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 talks about his experience with the week's big new releases.

Several anticipated items hit the shelves this week and it appears as if they were worth the wait.

Initially, Wizards of the Coast's reprints of the 1st edition AD&D Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide and Monster Manual arrived.  Except for the new leatherette covers and non-browned paper, the books look just as they did thirty years ago.  We had a couple of customers complaining that they would have liked to see errata or updates or introductory essays and I have read some complaints on Websites about the quality of the reprints.  That misses the point of the books.  WOTC brought them out just as E. Gary Gygax wrote them three decades ago as a tribute to them and to help support the Gygax Memorial Fund, which plans to erect a statue in Gygax's memory in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.  Hopefully that has served to gin up interest in these.  It certainly has here as we sold out of our initial order within two days and were quite happy to see restocks coming in from other distributors.

On a related note, and I'm not sure if this relates to the buzz around the limited edition reprints, but this is the first time in quite awhile we have been out of the original First Edition Player's Handbook in our used section.  Plenty of Dungeon Master's Guides and Monster Manuals in stock, but not a Player's Handbook on the shelves.

Fantasy Flight Games' Descent 2nd Edition also hit the shelves this week.  This should bring down the price of the first edition game, which has sold for upwards of $150 on the secondary market since it went out of print.  The box for the 2nd Edition is less than half the size of the original and you get a lot less than the original as well (eight hero figures instead of 20, for example), for about the same price.  While I expect this to sell to people who want to get their hands on a copy of Descent, I also expect to see strong demand for the first edition, with all its additional components, on the secondary market.

Plus, there's a plethora of Pathfinder from Paizo to peruse at this point.  Arriving in on the same shipment, the new Deep Forest Flip Mat, Magnimar, City of Monuments, Pathfinder Player Character Folios, and, probably of most interest, the Rise of the Runelords Anniversary Edition.  I really had no great expectations for this last one.  Though we had a few inquiries, we had no pre-orders until we made the announcement that our shipment was on the way (sigh).  Typically, Pathfinder modules sell poorly here, due to their limited use and Paizo pushing them as PDFs before they release to the brick and mortar market.  However, Rise of the Runelords has proved a pleasant surprise.  Much like with the 1st edition AD&D books, we quickly sold out of our original order but got a restock in for the weekend.  So far, we have sold half the total ordered, far better than our order of Descent 2nd Edition, all of which are still sitting on the shelves.

Overall, a solid week of new releases, with sales of the 1st Edition AD&D reprints the big surprise.

The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflct the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.