Rolling for Initiative is a weekly column by Scott Thorne, PhD, owner of Castle Perilous Games & Books in Carbondale, Illinois and instructor in marketing at Southeast Missouri State University. This week, Thorne offers up more thoughts on his trip to GAMA Expo 2026.
Two more things struck me about GAMA Expo 2026 (see “Thoughts on the GAMA Expo Retail Hall“), so here they are:
I Small Press RPGs. As I have noted before, a huge number of small press RPGs have hit the market over the past decade (see “Four Picks for RPG Week“). Granted, small press RPGs have been around since the earliest days of the RPG industry, but the advent of desktop publishing, digital media and short run printing has made self publishing RPGs even more appealing.
However, with the sheer number of small press RPGs getting published, it gets harder for an individual publisher to get attention and shelf space from retailers, especially when most retailers stock shallowly on small press RPG titles. Hence, the aggregator (like Indie Press Revolution or Quartermaster Direct) has emerged as a way for retailers to bring in a wide variety of offerings without having to pay freight charges for small orders from the individual publishers.
I counted at least five small press RPG aggregators in the exhibit hall. On a related note, I was impressed to see Mörk Borg doing well enough that Limithron had an entire booth devoted to its Pirate Borg variant of the game (see “‘Pirate Borg: Starter Set’“). Mork Borg has joined the likes of FUDGE, FATE and Apocalypse Engine as flexible-enough RPG systems that other companies choose to use them, rather than developing a new one.
ArmorClass10. T-shirts are a tricky category for vendors. They offer hundreds, if not thousands of designs, and customers have idiosyncratic desires in what they want to buy. It is only in rare cases, in my experience, that customers come in looking for a specific t-shirt design. Rather, they browse through the offerings and purchase one that strikes their fancy.
For this reason, we never got deeply into t-shirts, even though they are the preferred attire of many of our customers, too many shirts left on the rack. Hopefully, ArmorClass10’s stock rotation plan helps address that problem. Stores make a purchase of an initial order of shirts. ArmorClass10 sends out the initial shipment consisting of an assortment of their best-selling shirts and stores put them on the rack for three months. After three months, stores will purchase a second wave of shirts with different designs and return any unsold shirts, prepaid, for credit on the third wave of shirts. After that, every three months, stores return the previous quarter’s unsold shirts for credit applied to the next set.
This, I hope, increases our t-shirt sales due to fresh designs coming on a regular basis. With a reasonable investment on our part, it allows our store to build up a position as a place to go for gaming and pop culture-themed t-shirts.
Comments? Did you seen anything at the show you would like to bring to my attention? Send them to castleperilousgames@gmail.com.
The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.
Read more at this site