Classic D&D of All Eras Back In Print

GreyLord · Dec 23, 2016

Riley said:
Shortly after the TSR bankruptcy, truly staggering quantities of sealed, new second edition box sets and supplements showed up suddenly in several Half Price Books stores in the Milwaukee area. Pretty much everything made for the various second edition worlds was there, with many copies of each.

Oh and there was shelf after self of Buck Rogers and Amazing Engine products.

I assume they were sold to HPB after they were seized, in order to repay TSRs creditors.

I bought as much of the stuff as I could possibly afford, and maybe then some.

When they obtained it (after TSR's bankruptcy, and after they bought it and discovered stuff still in the warehouse, I believe they (WotC) sold as much of it as they could to anyone who would buy, and then it was off to the dumpster/incinerator for much of what wouldn't sell. My memory could be failing though, but I think that's what I recall happening.

Matt-M-McElroy · Dec 27, 2016

This week's D&D release list.

Classic PDFs:

Bleak House (2e)
Ravenloft: Realm of Terror (2e)
The Astromundi Cluster (2e)
The Legend of Spelljammer (2e)
DLR1 Otherlands (2e)

Classic PoD:

DLR1 Otherlands (2e)
X8: Drums on Fire Mountain (Basic)
C2 The Ghost Tower of Inverness (1e)
HWA3 Hollow World: Nightstorm (Basic)

D&D Comics:

Dungeons & Dragons: Shadows of the Vampire #5

Enjoy and Happy New Year!

-MMM

Matt-M-McElroy · Jan 3, 2017

This week's D&D release list.

Classic PDFs:

King of the Giantdowns (2e)
Evil Tide (2e)
The Inner Planes (2e)
Axe of the Dwarvish Lords (2e)

Classic PoDs:

GAZ6 The Dwarves of Rockhome (Basic)
CM3 Sabre River (Basic)

Adventurer's League:

DDAL05-08 Durlag's Tower (5e)
DDAL05-09 Durlag's Tomb (5e)
DDAL05-10 Giant Diplomacy (5e)
DDAL05-11 Forgotten Traditions (5e)

Enjoy!

-MMM

Big Mac · Jan 6, 2017

DragonBelow said:
Keep in mind that many of these come from scanned copies of the products (just like the PDFs themselves), they won't be the same quality as the original product, but they'll be the best they can be under those circumstances.

That's probably not going to be the case with 3rd Edition and 4th Edition (and 5th Editoin) products they sell. WotC must have a library of all the original files of those.

Big Mac · Jan 6, 2017

doctorbadwolf said:
I hope this soon includes Eberron books and the Dragonlance campaign book for 3.5. And the Eberron Campaign guide for 4e, bc I have the player's guide, and my friend who has the campaign guide moved to Washington!

I don't know what the legal situation with 3e Dragonlance is (as most of the books were designed by Sovereign Press/Margaret Weis Productions) but the print run for Towers of High Sorcery was smaller than the print run of some of the other DL books and the eBay Bandits really try to hike up the price. A new PoD version of ToHS (without the eBay Bandit price hike) is something that could really help a lot of Dragonlance fans.

And I'm struggling to find Secrets of Xen'drik at non-eBay Bandit prices, so I'll be picking that up, at some point. (The next big leap for Eberron will be opening the setting up to DMs Guild, so that Keith Baker can start selling 5e Eberron products there. WotC have recently allowed a live-stream Eberron show called Maze Arcana, so perhaps they are gearing up for 5e Eberron.)

doctorbadwolf said:
I might even eventually pay for print copies of certain Dragon issues from 4e, like the ones with Assassin stuff, and some of the issues with the really good Winning Races articles.

Dragon (and Dungeon) are things I'm curious about. Paizo published these for a long time and now it seems (to me) that the WotC decision to pull PDFs and then reenable them, but only via DriveThru RPG is some sort of commercial attack on their former partner, Paizo.

So, with TSR owning the really old magazines, Wizards of the Coast owning the really new magazines and Paizo owning the ones in the middle, I'll be really interested to see what - if anything - goes up on Print on Demand.

doctorbadwolf said:
While I'm wishlisting, maybe they'll collate all the Nerath/Nentir Vale/PoL articles in the Mags into one pdf and let us POD that. I would pay 30-40$ for that.

That sounds good. I'd gladly pay into a crowdfunded project to pay for Rich Baker to finish the Nentir Vale Gazetteer (with stretch goals for him to get all the other planned Nerath gazetteers done).

