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 discusses Green Ronin Publishing's GoFundMe campaign to fund its legal fight against Diamond Comic Distributors and the soft preorders for the latest Horus Heresy boxed set.

Following up from last week's column (see "Diamond’s Bankruptcy"), this week Green Ronin Publishing launched a GoFundMe campaign to pay for legal action against Diamond Comic Distributors.  Green Ronin wants to recover several hundred thousand dollars worth of merchandise the company has on consignment with Diamond.  Diamond is claiming ownership and plans to liquidate it in order to pay off their creditors (see "Diamond Seeks to Take").  These are books for which Green Ronin has not been paid.

Why use Diamond?  Well, as Green Ronin points out in its GoFundMe campaign, Diamond is/was the primary channel by which some independent game publishers gained access to the book industry.  Hobby game stores are great as we are the primary way by which entrants into the hobby are introduced to Dungeons & Dragons and the titles provided by independent publishers, but Walmart, which along with Target is a customer of Diamond, will get more customers in one day than will pass through my doors in a month.

Green Ronin is facing losses  of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of product, access to the book trade and the expense of legal action against Diamond to recover its product, just a month before Gen Con, the company's largest sales event of the year, as well as its best opportunity for outreach to tabletop gaming enthusiasts, its business partners and the hobby gaming community.  Preparing for Gen Con takes up huge amounts of capital for any company attending so Green Ronin just does not have the available capital to mount legal action to recover its product, hence the GoFundMe campaign.  As of the publication of this article, the campaign has raised enough money for the company, in conjunction with other publishers, to secure legal representation and start filing objections to the liquidation of their product this week (it has raised $32,604 of a targeted $50,000 – ed.).

Meanwhile, Games Workshop may have over-produced product for its Age of Darkness: Saturnine update for the Horus Heresy variant of Warhammer 40,000.  Normally, as I have mentioned before (see "A Modest Proposal"), Games Workshop does a hard cutoff on preorders such as with the Emperor's Children Army box.  Once a store submits the preorder form, that is it, no changes to quantities.  For Age of Darkness: Saturnine, our store as well as several others were asked, after submitting the form, if we wanted to increase our quantities on any of the items.  That indicates to me that orders for the set are coming in softer than Games Workshop anticipated.  Based on sales of Horus Heresy at our store and from what I have heard from other stores, our low customer interest in the line is not atypical.

Comments?  Send them, along with extra boxes of Universes Beyond: Final Fantasy, 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.