A Tale of Two Game Stores

All of the foregoing, if you can believe it, took place in just the first two days or so of D&D Resurrection. Early April. Then dawned the third day, and uncle K opined that it might be a fine idea to visit a game store. The adventures so far had been a bit rough and ready, and I think he was hoping for a "bought" adventure with some meat, that we could milk for a few hours. Good thought, so we saddled up.

Now let's stop and talk for a second about game stores. Long ago, the only store round these parts that sold anything gaming-related was a chain called Allied Hobbies. They had a shop in Ardmore, and another out at King of Prussia Mall. (TA still cannot believe there's a town called King of Prussia. Well there was once, dating back a long way, as you might imagine, to those of Washington's soldiers who hailed from Prussia and presumably still had fond thoughts of its king. But the old town has been dismantled bit by bit, till now it is only a maze of highway interchanges and the great mall itself sprawling in the midst). Allied Hobbies was quite serviceable: the Ardmore shop sold a good variety of lead figures, including the defunct Dragontooth line, which added in imagination what its sculptors lacked in finesse. And the King of Prussia shop was where I laid hands on the very first packaged module ever sold, the Steading of the Hill Giant Chief (actually released in advance of the AD&D books themselves, so we somehow staggered through the first couple based on the old rules). So Allied Hobbies was a serviceable place, and indeed it's still around, though none of its stores are where they used to be.

Not long into my first fascination with D&D, a new game store opened, up the road from the King of Prussia Allied Hobbies, at the Valley Forge Shopping Center. I can't for the life of me remember the store's name. Regardless, it was a harbinger of a new species, the pure games store. Allied Hobbies was worthy, but it was a hobby store, with its figures and rules books tucked at the ends of aisles that bulged with massive plastic battleship kits at 1:20 scale, and wooden-ships kits of horrifying complexity. (As I think about it, the long-departed Wayne Toytown also sold some of the early gaming materials: it was there that I purchased my first copy of The Dragon, #10 to be exact).

In any case, the new place instantly supplanted Allied Hobbies as The Place to Go for gaming stuff. Role-playing and board/simulation games were in the midst of a huge growth spurt, and the place thrived. Unlike Allied, it's still around in recognizable form, but we'll get back to that.

So by the time uncle K made his suggestion, I had been to a game store or two. But I wasn't sure what to expect from a game store in South Carolina in 2007. So off we went.

The place we lit down at was a combination games/comics store, which seems a usual combination these days. It was large, bright, clean and spacious -- almost supermarket-like in its proportions, very unlike the Center City Philadelphia comics stores at which I used to spend my weekends (institutions such as Comics for Collectors, a slightly finicky operation that used to have a shop on Rittenhouse Square, and seems now to be confined to New York, and the eminently small and comfy Fat Jack's, which, remarkably on two counts, seems to still exist in their location on narrow Sansom Street, and yet not have a web site). Point being, this place wasn't like those.

If you haven't been to a game store in a while, the things you notice are:

1. There's more stuff.
2. The stuff costs more.

More stuff: AD&D material has, of course, been proliferating for thirty years. After the original AD&D, came, I believe, AD&D 2. With the third edition, it ceased to be Advanced, and plain old D&D it is again, in a glorious Edition 3.5. In its essence, it still consists of the same three rulebooks: Players' Handbook, Monster Manual, DM Guide. Okay, except the Monster Manual is now multi-volume (they seem to be up to MM V). For players, well, in addition to the PH itself, there are also many class-specific books, each delving further into a specific class. There must be five or so of these, along with things like a Dungeon Survival guide, and a couple hefty volumes on playing characters of draconic lineage. I'll stop linking the things or the whole page will go blue.

The DM, as well, can spend as much as she likes on books. No reason to stop at just the plain DMG, there are a couple volumes on how to make dungeons, as well as individual sourcebooks to help you set adventures in cold, hot, wet, dry and other geographies. (Not far off, I'm sure, is the Official D&D Sourcebook for Eastern Taiga and Sub-boreal Woodlands, in two fat volumes.)

This all leaves out, of course, one of the largest categories of Stuff: adventure settings. Back in the day, as earlier alluded, this consisted entirely of modules as they were known. The mind echoes with names like Vault of the Drow, White Plume Mountain, Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, and Tomb of Horrors. (Heh, not to mention Temple of the Frog, as well as Tegel Manor, Dark Tower, Caverns of Thracia and other Judges' Guild delights. Seriously not to mention The Nightmare Maze of Jigresh! But all of those solid efforts are as chaff before the mighty wind of modern adventures. These are entire product lines, like Eberron and Forgotten Realms, game settings that each boast a dozen hard-cover game books, not to mention a big stack of adventures and a slew of novels.

Of course, you may not want to buy into an entire new world. You may want to make your own, but feel the need to insert a substantial setting here and there. No problem! Simply plunk down $120, and you are the proud owner of 672 pages documenting the mighty City of Ptolus.

