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 issues a correction on Impressions' Game Preview Events, and a look at the demo copy of Against the Darkness.

After last week's column (see "Rolling for Initiative--Gone with Nary a Whisper"), I received an email from Aldo Ghiozzi of Impressions Advertising and Marketing pointing out I had gotten several things wrong regarding the company's Game Preview Events program so I wanted to take the opportunity to correct them and publicly apologize.

First, the program HAS NOT been shut down.  Since only a few retailers took advantage of it, Impressions is retooling the program to make it more attractive and offer even more value to retailers.  Since I felt the program before offered a good value to retailers, and have already seen one aspect of the reworking, I'm interested to see what else the company has in mind.

Second, unlike Amazon, the Game Preview Events program has made money for Impressions from day one.  Period, end of story.

I jumped to some conclusions and inferred some things from an email I received from Ghiozzi.  They were not true and I apologize to both him and Impressions.

Also related to last week's column, after complaining about how difficult it is to get demo copies of RPGs, we received a copy of Against the Darkness, "A Roleplaying Game of Vatican Horror and Conspiracy", from Tabletop Adventures.  I've known one of the principals in the company via email from the GPA (Game Publishers Association) and was intrigued by the game when I saw them showing it off at a convention I attended last week.  I've always been a sucker for modern day horror RPGs (long time fan of Call of Cthulhu and I still run a game of Pacesetter Games' Chill on rare occasions), so when I saw ATD in Tabletop's display rack, I asked them enough questions about it that they finally gave me a copy (I also bought two copies and a GM pack for the store so they made some revenue off me).

Against the Darkness really intrigued me because of the similarity in themes between it and the anime, Trinity Blood.  Both involve representatives of the Catholic Church and the Vatican, fighting against the forces of darkness, save that Trinity Blood focuses on vampires as the main villain and is more overt in the conflict between the church and the vampires than ATD.  In ATD, the darkness is always there, but it hides in the shadows and the players must venture there, outside the ken of their fellow men.  The quality of the book looks good as well, the only problem I have is that Tabletop has saddle stapled it with no room for a logo on the spine. Ergo, if it (and the GMs pack) gets shelved spine out, well, it vanishes, leaving only the folded over cover of a book to attract the customer's eye.  The company is looking into the economics of producing a book with a printable spine and probably will come out with one in the future.

Lots of high quality small press stuff out there, but frankly, the economics make it hard for brick and mortar retailers to stock.  In many cases they don't generate enough sales to justify ordering case quantities directly from the publisher and it's proving more and more difficult to find them through one of the main game distributors.  More on this in a future column.

The opinions expressed in this column are solely  those  not necessarily reflect th views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.