From:	Simon and Fiona sfuller@******.com.au
Subject:	[OT] RPG antiques (was: Gaming in the Media)
Date:	Mon, 26 Jun 2000 10:16:16 +1000

-----Original Message-----
From: Jan Jaap van Poelgeest aka nevermelt <jjp@******.nl>
To: shadowrn@*********.com <shadowrn@*********.com>
Date: Monday, June 26, 2000 8:41 AM
Subject: [OT] RPG antiques (was: Gaming in the Media)
>
>Hey, UB and Harlequin can run up to $40-50 each on Ebay, as well as that
>it isn't unheard of that several of the older (and more interesting) OOP
>sourcebooks (paranormal animals, TirTang, some others) sometimes hit the
>$30 mark.
>The oddest SR item with a more than 100% over listprice markup I saw was
>the Sprawl Maps one, though. It's hardly ever offered, which often
>results in heated bidding and this particular one ended up at $40, IIRC,
>which I found rather amusing as I had snapped one up from a local gaming
>store's bargain bin for $5 just a week before. Anyway, what this shows
>is that in less than 10 years some SR books have already doubled in
>value, which isn't a bad return on your investment at all.... :)
>
>Basically all you need for RPG items to become valuable is a good (or
>well-marketed ;) RPG: this will result in lots of people playing the
>game for a long time, among them a certain amount of collectors (and as
>pack rat types seem to be attracted to RPG's this number will be high :)
>this will result in out of print items from the genesis of the game
>being demanded by the new collectors who are continuously attracted to
>the "good RPG" which is where the good ol' mar-ket meg-a-neezm takes
>over.


I read a couple of interesting articles about speculators recently (Not in
Corporate Shadowfiles, either!). In the early 1990's, speculators discovered
comicbooks, and the prices of back issues went through the roof. Already
some original print first editions were valued at over a thousand dollars,
but now all sorts of comics went up above $10000, mostly because of the
Batman movie. Comics started to be printed with five different covers,
holographic pictures, printed on authentic parchment, all sorts of weird
stuff. The stories suffered because the big companies were just churning out
crowd pleasers. Then the speculators dropped comics and moved onto
collectable card games. The comics industry collapsed. Marvel, for decades
the biggest and strongest, was and is on the verge of bankruptcy, because
most of the diehard fans had been driven away by years of shoddy work. Not
only that, but all these geekboys who had bought a thousand Spiderman issue
#300 (or whatever) at $3 each to fund their retirement, found that they
could now only get about 5c a copy, if that. Now the speculators are onto
Internet company shares, which is potentially much more damaging when the
artificially high Internet stock prices plummet, and they almost definitely
will. This pattern goes all the way back through history. In the 1600's
tulips became very popular. The Dutch (and I assume many others in the area)
went tulip mad, and many people became stinking rich. People began investing
enitre life savings on a single bulb, in the theory that one bulb would be
the start of a massive tulip farm. Then the fashion moved on and a lot of
people were left with no money but a lot of pretty flowers.
So, in closing :?) IT would not be a good thing for speculators to trip onto
role playing games. We would end up with tons of substandard material, often
overpriced, and a glut of new players who are more interested in which
alternate cover is on the rulebook than getting into character (remember
Magic: The Gathering? I loved that game, when you never knew what killer
card you'd get, or who would have the best deck that week. Then the craze
caught on, and there were stacks of people with the entire collection and
all of the expansion sets, each more overpowered than the last, and small
time play-for-the-fun-of-it people like me couldn't get a decent game. My
Magic cards are at the bottom of a box somewhere now). Then we would have
masses of very cheap sourcebooks, but they are likely to be crap anyway,
less proper players since the good ones all moved on to something else in
annoyance, and a lot less role playing game companies.