Keep Circulating the Tapes/Tabletop Games

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Warhammer Fantasy Battle and Warhammer 40,000 have changed all through the 1990s and 2000s, but the old sourcebooks are still circulating.
    • This was often out of necessity. For example, the original 3rd Edition Ork codex was released in mid-1999. It remained the "current" codex until a 4th Edition was released in late 2008.
    • Warhammer Quest likewise.
  • Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 edition and all prior editions are completely out of print. With 3.5's staggering popularity, prices for used copies of the more common books are slowly on the rise. Wizards of the Coast used to sell PDFs of all of its current products and any TSR products as well, but they were all pulled from websites like RPGNow and DriveThruRPG in Spring 2009.
    • Every edition has this. Check the prices on eBay for some of the favored old AD&D modules and editions. Check the prices for Planes of Conflict or Menzoberranzan or The Ruins of Myth Drannor or Spelljammer: Adventures in Space. As of 19 Sep 2011, the asking price for some of these sets (the original Ravenloft boxed set or Hellbound: the Blood War) is higher than the retail price for the products when they were new.
    • Wizards of the Coast finally relented on PDF sales in 2013 and now offers almost all of their back catalog, minus licensed games, as PDF.
  • Star Wars RPG articles and modules posted on the internet by publisher Wizards of the Coast were taken offline by the company when the license expired in May of 2010. They're still out there, kept online by fans who saved them before they were taken down. The books will also never see a reprint and some of the best regarded books had pathetically low print runs in the first place.
    • The RPGA modules for the Living Force campaign. Made worse by an order to destroy local copies of the modules after the conclusion and the fact that the events of these modules were canon to the Star Wars Expanded Universe (though only the broadest information was ever referenced outside of them).
    • Fans continue to circulate the old West End Games versions of the RPG as well. The core rulebook, but only that, got a reprint in 2018 by Fantasy Flight Games.
  • The Old World of Darkness is quite popular to this day, and though no longer in print still sells briskly on the second hand market and has players who play it today.
    • White Wolf have started making their back catalogue (OWOD and NWOD) available through print-on-demand, with the intent of having everything available. Oh, and they've started putting out new OWOD PDFs in tandem with NWOD PDFs. They're definitely working on moving the OWOD over to 'Rescued'.
  • The BattleTech magazine Battletechnology falls into this category as well. Originally published in-house by FASA, it was later "farmed out" and passed through several different publishers before finally ceasing publication, leaving behind a tangled mess of ownership. The result is that it will never be compiled or re-printed. Furthermore, by Word of God, material from Battletechnology will not be used in the Tabletop Game unless it is non-contradictory and the orignal creator can be tracked down. (Several mechs from the magazine have appeared; in those cases, they were either created in-house to begin with or the writer is now a member of the Battletech creative staff.)
  • The original Dune boardgame is considered a classic, but is direly out of print, and going to stay there, due to rights issues.
  • Just about any Home Game of a Game Show, likely due to this being a very niche market that doesn't often see re-issues except on popular franchises such as Family Feud or Password.
  • Various RPGA campaigns never had their modules published again after the conclusion of the campaign. These include Living Greyhawk and (as mentioned above) Living Force. Not even the organizers of Living Greyhawk are sure of the full list of modules published (since many were foreign language only), and redistribution is further complicated by a unique legal situation where, after the conclusion, copyright of the non-D&D, non-Greyhawk parts of the module were returned to the author.
  • For over three decades Villains and Vigilantes could only be played using the first and second edition rules, which were published in the early 1980s. Some players resorted to photocopying the entire rulebook when they couldn't find a used copy of their own. Fortunately, a third edition, called Mighty Protectors, finally emerged (thanks to some good lawyers and a Kickstarter campaign) in the middle-late 2010s, and it's no longer necessary to scrounge for copies.
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