Badmike wrote: the emergence of the Retro Clones

Which seem to take up an ever-increasing amount of shelf space at my LGS. Makes me wonder why Hasbro itself is not exploiting the market. If they wanted to, they could publish D&D products that serve as vehicles for the old-school artwork. E.g., a 4e starter that uses 1970s b/w line illustrations, written in Gygaxian style.

In past decades they've done it with the Art of.. books, the Silver Ann. reprints, "Thirty Years of Adventure" (mostly reproducing entire covers as reduced-size insets), etc. So inevitably they'll do it again, in some shape or form.

Most of the shops I have been to lately are being very conservative on what they bring in.  Generally this means they stock WotC 4e books and Pathfinder books with only a few other things.

I'm going primarily on Dragon's Lair in central Austin, plus the general level of internet discussion, & am considering the trend for the past 10 years of OGL product. What started as a more subdued 'old-school' look-&-feel seems to have progressed toward more explicitly retro-looking stuff like Castles & Crusades.

Another factor is the ravages of time upon the old printings & original art. Sooner or later, if we want these old artworks to survive at all we've got to think of reproductions. At one extreme are full reprints (like the Silver Anniversary box), at the other extreme are artbooks which reproduce the illustrations alone.

Neither seems practical for the black-&-white line art I have in mind. By itself it appears lackluster; it needs to appear in text to look right, & it needs to illustrate the text. Any ideas as to what would be a good vehicle publication for this sort of thing?

wavemotion wrote:The market for retro clones may be close to saturation with the couple that exist.

-Dave

Couple? There are like ten at this point. But yeah, I think the <1000 players of those games is about where the market share is going to stay.

sauromatian wrote:
Then it's decided - Hasbro should publish an A-Team movie tie-in, which will without doubt be the greatest achievement of the genre since SPI's Dallas RPG.

Ha! I bought the Dallas RPG for my wife for Christmas. She's a huge fan of the show - so much so that she refuses to remove the shrink so I can get a look at the contents of the box

simrion wrote:I haven't seen any in my NSFLGS     They're mostly 4th/Pathfinder, Warhamster...errr I mean Warhammer and lots of CCGs...especially Magic and Yu-Gi-Oh

Same here.  I WISH the game shops in London were packed with retro clones.  Or even much apart from 4.0.  And Warhamster      

sauromatian wrote:Anyone know where the rest of it is?

Ask Diesel; that's where Mr. Punkinhead came from:

shadowcastingsinc@yahoo.com

http://shadowcastings.samsbiz.com/

In my trips to SC, San Jose, and to Philly-South Jersey-NYC, I've seen retro-clone adventures in stores, including:

- a bunch of OSRIC adventures from Expeditious Retreat Press
- one or two Labyrinth Lord adventures from Brave Halfling

I haven't seen any of the non-FRP stuff in stores, nor have I see any core rules books/box sets/whatever, and I'm not counting C&C as a retroclone here, FWIW.

I've seen XRP OSRIC adventures and Labyrinth Lord at Nan's in Houston.