois, this past weekend and had the opportunity to reconnect with Lester Smith, a prolific game designer during the 80s and early 90s, who has gotten back into the game, so to speak, in the past few years. Since we had time, I wanted to find out how he got involved in the gaming industry and what he had in the works now.

Smith entered the gaming industry in the fall of 1984, submitting what was called at the time a “capsule review” of Wizard’s Realm to Steve Jackson Games’ Space Gamer magazine. Emboldened by his success, he then submitted a full game, Mind Duel, for inclusion in the magazine. Unfortunately, SJG sold off Space Gamer just then and Mind Duel instead appeared in the first of the renamed VIP of Gaming magazine, which folded after only a few issues.

Moving forwards a few years, now pursuing an English degree in Bloomington Il., Smith landed a proofreading job at Game Designer’s Workshop, nee GDW. While proofreading, Smith developed the habit of making marginal notes, suggesting corrections or improvements to the material. The higher-ups at GDW noticed this and, rather than getting annoyed, Mark Millar, the designer of Traveller, asked if Smith would write the first adventure module for the company’s new Traveller 2300 RPG. He did and then wrote a memo to GDW’s head, Frank Chadwick with suggestions to improve the realism of Traveller 2300 when the company reprinted the game. Chadwick agreed with his suggestions, then turned the situation about by asking Smith to do a complete revision of the game, now called just 2300. Then, when GDW decided it wanted to do an ecologically themed horror RPG, it handed that to Smith too. The result:  Dark Conspiracy. By the end of the 80s, Smith was line manager for both Dark Conspiracy and 2300, as well as working on other games for the company such as Test of Arms and Space 1889.

A good friend, Tim Brown, had left GDW for TSR and let Smith know that TSR need designers immediately so Smith sent in a resume. Apparently “immediately” at TSR at the time meant something different than it does to most people as Smith heard nothing for a year. A callback for an interview resulted in another year’s wait. A third interview, this time with Jim Ward, who was vice-president of Creative Services, resulted in a tour showing where Ward’s desk had b0een during previous TSR layoffs and a job offer with several conditions that Smith could not accept, including a requirement  that all of his writing would belong to TSR. Smith passed, resulting in a fourth callback a year later, with a similar tour and Ward and TSR meeting all of Smith’s conditions. In fact, when he didn’t respond immediately, just processing the size of the salary offer, which was larger than expected, Ward responded by bumping the salary offer up another 20%. Just shows that silence can be profitable.

During his tenure at TSR, Smith wrote Bug Hunters for the Amazing Engine system, developed Dragon Dice, and worked on Red Steel, PlaneScape and an unpublished followup to the DragonStrike game.

Leaving TSR about 1995, he joined Brown at the comic publisher Comico, which had them develop a collectable card game based on the company’s characters. Nothing ever came of it though and in 1998, he went to work for Sebranic, formerly known as The Write Source, a publisher of educational textbooks, where he has remained since, writing poetry and short stories is his spare time, only designing a few gaming products, notably Chaos Progenitus and the Zero RPG.

About 2012,,the game design bug bit him again and, in quick succession, he developed and sold through DriveThruCards the games Invasion of the Saucer People, Monster Con, Clashing Blades and Wolfman’s Curse. His current project is the d6xd6 CORE RPG, which arose out a discussion with another game designer as to whether it is possible to develop a RPG with only one statistic d6xd6 CORE is the result with the character sheet fitting on a business card. In addition, when published, the d6xd6 CORE rulebook will include “setting chapters” from 30+, novelists, giving players basic information on venturing into each writer’s world and directing them to the novels for more information.

In addition, for several years, Smith has published an annual anthology of Halloween poetry and short stories and is looking for contributors to this year’s edition. Interested writers can go to www.popcornpress.com for more information.