Not feeling so rich? So scale your expenditure back to $100 and be content with the world's largest dungeon.

And that's a useful segue to the topic of "costs more." Granted that $120 is only about $48 in 1980 dollars, forty-eight bucks for a game setting was pretty unheard of back then (I think the biggest books from Judges' Guild topped out around $18). Consider further that all of the hardback game books run about $35, and that you can easily get a dozen of the things and, well, it adds up.

Even a simple module, it turns out, will run you $20 or so. I settled on The Barrow of the Forgotten King. Uncle K, somewhat overwhelmed by the WALL of D&D material, briefly considered whether D&D for Dummies might not be an appropriate path back into the game, but decided against it. And with that, we left the brightly lit acreage and headed for home.

***

Now, if I may, before I get back to what happened when we cracked the module open, I'm going to skip ahead a month or so. It is Saturday, a swimming lesson day, and I have shamelessly bribed my son to go to his lesson. This will only work once, but I think it's important to get him back in the water, so I stoop. I've told him we'll visit a game store after the lesson, and he can choose a D&D book to buy. Yes, that would be one of the stock $35 hardcovers. There ya have it.

The place we visit is the successor of that self-same games store of long ago, from the Valley Forge Shopping Center. Though I do forget the original name, there was some point in the last 20 years when the store became a branch of The Compleat Strategist. The Strategist is probably one of the oldest games stores in the country. I visited the flagship, in downtown New York, in December or so of 1980, with some summer camp alumni, and was suitably impressed.

But the King of Prussia Strategist? Shifted from its old, spacious location on DeKalb Pike into a small shopping area that consists of a remodeled barn and outbuildings, it is ... not what it was. It is small, low and dark. When we visit, a gaming group is just sitting down at the back for the Saturday game. "Anybody got any of these items?" the GM demands. "Robe of Falconry? Deck of Azurite? Radiant Headpiece? Shimmering Mask of Zerthul?" Muttered negatives all around. "K, well lemme figure out yer bonus, then ..." Various dice rolls. The GM moves them along and begins reading, literally reading, loudly from a bought adventure. This forms the backdrop of our stay.

E. can't decide what book he wants. What he really wants is the Dungeonscape book we saw the SC store, but it's not here. We spend a long time looking fruitlessly. Meanwhile, a large gamer with a big white beard, floppy denim hat with good-cause buttons pinned all over it, suspenders and a blue t-shirt over a Santa Claus-like belly, has trapped the store owner with a long political harangue. Finally I am able to rescue the store owner by asking the whereabouts of Dungeonscape. Though relieved to be freed, he isn't much help, and waves vaguely at the shelf where we've just spent 15 minutes looking. Clearly the book isn't there -- too bad, as I have to admit it's the one I would have chosen myself.

More people crowd in. The game in the back drones on. Finally E. settles on an environmental sourcebook called Stormwrack. His love of the sea coming through. We prepare to buy it and skedaddle. There's only one customer ahead of us (one of several father-and-son pairs I see there), but things are not so simple. The shopkeep first asks whether Dad is paying with cash or credit. One doesn't hear that question much anymore. But here you do. Dad is using credit, and the shopkeeper pulls out one of those slider things that you use to take a card impression. He takes the card impression, then with great labor fills in all the details of the purchase on the charge slip. Then he puts on his glasses, picks up a calculator, and carefully figures the sales tax, writes that on the charge slip, then, again using the calculator, figures the total. Next he takes the card to an authorization machine, runs it, and enters the total. Once the card is run and approved, he hands the charge slip to Dad for signature. Dad signs, clearly somewhat impatient. But the sale is not complete. The shopkeeper now produces one of those old metal boxes with a double or triple roll of sales slips on it. He now proceeds once again to write out all the details of the purchase, long hand, and slowly at that. He then strips the sales slips from the box, hands Dad the white copy, opens a small metal drawer in the bottom of the box, and slips his own pink copy carefully into it. Finally he produces a bag, puts the sales slip, the charge slip, and the purchase into it, and hands it all to Dad, who is rather tight-lipped at this point. Finally father and son are free to go.

I watch in something near awe. In most establishments the purchase would have taken 45 seconds, tops. This process probably took three or four minutes. Clearly this could only work when you haven't many customers at once. It's now my turn to step forward. Knowing we have quite a bit of work ahead of us, I engage the shopkeeper in a bit of conversation. He acknowledges they're affiliated with the main Strategist, but, he notes, waving at the metal box, the charge slips, the calculator "they still got us using thirty-year old equipment." True enough.

We complete all the steps of our purchase with due diligence, and finally leave, dice still rattling in the background. The GM's monotone follows us into the April air: "The Temple of Ashara was once a wondrous site of worship, but is nearly ruined now, and has fallen on hard times ..."

It has indeed, dear lady. I finger my brow for signs of a Radiant Headpiece or Shimmering Mask of Zerthul: nothing.