





Last week, my wife and I headed over to Omaha, Nebraska and went to what used to be a favorite store of mine called Dragon’s Lair. Now, back in the day this was a Gaming Store! The walls were covered in little miniature single packs, the shelves were lined with titles from all the different RPG lines, adult board games unique to specialty stores, new RPG books as well as Used RPG books as they’d always buy the books, regardless of condition. It was actually cool to buy a used module from them and look at the modifications done by the original owner. They sold hex paper, play mats, and all of the other supplies that Dungeon Masters used, as well as having fancy tables for players to come over and play battle games like Warhammer and such, or even just space so that people could sit down and play D&D if they wanted to. This was the place to go! The owner was a gamer, and he wasn’t the only show in town. If you look at old Dragon Magazines you can find a place advertised in Omaha called Star Realms, which was even larger! But Star Realms was miss-managed and collapsed, and Dragon’s Lair is still around.





On the side, they sold Comic books, but the emphasis was Table Top Role Playing Games. The owner was a gamer. Even as late as a few years ago he was personally running a 1st Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons game. I don’t know if that campaign is still going on. Granted, he, as well as the rest of us, is much older than we used to be. Younger people are now working the counters, and the emphasis seems to be comic books, super heroes, and card games. Card games: I never understood them. The game of Magic the Gathering was popular back in the day, but I thought that it was stupid even then, and just a way for a company to make money from suckers. Imagine my shock and horror when the company that sold Magic the Gathering purchased Dungeons and Dragons! I still don’t get that hero clicks stuff, any game with some RARE thing which is only rare because a company decided that it would be, makes no sense to me, but people eat it up! I guess that I never was a collector, well, I never used to consider myself a collector, but it would appear that I am now.





A couple of years ago, the original Dragon’s Lair had burned down, so now they have moved and the store is actually much bigger! However I am dismayed at just how little they have. Comic books, card games, and large boxes of Warhammer crap that everybody knows isn’t worth the price of the plastic garbage in them. They still sell the modern war game materials, that I don’t play. They do have a selection of adult board games, but the bread and butter has always been the RPG materials. They have the two current leaders, 5e and Pathfinder, but the rest of the stuff has been consolidated into two display boxes that had formally been reserved for comic books, and the system is a mess. I went through that entire thing and found no AD&D material what so ever. NONE! Not even other system neutral material or anything remotely interesting to me.





Granted, they had two copies of Dungeon Crawl Classics available, as well as a full set of Castles & Crusades, but I don’t have the money, nor the player interest to get into a new system. We already made our investments into gaming years ago when we still had disposable income, but now I have to buy school clothes for two kids, work on projects around the house, and be a grown-up. I had a few bucks to spend and I was hoping to find something at the old gaming shop and I found nothing! Not even so much as a new set of dice that I liked.





What does this tell me? Well of course the online stores have taken a huge bite out of the book market. Why shop at a store when you can shop at home? Well, I don’t always like shopping at home. I’m paranoid when it comes to credit cards and know just how easy it is to become a victim of fraud, especially on the used book market. A brick and mortar store is very attractive to me. It also tells me that both editions of AD&D are hot right now, and I am competing with locals to acquire materials. This isn’t collectable materials, this stuff isn’t rare. TSR saturated a market, and most of the books are still alive and well.





There is a RPG renaissance going on, but I’ll be honest; I’m not a part of it. I don’t play 2e because it is a thing right now, I play it because I bought into the system and simply never stopped. I didn’t get bored with it, when I did stop playing it was because life got too busy, it had nothing to do with the system. Once everyone got to a point where we had the time and energy to play again, we picked it right back up. But, I’ve gotten side-tracked.





Dragon’s Lair! There is still a lot of system neutral products that are being released. Where are they? It makes more sense to release stuff like that, what with every table playing a different system, there is a market for that. Back in the day Gygax would get so angry at 3rd party leeches that he’d yell at us all through Dragon Magazine. Some of these products were really shoddy and crummy, but some of these products were really really good too! Where are these things? They are still being made, but are they for sell at one of the midwests only gaming shop? NO! Instead of selling Gaming Products, Dragon’s Lair now sells COLLECTABLES. Over-priced garbage that serves no other purpose but to sale it, games that’s values are decidedly manufactured, overly polished products produced by insane people who expect the consumer to make up for their inability to stick to a realistic budget, old RIFTS books that have sat on that shelf since they came out back in the 80’s and you can’t pay people to take them they suck that bad.





When asked where all of the AD&D stuff is, the kid working the counter started getting scared. He led me over to the shelf where HASBRO was nice enough to print over produced reproductions of every book that users don’t need and at a price that is comparable to buying all of the original Core books plus some DM material and still have enough money for Cheetoes.





I represent a very large market of gamers, and there is nothing for me at Dragon’s Lair anymore. Nothing! Not an old module, not an extra copy of a book, not a little metal man that I can paint, not even so much as a scrap of hex paper, NOTHING! It was a wasted trip, and I had money burning in my pocket, but there was nothing! I would have even bought one of those funny little pencils with a fuzzy head! It was sad.