Echohawk · Jan 6, 2017

Big Mac said:
I don't know what the legal situation with 3e Dragonlance is (as most of the books were designed by Sovereign Press/Margaret Weis Productions) ...

It seems that the rights for those books (and the similarly licensed 3e Ravenloft books) have now reverted to WotC, since they would likely otherwise not be available for sale on the DMs Guild: Towers of High Sorcery, Ravenloft Player's Handbook.

I'm also not convinced that Paizo still own the rights to the run of Dragon and Dungeon that they published. In the product discussion section of the page for Dungeon #91, Vic Wertz gives this as a reason that there isn't a PDF available for that issue:

Vic Wertz said:
If memory serves, when we went to make the PDF, we found that our copies of the digital files were corrupted, and we weren't able to track down a good copy while we still had the rights to convert them into PDF form.

So while Paizo clearly still have the right to sell PDFs of many issues, at least some of the rights have apparently reverted to WotC.

Big Mac · Jan 7, 2017

Echohawk said:
It seems that the rights for those books (and the similarly licensed 3e Ravenloft books) have now reverted to WotC, since they would likely otherwise not be available for sale on the DMs Guild: Towers of High Sorcery, Ravenloft Player's Handbook.

Well we don't know what the legal agreement was for these different companies. It's just as possible that WotC bought back the copyright or that DriveThru RPG has cut a deal with MWP and or White Wolf.

Echohawk said:
I'm also not convinced that Paizo still own the rights to the run of Dragon and Dungeon that they published. In the product discussion section of the page for Dungeon #91, Vic Wertz gives this as a reason that there isn't a PDF available for that issue:

<snip - Vic Wertz>

So while Paizo clearly still have the right to sell PDFs of many issues, at least some of the rights have apparently reverted to WotC.

I wouldn't expect to see DMs Guild selling Dragon and Dungeon magazines if Paizo have the rights to them. But then I didn't expect to see them selling Dragonlance or Ravenloft books from the 3e Era.

And as DriveThru RPG and Paizo are both competing for the same PDF market (and as DriveThru penalises companies who sell on both DriveThru and Paizo in order to give them an incentive to avoid Paizo) I think that Paizo would not be inclined to allow DriveThru access to any magazines it still has the rights to.

Echohawk · Jan 7, 2017

Big Mac said:
Well we don't know what the legal agreement was for these different companies. It's just as possible that WotC bought back the copyright or that DriveThru RPG has cut a deal with MWP and or White Wolf.

The latter seems extremely unlikely, because then the publisher would be listed on DMs Guild as "MWP" or "White Wolf", instead of "Wizards of the Coast". Also, we know that the Ravenloft licence permitted White Wolf to sell existing stock of printed 3rd Edition Ravenloft products only for a limited time (six months?) after the licence to produce new products expired. Thus, to be able to start selling those books again now, in any format, would have required WotC to grant them a new licence, which seems improbable.

I couldn't find any direct evidence that the licensing deals for those properties meant that the copyrights for the materials reverted entirely to WotC, but we do know that was the case for all of the D&D comics, which is why WotC was able to subsequently license IDW to reprint older comics initially published by other companies. This indicates to me that WotC's standard licence for any material based on their campaign settings ensures that all rights for that material reverts to them after a period of time.

And as DriveThru RPG and Paizo are both competing for the same PDF market (and as DriveThru penalises companies who sell on both DriveThru and Paizo in order to give them an incentive to avoid Paizo) I think that Paizo would not be inclined to allow DriveThru access to any magazines it still has the rights to.

For both the Paizo-era and earlier Dragon/Dungeon magazines, my theory is that the lack of releases on DMs Guild is unrelated to any licence with Paizo. I think the copyright for the D&D material in those issues has long since reverted to WotC. However, there is additional (non-D&D) content in most issues for which the copyrights never belonged to either WotC or Paizo, for example, the comics. For this reason, you'll find that the electronic versions available for sale at Paizo are not complete issues. They do not contain the adverts, and some issues are missing certain comics. As I'm sure you're aware, this situation is even worse for the TSR-era content, where the electronic publication rights for the articles is, to say the least, rather complicated.

Thus, there is a significant "hassle factor" involved in selling those issues via the DMs Guild. It's not a matter of just scanning the issues, but also ensuring that only the content for which WotC actually has the copyright gets included. My guess is that WotC has looked at the risk/reward and decided simply not to bother with content for which the rights are not 100% clear.