The Rise of POD

So I tried getting my hands on a copy of Against the Darkmaster, a Kickstarter open-system clone of the Rolemaster/MERP game, and the book sounded great - 600+ pages, premium printing, and I did manage to get the PDF, but...

Out of stock.

And I checked a few other premium printings of games, Old School Essentials Advanced Fantasy? Out of stock. And I feel the great supply chain disruption of 2021 starts hitting the pen-and-paper gaming community pretty hard. Note this is all "at the time of this writing" so by the time you read this the problems could be resolved.

Note, any of these sites could be "in stock" at any time so my experience may or may not be a reflection of reality, this is just one attempt to get several games at one specific point of time in a supply chain crisis that is affecting everything from car production to supermarket shelves.

This isn't PS5 or XBox Series X bad since we can get the PDFs of these games, so they are not 100% unavailable, but it feels like the "premium printing" the community has been moving towards is starting to get bit by printing, shipping and supply chain woes. Larger games by bigger publishers? Fine, I can get D&D 5, Runequest, Traveller, Shadowrun, and Pathfinder 2 books all day. Even mid-tier games such as Zweihander, Mythras, or Forbidden Lands you can get hardcovers for on Amazon pretty easily.

But the premium games by the smaller publishers and also the smaller Kickstarter games seem hit pretty hard, and you may find yourself checking the sites daily to see when copies are in stock. This hurts for games like OSE Advanced Fantasy - this is a great game and I always want to see these books available for people to enjoy the physical copies for the game.

POD games from smaller publishers? In stock but with delays, and I am still getting these in the mail, which I am thankful for. If the supply chain problems get worse I would love to see some of the premium publishers put out "POD versions" of the games to help alleviate supply issues, but I have no idea how bad things are or if this is a situation that is going to last a while. POD at this time does have a huge advantage in that books can be endlessly created via mass-production from digital files without special custom printing, books with ribbons, fancy bindings, and other premium features (that I do love, but these things take special manufacturing and limited print runs to pull off).

If you have hardcovers for some of these games you may want to hold onto them, as I have the OSE Advanced Fantasy books and I treasure those. As I said, PDF is always an option, but I like being able to flip through a book and enjoy that experience.

I hope people someday can look back at this article as a historical note for 2021 and things get better soon, and this "dark ages of gaming" is a footnote.