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 the "Diamond Mess," and discussed DCC Day results.

The "Diamond Mess" continues with a number of publisher clients of Diamond Comic Distributors filing objections to Diamond's plan to liquidate consignment inventory to pay its debts (see "Numerous Objections").  As I noted last week, Green Ronin Publishing launched a GoFundMe campaign to raise money to help with the company’s legal fees (see "Green Ronin Vs. Diamond").  So far, the campaign has raised just over $35,000 and Green Ronin Publishing has, along with dozens of other companies, filed motions to object to Diamond's liquidation of their property.

Meanwhile, Diamond's lender of record, JPMorgan Chase, has gotten in on the act, filing both a limited objection and reservation of its rights.  JPMorgan Chase loaned money to Diamond to keep the company running during the bankruptcy, and now wants to make sure it is paid in full before anyone else is.

The whole situation indicates the problem with monopolies.  Of course, Diamond was accused of monopolizing the comic industry numerous times over the years and managed to avoid getting classified as one by arguing that comics were just another version of books and customers had plenty of sources from which to get books.  As a monopoly, Diamond worked well for over 20 years, until it didn't.  Monopolies work very well doing what they do, until they don’t and leave all the businesses that depended on them in the lurch.

DCC Day took place this past Saturday (see "'DCC Day 2025 Kit'").  We have participated since the inaugural event, but this was the lightest turnout we have seen.  Normally we have a few people contacting us the week before, just to make sure we are participating in it this year, with Dungeon Crawl Classics fans driving in from an hour away to pick up the freebies and limited-edition items.  This year, the kit had even more limited-edition items than it has in past years and we even ran a session of DCC during the day, but we had no calls inquiring about it, one email and only two people that came to the store specifically for DCC Day.  Customers took the freebies but generally only after we pointed them out.

One big problem was that we did not receive the kits until about two days before the event.  We promoted it on social and other media but without actual items to show potential participants, it was hard to generate interest.  We did have one customer drive in from an hour away, but they came with friends who were driving to Carbondale for another reason and would likely not have come on their own.  We were the only store participating for well over 100 miles so any DCC players in the region should have come out but opted not to do so.  I will have a postmortem on the event with the staff and see if we can figure out why the extremely low turnout.

Comments?  Did you host DCC Day and have a better response than we did?  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.