Old School RQ in PDF

Good news for everyone who's keen to get hold of Moon Design's excellent "Gloranthan Classics" series. All four volumes of the series are now available as PDFs from Issaries on RPGNow. They sell for $20.00 apiece or you can get all four for $60.00, which is a good savings. They're expensive, yes, and they're not a replacement for honest-to-goodness hardcopies, but they're excellent products that are otherwise hard to find. I'd recommend getting them if you have the money to do so and have any interest in Chaosium era RuneQuest.

The Joy of Print

Because of Lulu's ridiculous shipping costs to Canada (which, to be fair, are increasingly less ridiculous as the years drag on), I generally don't buy every issue of Fight On! as soon as it's released. Instead, I content myself with my PDF contributor's copies until I can order several issues at a time and thus make the shipping cost more justifiable. This morning I received issues 7 and 8 in the mail and I have to say what a joy it is to hold them in my hands.

Fight On! continues to impress me with the diversity and creativity of its articles each quarter, but the fact that it's in print is a big part of its appeal. I'm one of those horrible Luddites who finds electronic "books" poor substitutes for something I can actually touch. For me, there's something wonderful about being able to take my thumb and quickly flip through a magazine, scanning the pages for a particular article or illustration, along the way noticing something else entirely -- and getting sidetracked in the process. Of course, I generally prefer things to be "embodied" rather than virtual whenever possible, which is probably why, despite being a stupidly prolific blogger, I find face-to-face conversations vastly more satisfying than what passes for discourse on forums and in comment boxes.

I'm glad magazines like Fight On! and Knockspell exist. In my formative years as a gamer, I loved getting my copy of Dragon each month (and, much later, GDW's Challenge) and these old school magazines come close to evoking similar feelings in me. I recognize the advantages of PDFs and similar formats, but, for me anyway, print is almost always my preference, even with the extra expense and issue of storage. But then I'm probably weird that way.

Very Interesting

A number of people have pointed out to me that, according to this page, Paizo will be selling the PDF version of their upcoming Pathfinder Roleplaying Game for $9.95. Now, I'm not ever likely to be playing Pathfinder. From what I have seen -- I have read the Beta Playtest in its various iterations -- it's still too much like v.3.5 to hold any appeal for me, no matter how much I like the Paizonians.

That said, $9.95 is a remarkably ... reasonable price for a PDF, especially in an industry where far too many companies offer very little discount over the cost of buying a hardcopy. I can't help but applaud Paizo for doing this and I hope -- almost certainly in vain -- that we might see other companies follow their lead. In my experience, a low price on a PDF means that I'm much more likely to plunk down some money on a product whose merits I'm unsure about than if the PDF is a mere 10-20% cheaper than the print version. Likewise, if I like the PDF, odds are good I'll also buy the print version. If there were a PDF version of HackMaster Basic available at a reasonable discount, I'd probably buy a copy, because, despite my skepticism, I'm still intrigued by it. But, alas, no such thing exists and so Kenzer has lost not just one but possibly two sales from me (and the possibility that I'll drive some sales their way with a review of the thing).

At $9.95, though, I'll happily snag a copy of Pathfinder, even though I'm highly unlikely to play it or to buy any of its supplementary material. That's a small enough amount of money that, even if I find nothing of value in the PDF, I won't feel as if I'd been cheated and the odds of that's happening are pretty slim indeed.